Hey all, I am going to look at a a Hitachi 150, next week. I already looked at it once and i want to go back and run it again. It seems to be VERY well maintained, filters/fluids marked with service hours/date, everything greased well, under carriage looks fair. It has around 8000 hours, and is not beat up at all. What kind of hours are you guys that own hitachis getting out of them? Priced at 31000, and wont budge, does that price seem out of line? Thanks
be careful with 150 hitachis, is it a dash 1 or 5 , the undercarraige was weak on them ,and the engine was underpowered ,it runs the same engine as a 130, the undercarraige faults are weak chains, too light for the size of machine weak pads , too light for the size of machine idlers and rollers ahve same fauls motors seem ok but an engine never kasted long enough in one i had or operated to burn out a motor. the 150 problem was that hitachi built it with 120 and 130 parts stuck on to a 16 ton machine ,so they wore out or broke alot faster. the cooling system was too small in them also. however if its in good nick and has been maintained and your only going to be using it for a day a month or a couple of weeks a year it would be ok. on the plus side the 150 was a way better balanced machine than the 120 130 or even 200 it was way nicer to drive and easier to do finishing work with
I ran a 150-1 for a year and while it did have it's issues I did quite like the machine. One issue was like cj says the undercarriage. The track frame up front where the idler yoke slides in has a tendancy to spread apart allowing the idler to move side to side and thereby the track to walk off the idler very frequently. I was logging in some pretty steep terrain with it and we spent more time putting the track back on than actually getting anything done. We pulled yhe frames back together and added stiffners and that helped a lot but still didn't fully eliminate the track coming off. The other annoying issue was that im the summer it would readily overheat. After about an hour you would take a 15 minute break to let things cool off if you were doing heavy work. We had the rad rebuilt, installed a new water pump but we still always had to watch the temps really closely. On the plus side it had plenty of power, was fast, well balanced and a good all around machine for what we did with it. I'd definitely consider one as long as it was looked after.