hi, sorry if I open the discussion, some user friend could kindly give me opinions on the excavator brand "LINK BELT", I only knew the lattice crawler cranes for drag line piling the dredges with bucket and rope excavators thank you.
The company has been around for a long time. Name sake is from inventing steel chains in the 1800s if I remember correctly. They were making hydraulic excavators when I went to work for the dealer in 1979. LS5400 and LS5800 were top of the industry in those days. Many were turned into very successful log loaders for the west coast of North America. They joint partnered with Sumitomo at about that time who started building other model sizes in Japan and imported them into North America. They were well thought of all through the mid eighties but started to be overshadowed by the gray market Hitachi line in the mid to late eighties. Hitachi and Komatsu caught on big time with franchised dealers and machines built for North America in the early nineties and Cat finally updated their excavator line in the late nineties in an effort to catch up to the markets. Link-Belt became a second tier brand and Sumitomo started making the same machine for Case in the mid to late nineties. In my opinion it was an effort by Sumitomo to possibly double sales of the line. What I saw was a cut in Link-Belt sales and the combined sales of Link-Belt and Case being about the same as before. The machines are still made by Sumitomo in Japan and you can still buy a Case or a Link-Belt and the only difference is the color as far as I know. They are still a decent machine that with decent maintenance will last a long time. They are expensive to fix and support for either line is spotty. You find the service person who can fix them and then pay whatever they want to keep them around. Electronic systems were poor compared to the rest of the builders. Rest of the machine was engineered out of a catalog with Cummins or Isuzu engines, Kawasaki or Uchida pumps and various hydraulic components like valves, motors and gear boxes built to spec by other companies. Booms and sticks could be a little light structurally. Undercarriages were patterned off of Caterpillar chain specs with different bottom roller patterns. All in all, they were generally a little less expensive to purchase, they could last a long time and life cycle costs were always comparable to the other brands of excavators.