CascadeScaper
04-29-2005, 12:35 AM
Hey everyone. First just wanted to say thanks to everyone who helped me through my quest in the search for an excavator. We decided to go with a 303CR because we felt anything bigger would be too big for what we're doing. Decided we don't want to do a bunch of retaining walls, we're just not setup to haul the rock and the walls are more time consuming by the time we load the rock and get it to the site, building the wall isn't so bad but everything else just takes too much time for our liking. In the landscape business that we're in, it's too expensive for my dad to not be out running the crew and getting our installs done. If we marketed these retaining walls, he'd be having to help me transport materials and make less per hour than he would be running the crew, doing irrigation, etc. So cost wise it just doesn't make sense. So we decided if we absolutely had to build a wall, we'd just rent a machine to do it and pass the cost on to the customer instead of buying a machine too large for our everday landscaping tasks. Basically, the decision of what excavator to buy came down to the dirty fact of how many walls we WANTED to build a year and when that number came down to about 3 or 4, it just doesn't pencil out to buy a large machine to build 4 walls a year.
So with that said, we signed the papers on Tuesday for a brand new Cat 303CR. We have just about everything you can get except for the cab, they quoted us like $6K for a cab....I think I'll pass. Hydraulic thumb, mech. quick coupler, 12" and 24" buckets and a 40" cleanup bucket, and the most expensive option we got was the repositioning of the thumb controls up to the right joystick. This was every expensive, as DKinWA told me it was, but Dad said he didn't care, we're buying exactly what we want, do it right the first time and this option cost us about $2K. So out the door with all that was about $39,000. Sales guy said he was counting on it being no longer than 2 weeks, but probably not sooner than a week, so I'm hoping we'll have it by the end of next week.
DKinWA, on your machine you said you have the thumb control on the joystick, did they put the same type of joystick on your machine as the ones on the 304.5 and older models? The hard plastic ones? I don't mind these at all, they're pretty comfortable, but is the pull or servo "feel" on both joysticks the same even though the 2 sticks are different? If I recall, the 312C I rented had the same setup, different right hand stick for the thumb control but the left hand one was the regular, long skinny stick and the pull felt the same, am I correct? This is the only thing that I'm curious about, but I think it'll be fine and I'm just worrying for no reason at all. In the meantime, the dealer is giving us a rental 303 for FREE. We'll have had it for close to 3 weeks before ours gets here and the dealer isn't going to charge us at all. NC Machinery is WA great to deal with and that's why we will continue to buy Cat. Anyway, I appreciate everyone's help and if you've read this far, I congratulate you for putting up with my rambling. Thanks again!
On edit, I want some opinions on how to market small machine work. Like I said, I don't really want to be doing retaining walls, they're too intensive for us, just dirt work in general, like 1 or 2 day quick jobs. Dad says that when the school year is over and I'm available full time I can start marketing the machine for dirt work to put a dent in the initial cost on this thing. Any ideas of work that I could be doing with this piece? There's only a couple guys around here that have mini's, I think I could get work, but not really sure what I'd be doing quite yet. Also, another huge plus for us buying the 303 vs. a 304, etc. is that I can tow the machine with my truck on our tiltbed bumper pull vs. my dad's truck and the gooseneck. So this enables my dad to be working doing landscape install work that he likes to be doing while he dispatches me to a different site with the machine and my truck while he's working somewhere else. We've done this with our skid steer and we bill out over $2500 a day when he's working with our crew and I'm out on another site with equipment doing work so this option is very appealing to us now that we have an excavator, it opens a few more doors for us. So any ideas? Thanks again guys, I need to stop talking now...LOL
So with that said, we signed the papers on Tuesday for a brand new Cat 303CR. We have just about everything you can get except for the cab, they quoted us like $6K for a cab....I think I'll pass. Hydraulic thumb, mech. quick coupler, 12" and 24" buckets and a 40" cleanup bucket, and the most expensive option we got was the repositioning of the thumb controls up to the right joystick. This was every expensive, as DKinWA told me it was, but Dad said he didn't care, we're buying exactly what we want, do it right the first time and this option cost us about $2K. So out the door with all that was about $39,000. Sales guy said he was counting on it being no longer than 2 weeks, but probably not sooner than a week, so I'm hoping we'll have it by the end of next week.
DKinWA, on your machine you said you have the thumb control on the joystick, did they put the same type of joystick on your machine as the ones on the 304.5 and older models? The hard plastic ones? I don't mind these at all, they're pretty comfortable, but is the pull or servo "feel" on both joysticks the same even though the 2 sticks are different? If I recall, the 312C I rented had the same setup, different right hand stick for the thumb control but the left hand one was the regular, long skinny stick and the pull felt the same, am I correct? This is the only thing that I'm curious about, but I think it'll be fine and I'm just worrying for no reason at all. In the meantime, the dealer is giving us a rental 303 for FREE. We'll have had it for close to 3 weeks before ours gets here and the dealer isn't going to charge us at all. NC Machinery is WA great to deal with and that's why we will continue to buy Cat. Anyway, I appreciate everyone's help and if you've read this far, I congratulate you for putting up with my rambling. Thanks again!
On edit, I want some opinions on how to market small machine work. Like I said, I don't really want to be doing retaining walls, they're too intensive for us, just dirt work in general, like 1 or 2 day quick jobs. Dad says that when the school year is over and I'm available full time I can start marketing the machine for dirt work to put a dent in the initial cost on this thing. Any ideas of work that I could be doing with this piece? There's only a couple guys around here that have mini's, I think I could get work, but not really sure what I'd be doing quite yet. Also, another huge plus for us buying the 303 vs. a 304, etc. is that I can tow the machine with my truck on our tiltbed bumper pull vs. my dad's truck and the gooseneck. So this enables my dad to be working doing landscape install work that he likes to be doing while he dispatches me to a different site with the machine and my truck while he's working somewhere else. We've done this with our skid steer and we bill out over $2500 a day when he's working with our crew and I'm out on another site with equipment doing work so this option is very appealing to us now that we have an excavator, it opens a few more doors for us. So any ideas? Thanks again guys, I need to stop talking now...LOL