rshackleford
Senior Member
any of these aforementioned companies will only purchase new machines (some Union deal)
off topic but, in my eyes, another example of the kind of crap that has let unions ruin this country.
any of these aforementioned companies will only purchase new machines (some Union deal)
Many of these aforementioned companies will only purchase new machines (some Union deal) which precludes them from getting a used 5110 or 5130.
Yeah I gotta agree purple does not look good on an excavator. They must of hired a fashion designer to come up with that.
Looks like the old Bucyrus-Erie, maroon to me.
We also have 2 old RH120E's, the shovel is actually serial # 120001, the first production 120E.
I think the general opinion is that the 5000 series were crap, everyone knew it, from production, maintenance and Cat. They had so many problems Cat would've had to start from scratch.
I'm definitely not anti Cat, I reckon they make the best dozers, graders and mechanical dump trucks in the business, but when it came to these things... well.
When it comes to big hydraulic diggers (200t +), if you want build quality you can't go past Liebherr, O&K (i know.. Terex, and now Bucyrus), and Komatsu, which is a Demag anyway. But they're more expensive to both purchase and to maintain. Hitachi's are cheap and reliable, but they fall apart pretty quick in hard digging.
We have a few Hitachi's at this site (Indonesian Borneo) 7 x 2500's, 7 x 3600's and 3 x 5500's. The booms on the 3600's crack up so bad that we have a spare rotable boom so that we can swap booms out for repair. Old one comes off, repaired boom goes on and then that one is repaired. As soon as it's repaired we change the next one that is the worst. We just had to remove the sticks from 2 of the 5500's so we could repair cracks in the end of the boom 2 feet long. And then the 2500's just like to crack all over.
They'll definitely keep boilermakers/welders in jobs.
We average 90% availability for the hitachi's and a little higher for the 2 x Liebherr 996's, around 91 -92 %. We also have 2 old RH120E's, the shovel is actually serial # 120001, the first production 120E.
I am in a union and I never heard of that. Contractors buy and sell and rent used equipment all the time.
when we had our 345 delivered to us last year i was talking with the head of sales for cat down here and we got on to the topic of the 5000 series shovels,he was telling me that there going to drop the line of shovel dew to the high cost and fabrication of the shovels and just the enginerring going into these hovels were a nghtmare,they had some seriuos problems with these big shovels he also told me,so he pointed out that cat would propably stay away from this altogther its better to build what you know and can handle,