Something for you guys to look at

Just looking through used excavators and I came across this

http://www.equipmenttraderonline.com/find/listing/2001-Caterpillar-320CL-100041213

How do you let a piece of equipment get in that bad of shape? And with just under 9,000 hours on it!

Would any of you guys ever bother buying something in this sad of shape?

Is there any teeth on the bucket?....

Saw a 320c come from a scrap yard looked abit like that, it was loading trucks with a grab to carry scrap to the furnace! It was in real bad shape, but they still managed to get real good money for it!

Unfortunately I have seen some machines that are worse than that with a lot less hours on the meter..

bad shape

that seems really expensive. the machine is trashed, for that price you can buy a great machine at auction or in repo. i am not a cat man so i may be off but last year a buddy had a 320 c and d with 800 and 1500 hours and the dealer was offering 70 and 80k.
it is a shame what guys will do to machines if left to theri own means.
everbody is different the way they take care of their iron.
regards. cd

I was trying to figure out if that was soot from a fire on the boom or if that was one nasty hydraulic leak that didn't get attention. It seems like a lot of money for an excavator that's been that trashed. It looks like they liked to swing into things from the look of the side panels. It's ridiculous what some guys want for some of those excavators.

Looks ok to me .. Just needs some doors .. You guys shouldnt assume its trashed ..

probably had a few knocks while it was doing demo. Is this worse than missing half the service PM intervals?

And it looks like its never had a wash .. Hence the crap on the equipment ..

Usually its a good indication of abuse and lack of maintenance when some one neglects a machine on the outside like that.

You would think that the operator would upchuck his breakfast before stepping up into that poor baby. Seems to me that a clean good looking machine makes a guy want to step up into the cab.

I've never understood why people treat fourty thousand dollar pickup trucks better than $150,000 dollar excavators. But I,ve seen worse, every hood and panel held on with bungy straps.

Guys run there iron pretty hard around here and don't maintain like they should. One utility outfit here I worked for had several Cat hoes under 2K hours some under 1K that had missing/bent doors, broken windows, and ETC.

Doesn't look that bad to me. I've seen a lot worse than that around here working. I wonder what all the black is on the boom? Oil leak?

Looks quite tidy really. I've seen them with 3/4 of the track shoes snapped off and the rest bent over, buckets broken off and hanging sideways, grappled logs thru the cab. I agree its a bit steep though, 30k should stop it but even that wouldn't be as cheap as some I've seen go at auction

Looks like a piece of S**t . It would have to go straight to the shop before it could even be sent out on a job

I would suppose they should have washed the thing before taking ad photos. But then again the crappy looking boom and stick may be stained from doing demo work.

The hour meter shows almost 9,000 hours and for a machine with a manual thumb, it is pretty much what I would expect to see.

Additional photos could tell a much better story. A photo of the inside of the cab would tell me about what kind of operators it had and the condition of the seat would tell me about the owners. The bucket doesn't tell you much because most companies don't trade a machine it with a good bucket. They find a wrecked piece of junk they want to clear out of their yard.

Take a picture of the front idlers and I can sum up the wear on the undercarriage and one from the bottom of the bottom of the counterweight looking forward under the house and I'll have the engine condition summarized.

The price is only an asking price which most dealers anymore seem to think anyone interested will know isn't the value of the machine. Only fools pay asking.

The moral of all this is to not judge a machine just from a few crappy photos.

As I've heard many others say ... "That'll Buff Right Out" lol.

Well all of our excavators have manual thumbs. Most of them are right around 9,000 hours or a little less and they don't look nearly that bad. Our 320BL has 15,000 hours on it, it was used as a cement breaker for 3 years, and it's had demolition grapples numerous times over the years and it doesn't look even close to that bad. In fact, it's the one in my display picture.



Here it is last summer with 14,000 hours on the clock.

The 320CL next to it had 7,000 hours at the time of the picture.

my father took one look at it and said looks like crap to me, the price is way to high.