New here, and need some help, tried a search but poor results for the pretty purple machine I'm looking at buying. I have an opportunity to buy a 1995 kamatsu model in title, 3994 hours, sat for a year, started with a jump slightly squeaky belt appears clean rubber tracks sprockets and rolls appear 70 percent. Here's the kicker it has a slow boom, I mean slow. It has some electric boom wire attached at each joint to what I guess is a rheostat, the owner says this is the issue, you can set it for a certain depth and height and keeps the bucket from coming through the cab when using the knuckle boom. The money is right I guess if I'm getting paid by the hour. Questions I would like some help with is a link to some info on this machine, any knowledge on this electric apparatus and is there a way to bypass it so I can test the actual hydraulic speed of this machine. I had an old bantam once that was lot faster. Can i get parts, how pricy or interchangeable are the parts, does this machine have a history of one ailment or another can't find much on it. Sorry for the question right out of the gate but need to get off the pot if I'm going to get it.
Welcome to the forum kirt. :usa A purple Komatsu is a grey market machine in N America. The very first thing you should do, if you're going to own this machine, is call your local Komatsu dealer with model and s/n and ask them if they can support the parts on that machine, they are your only source for parts. And you can not contact other Komatsu dealers in other parts of the states and have them shipped to your area as Komatsu is territorial, only sell within their area. Make sure you have parts support first before making the purchase. Second, those potentiometers do allow setting pre-sets on boom functions, digging dept, ect. But they also serve as boom position indicators to the ECU to prevent bucket from being crashed into the cab when boom is in offset position. My experience with the PC75UU, similar machine in design, is this system does not slow down or speed up boom functions, it stops boom functions entirely. If you are experiencing extremely slow boom operations, I would tend to think something else is the problem, not the boom position sensors. As to just what would be the problem, that I don't know. I do know the 75UU was not a very fast machine, compared to comparable machines, likely the 50UU could share similar characteristics. But if you're talking really slow operations, there's definitely something wrong.