Now this is worth a discussion, they shrank the container and still the same price.
I dont care what they charge for there products, that stuff is the bees knees.
Several years ago United Rentals took over a local rental house and they did the same thing, only they dumped used motor oil on them first so that no one would be tempted to take them out of the dumper. They also took diagnostic tools and hit them with a hammer a few times before throwing them away. A bunch of brain dead people.One of my son's called me from work one day about a year ago, told me to sit down, so I did, then said and I quote "the idiot in charge [parts department] threw away all the paper service/parts manuals". At first I laughed and said, yea right, now what's up, he was dead serious, three huge dumpsters full of paper manuals got thrown out and hauled to the landfill?? For every machine they've ever worked on, from the most obsolete to the newest model made, everything was tossed out, only the manuals my son had in his truck were left.
So began the argument of "where do we get a new service manual for a 40-60 year old machine that's obsolete" and NOT on PDF anywhere and that company no longer exists but we still fix and service those machines??
So if you think 700 something bucks is bad, try a service manual for a few million dollar crane on for size once, it makes a grand look really cheap really fast.
I'm not sure how many hundreds of thousands of dollars in manuals were tossed out, nobody seems to even be able to come up with a figure, but I do know, they've been buying back new manuals that they can.
There are days you really have to wonder, exactly who is doing the thinking and exactly how much thinking are they really doing.
It's legal if you are not doing it for resale, even copy righted manuals. Even so there are some places that won't do it for that reason.The owner or sales dealership won't be given manuals, haven't for a long time now, but certain manufacturers will upon request, still print out the manuals for a fee, very steep fee, but will still do it, otherwise you have to hire someone, like a copy place to print them off for you [not real sure that's exactly legal] but certain places will do it, that's how you get a paper version, they'll also laminate pages so when your working in the rain, the pages stay usable.
I like paper and usually have a manual for anything I'm working on. Several times I've had to have the dealer come out and when they see my paper manual they usually put their laptop away.In order to track down wiring gremlins, its nice to lay all the pages out end to end, so you can trace everything through from point A to point B, with it on the crane screen or a computer screen, you can view one page at a time, then usually either the computer and or crane screen is tied up not allowing you to do multiple things at once while trouble shooting the problem at hand.
With paper you can also photocopy certain pages, to enlarge or reduce them to make seeing things easier, then you only have to take those pages up into the crane and if they get damaged, toss them away when done, after all they are only photocopies. Any copier place can make whatever you want whatever size you want, through the crane computer screen, if you can even get that to light up and work, your pretty limited on what you can send or do, if that's down, your pretty much SOL and dead in the water. Paper is still nice to have, even as a backup system, there are times nothing can replace it.
That machine was close to $100,000.00 when new and today is still valued at over $50,000.00. It seems to me that anyone who can afford that should be able to afford $750.00 to keep it maintained. I do heavy equipment repair and I buy myself a manual for every machine that my customers buy so that I have as much information possible when I get called to work on them. I've paid as much as $1500.00 for a paper manual, and that was close to 20 years ago.
I’ve probably put another 10k into the unit with what I’ve done. Add $5k for the Deere piece. I do the maintenance.
It’s just another $750 out of pocket after a huge outflow.
I used to get that done and time at Kinko. I don't know if they are even still around that anymore. We would give them a disk and a list of the pages we wanted and the sizes we wanted them in. Every place had at least one of those large engineering print machines.
Several years ago United Rentals took over a local rental house and they did the same thing, only they dumped used motor oil on them first so that no one would be tempted to take them out of the dumper. They also took diagnostic tools and hit them with a hammer a few times before throwing them away. A bunch of brain dead people.