Last week I went with my brother to a neighboring town we walked into a Bobcat dealorship and easily purchased parts for his old Bobcat. I later thought to my self people like us in the midwest USA take parts availability for granted. I would like to Hear some stories of what it takes to get parts in remote locations and how other folks retrofit any thing available to get the units back on the job. thanks the BIG D
I worked on snowcats at a place 10 miles from the nearest road. Basically any broken part that came off got saved because you never knew if one day that part might still be better than what you've got. We do really have it easy in the US though, it would be amazing to talk with a mechanic in Cuba or Africa where they pulloff some truly miraculous repairs.
Heavy equipment parts seem to be fairly easy to come by, most dealers have just about everything and if they don't, they're overnight shipped. Never had a problem. However, I ran snowcats last winter at a ski area and those machines are incredibly tempermental. We run 8 Prinoth/Bombardier cats and one Pisten Bully, parts turnaround was typically at least a week for routine items, some things were 2-3 weeks or even a month. If we broke anything on the tiller frame, very easily we could wait 3 weeks to get a replacement. Wiper motors, floor mounted wiper switch, door latches, hydraulic couplers, seals and gaskets, most of that stuff we have in the shop but could be ordered and recieved in less than a week if we didn't. The bigger items took forever, like parts for torque hubs, stack pumps, valve bodies, anything that is at the heart of running the machine takes 1-2 weeks. Rarely did we have engine problems, the Cat C9's in 7 out of 9 cats we ran rarely gave us issues.
Just last month; I had to travel about 150 Mi, and visit 6 different parts houses to find the battery interconnect cables (3 into 1) for my Dump truck. I prefer not to go to town for parts. I try to have the Brown truck deliver my needs.