Komatsu is one of the better excavators on the market. Their fit and finish is excellent, making it one of the most comfortable, capable and reliable machines on the market. Down here it is also one of the leaders in the excavator market so I find it hard to believe that they are cheaply built. I think its safe to say that the excavator is pretty much Komatsu's "flagship" piece of equipment.
In your expierence, what did you find that was cheap about them?
Well put, Countryboy. As I've mentioned before, we have a Cat rental fleet with 30 + pieces of their iron ranging from mini 301.6's on up to 330's, and several D-3's, etc. Cat is getting proud of themselves lately with us, and wants some financial commitments that we are not interested in at this time.
I personally have the task of shopping the market to find better prices on other brands, as I have convinced the owner that being a multi-branded dealer will improve our bottom line, and save substantial initial capital investment.
A Komatsu excavator in the 30K lb. class is $30K less money than the over-rated, overpriced Cat brand new, for example. Nothing wrong with Komatsu...same animal as Hitachi, Samsung, Daewoo.They all burn soy sauce, but all in all as John C. said previously, they're ALL GOOD up to 7,500 hours. (Personally, I like to see 'em headed for the auction or to the port headed to Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, or Egypt by their 6,000th hour, myself.)
We do a lot of transporting for our Cat dealer locally, and they recently knocked us out of the daily preferred carrier circles, and put the trucking out to bid. We're not running an auction...just a few $200,000.00 per unit trucks spec'd originally for their dedicated service. So we decided to let them use the lower bidders, and we can stay busy at other things, thank you.
When we get a call from them asking for a price to move such and such to a point, and it's too high compared to the "competition", they refuse our service and don't use us. When we call to buy a new excavator and they tell us it's $150,000.00 and we say, "we'll give you $148,000.00,...they tell us to basically go pound sand. And it's safe to say we do a heck of an amount of business with them on an annual basis compared to a lot of people here on this forum...parts alone even. It still doesn't matter to them, they're too big for their britches nowadays.
With that said, if there's another flavored dealer nearby that offers good quality service and parts availability, etc., don't be afraid to jump ship. They're all made of the same steel, plastic and fiberglass now anyways.
Soy sauce all smells the same once combusted.:cool2
While I'm not buying large equipment or in large numbers, I still don't have time to pester a dealer to sell me a machine. Unless I have no other choice, If they don't have time for me, I don't have time for them. 
