We’re gonna talk about how do you go about buying a used piece of equipment and not get taken advantage of, and how do you know that you’re buying a good piece of equipment? I want to talk about this from not only the perspective of an operator in the industry, but I also sold equipment for two and a half years.
So I was very much involved in the used equipment market. Today, we’re just gonna go through some very high level things. We’re not gonna get down into the details of every single machine, you know, what to check for on a loader, what to check for on an excavator, what on a dozer. We’re not gonna get that down in the weeds, but we’re gonna talk at a high level of some things that you can do to protect yourself if you go look at some used equipment. So the first one, and by far the biggest one we need to worry about is a gray market machine.
If you’re not familiar with what a gray market machine is, let’s take a just a random piece of equipment. Let’s say a CAT 315 excavator. Caterpillar manufactures a 3 15 excavator that’s a variety that’s made for the North American market. It conforms to all of our standards. It has tier 4 emissions on it.
It has safety features that are required by the US government, has all these things that are required to be sold in the US. But Caterpillar also recognizes there’s a booming market down in Venezuela, and they don’t need backup alarms, and they don’t need tier 4 emissions. In fact, they don’t need emissions at all. My god. Let’s sell them something that we were manufacturing back in 1985.
Boom. Awesome. And so Caterpillar has a great market down there. Well, what importers have done is they’ve looked at those machines and they’ve gone from the outside. They look pretty much the same, but this one down in Venezuela is about $75,000 cheaper than the US variety.
Why don’t I import, I don’t know, a dozen of these machines and try to sell them to a schmuck up here in the US for a heavily discounted price? And that’s exactly what happens. They bring those machines into the US. They find some schmuck online that doesn’t do a serial check, and they sell it. And the guy goes, I bought a machine, and it’s so cheap.
I’m $50,000 less than anywhere else I can find it. This is awesome. What a honey of a deal. Until it breaks. And then you go to your dealership and you say, hey, mister dealer.
And you’re whistling your favorite tune, by the way, because even if this breakdown cost you $8, you’re still way ahead because you bought the machine for $50 less. Can you believe it? Except the dealership can’t pull up your serial number, and they can’t get you parts because a lot of the parts don’t match. Oh, and now you’re finding out why you don’t want to buy a gray market machine. That’s the number one thing you need to protect yourself and this is a very simple check it’s really straightforward all you need to do is get the serial number from whoever’s selling the equipment, and you need to get photographic evidence if you’re buying online.
You need to get photographic evidence that it came from that specific machine because there’s a lot of shysters out there. Let’s be honest. And then you’re just gonna call up to your local dealership with that serial number and you’re gonna say, hey. Can you guys pull up the serial number in your system and can I get parts for it? If it’s a gray market machine, it ain’t gonna pull up and they can’t get parts.
If it’s a regular clean serial machine that’s made for the US, they’ll be able to pull it up no problem. That’s it. That’s how you protect yourself from buying a gray market machine. So now let’s talk about actually going to look at the equipment. What do you even look for to at least try to do a good job of making sure you’re not getting into a real problem?
Well, the first thing, by far, in a way that I always look for and I still look for when Rick and I buy equipment is grease. Why grease? Because grease takes about 5 to 10 minutes per machine per day to take care of the equipment. And if someone can’t take the time to just grease the machine, do you think they’re taking time to drop belly pans and do proper maintenance, or are they hodgepodge and stuff together and maybe shorten some of the fuses together so that they can just make it run for the next however long before they offload the machine. Grease is a very telling factor, and so by far and away the biggest thing I look for is how often was the unit greased?
How loose are the pins and bushings for how old the machine is? I mean, if we’re talking a 2 year old machine and it’s totally ramped out, well, right there is a great indicator that it was abused and it was not maintained or managed. So grease is a great indicator just overall of how the machine was taken care of. Now when it comes to actually walking around the machine, you always wanna check all of your cylinders. You wanna make sure that the rods, the the actual piston that goes in the cylinder doesn’t have any big gouges or anything in it because, first of all, that’s another sign of possible abuse because how did your cylinders get all nicked up?
But secondly, that can be kind of expensive to go in there and have to replace 1 of the rods or heaven forbid a whole cylinder. You need to actually look at those things. Do any of the cylinders need repacking? That’s not a tremendous expense, but it is also something that’s gonna be a pain you’re gonna have to pay for and you wanna be aware of. As you walk around, look at body panels, look at the counterweight, especially on those excavators.
Someone’s rubbing the paint off the counterweight every 5 minutes, they’re probably not taking very good care of the machine. You know, open the engine compartments. Are there any obvious leaks? Any signs of damage? Are the body panels themselves damaged?
Because, again, if I’m swinging the machine into the side of a house or into the side of a tree, what else am I not paying attention to on the machine? You can kinda get my general vein of where I’m going here. It’s kind of obvious when people have taken care of the equipment versus they just work the snot out of it and then try to offload it before something goes wrong. Now as you continue to walk around the machine, we’re gonna actually get in it and we’re gonna run it. Right?
You wanna make sure that you don’t hear any weird chattering or, weird whining or anything that’s kinda off kilter that doesn’t sound normal in a machine of that type. Obviously, dozers are gonna make different sounds than excavators and different sounds than lowers. But if you’re kind of familiar, which hopefully you are if you’re buying one of these machines, if you’re kind of familiar with how they should sound and something sounds a little wrong, you might wanna dig into that a little bit. Another great indicator of how well a machine’s been taken care of, look at the filters. Most guys in the industry will write either the hours and or the date of when they did their last filter change.
If you don’t see anything written down, that’s a great time to ask the owner, Hey, do you have any records of maintenance on the machine? Some guys, instead of writing on the filters will actually keep a journal somewhere of when they do fluid changes. And that’s totally fine if they have that. If they don’t guess what, when was the last time that was changed? Do they change it seasonally?
Do they change it whenever they feel like, Have they changed it? Like, these are the sort of questions you start getting into when no one keeps records and no one really knows when the last time they did a maintenance on the machine was. And again, this all ties back to if they don’t take the time to grease the machine, chances are they aren’t doing all the other stuff too. And finally, the last thing I wanna talk about is specific to machines with tracks. Skid steers don’t really have to have an undercarriage, life measurement taken because at the end of the day to replace the undercarriage on a skid steer, while it is kind of a decent cost, it’s not nearly as sizable as the cost of going and replacing the undercarriage on a dozer or an excavator or a track loader.
And so that’s where when you start looking at those sort of machines, you should actually take the time and invest in an undercarriage measurement kit. You can find those online all over the place and you can also find a 100 different how to actually measure the track life left on an undercarriage. It is 100% worth your investment because these measurement kits are not that expensive. It’s 100% worth the investment.
Because what you might find is you get into a honey of a deal on a dozer. And then 4 months later, you’re spending 40 to $50,000 on an undercarriage. That’s where you just need to do your due diligence, do your homework, and make sure you’re purchasing something that still has life left to it, or at least account for it. If it needs an undercarriage, that’s not the end of the world, but make sure that you’re getting compensated for that on the purchase price of the machine.
So as always, I desire this has been helpful. Like I said, that is a completely excessive degree overview. This is not getting into the super nitty gritty details of how to analyze a machine for resale or anything along those lines, but it should at least give you some direction the next time you wanna go out and take a look at a piece of equipment of how to approach the situation and what are some really key points to look at.
Very impressive