I was looking at the Ritchie brothers auction site at some Cat 305e2’s, and 305.5e2’s, from 2017 to 2019 dates. Some had common rail injection, but several had 2017 epa labels that says tier 2, and have mechanical injection. serial numbers started with such as 305.5ekwe, or awe, or cwe, etc. Are these considered gray market machines and if so, whats the current legal status of buying and owning one of these?
for the 305.5E2 models what was the digit that came after the "WE" on all those Serial Numbers you mentioned, not a 2 by any chance.? With the 305E2 machines need S/N prefixes to investigate. So what you need is the next 4 characters after "305E" from the 17-character PIN.
yes, there was a 2. One of them was CAT3055ETWE201713
So the S/N prefix of the 305.5E machines you were looking at is actually WE2. The last 8 characters are the Serial Number. Machine WE201713 was built on the 20th of January 2017 All the parts and service information for that model appears in the online system so you should have no issues getting spare parts & service backup. For a true grey market model the above information would not be available online. Whether the WE2-prefix 305.5E2 model was ever officially imported into the US I'm sorry I don't know.