Thinking of maybe adding a 8-9 ton machine to the fleet. Currently have stuff between 1. to 6 tons. Assumingly there is a correlation between the size of machine and how many reasonably trouble free hours one can expect. Certainly maintenance and the type of work are huge factors among other things. Here are couple of examples. A lot of o/o and rental shops trade in their 3.5 tonners before 3-3500 hours. For the the 20k ton machines, usually around 7-8k hours. I would think that would be their reasonably trouble free life expectancy.??? Where would the 9 ton type stuff fall. Looking for real life experiences from forum members. THx.
I have a little over 5k hours on a TB 290 Takeuchi running a very heavy helac type coupler (swinger) and have had basically no down time. The machine gets worked really hard and has been the best tractor I have ever owned over the course of 20+ years in business. A company I work with all the time gets at least 6k hours out of all minis before they turn them over. My dealer wants me to turn my 9 ton over at 7-8k but unless I start to see failures I'm going to keep running it.
Both our 4 and 5 ton machines have over 6000 hours on them, Just put a set of tracks on both of them. The bobcat has been trouble free, but the Kobelco seems to be having issues with the swing brake. Our 8 ton Cat has about 5000 hours on it. No real issues. Seems to be getting weak on one track. I walked up to a 2 foot high windrow this summer, one side wanted to go over, but I had to lift her up to go over. The cat guy was going to check it out this winter. Another company we deal with a lot has the identical machine, I think it was built 2 months before ours, and it is ten times the machine. Smoother, more power, and a little faster.
Thanks for that info. I'm actually looking at a TB290 with 2.7khrs. Have couple of bigger jobs coming up where the 6 tonner is going to be a little on the small side. If I can get 6k hours out of it w/o major issues I'd be pretty happy.
I'm an o/o with a 09 kx 080-3. She just rolled past 9100hrs. 2 undercarriage done. That's mainly cause of the type of work I do. I'm also debating on trading it in cause of the higher hours, but still not sure if uta really nessasary as it's VERY dependable.