Hello everyone, I am looking at a 10 year old 773 with 3000 hrs, gold package cab heat air and so on. It has been sitting outside for five years and never moved the owner put new tires on still have **** and now they are starting to dry rot. What should I look for ? The machine is clean and not beat up, he says $12.500. Any thoughts? Thanks to all for a great site!
hmm price doesnt sound too bad. check for a cracked head on the engine. these machines were more susceptible to this than the newer ones. make sure to keep between the radiators clean and make sure to always keep the coolant level full both in the radiator and the overflow tank if you buy it. might wanna flip up the cab just to see if it looks ok.
Thanks dave, I really want a new JCB hope to demo the 260 this week, if I cant bargin to my liking I may just bye the old 773.
yea it is quite hard to justify paying the 45k when you can pick up something for 12k. if my life depended on my 500000 edition 773 with 8000 hours i would take my machine hands down over a new one. i would be tempted to pick up the 773 if it was around here too. if you buy the 773 whatever you do dont overheat it because the head WILL crack.
Just to add my 2 cents... I owned one of the 773G's... The 500K model in fact. I ended up cracking the head on this machine. I'm not sure how though? Coolant was always full, Always kepts up meticulously on maintenance etc. I would imagine that a coolant light or warning would go off before the catastrophic event of a head cracking. Anwway, I really loved that machine. It only had 1900 hrs on it when the head went, I ended up trading it in for a track machine. Good luck anyway. Price doesn't sound horrible but I picked up mine for 10k with about 1500 hrs on it.
well...some people will tell you the head on every bobcat will crack at 2000 hours. some people say that this problem has been solved. we have had 2 cracked heads on ours. one at 2000 hours and one at 4000. no problems in the last 4000 hours. its hard to say what happened with ours. we had some unexplained overheating problems with it for a spell and its seems that once the machine auto shut down kicks in you are too late. i always figured our heads cracked because the engine was overheated, but maybe they would have cracked anyway.