Chapter 12- What Reuben Found That the Screen Could Not

Reuben Prieksat drove sixty miles to that auction yard on the Thursday before the sale, which cost Vern three hundred and forty dollars including his road time, and which is the best money spent anywhere in this book.

He walked the machine for ninety minutes. Vern followed him with the notebook.

The reason this chapter exists is that a reader who has followed eleven chapters of engine data could reasonably conclude that the scanner is the method. It is not. Roughly half of what makes a used tractor expensive has no wires attached to it at all, and the audit that had just told Vern this machine was worth bidding on had nothing to say about any of it.

What He Found

Rear tires at about thirty percent, with sidewall cracking from age rather than wear, which on a machine that spends winters outside is normal and which is a four figure item per pair.

A crack in a loader mount bracket, hairline, about two inches, with no repair attempt on it. Reuben found it by running a hand along the underside of the bracket rather than by looking at it.

Four hydraulic hoses with perished outer covers, none leaking, all of them older than the ones around them and all of them due.

A power take off guard with a broken retaining tab, which Reuben was blunt about and made Vern write down as its own line rather than lumping it into miscellaneous.

And a full service due, because the machine had been parked since the previous autumn.

Ninety minutes with a light and a hand, on a machine that had just passed a clean audit.

Six thousand eight hundred and fifty dollars of work, on a machine whose entire electronic record was good, found by somebody with a torch and forty years of knowing where to put his hand.

Where a Loader Tractor Cracks

Reuben spent twenty of the ninety minutes on structure, and the reason is specific to this class of machine.

Three places worth a hand and a light on any machine that has carried a loader.

A loader puts loads into a tractor frame that the frame was designed for but that accumulate. The mount brackets take it first. The frame rail below the cab takes it next. The drawbar and hitch castings take a different kind of abuse entirely, which is shock loading from towing and from things that stop suddenly.

Reuben's instruction, which any buyer can follow, is to look for two things rather than for cracks. Look for fresh paint in one small area, because fresh paint in one small area on an otherwise faded machine is somebody covering something. And look for weld beads that are not factory, because a repaired crack is not automatically a problem and an undisclosed repaired crack tells you about the seller.

He found no repairs on this machine and one live crack, which he described as an easy repair now and an expensive one in three years.

The Rule About Order

Vern paid Reuben four times that spring. Three inspections at between one hundred and eighty and two hundred and forty dollars, plus the auction trip at three hundred and forty.

Nine hundred and forty dollars in total, against seven machines looked at.

He did not pay for an inspection on four of them, because the audit had already ended those four before anybody needed to be paid. The hour gap machine, the cleared memory machine, the ash loaded auction machine and the machine with two weak cylinders were all eliminated in ten minutes each with a tool that costs nothing to run.

Inspecting all seven would have been roughly sixteen hundred dollars. Inspecting none of them would have meant buying a machine with a cracked loader bracket and four perished hoses and finding out about them in July.

Reuben's own summary, delivered in the yard with his hands black, is the sentence that governs both books. He said the scanner tells you which machines are worth paying me to look at.

What He Would Not Do

Two things Reuben declined, both worth knowing before hiring anybody.

He would not put a value on the machine. Not once, and Vern asked twice. His position is that a mechanic who prices equipment ends up selling equipment, and that he was not going to be the man who told somebody to spend a hundred thousand dollars.

And he would not touch the fault memory on a machine his client did not own, for any reason, including the innocent one of clearing a code to see whether it came back. He said that the moment he did that, every finding he had made that day became arguable and so did his name.

That is the same rule Vern's daughter had written on the inside cover of the notebook the previous April, arrived at independently by a man who had never spoken to her.

What He Would Have Missed

It is worth listing what a buyer relying on the audit alone would have taken home that day, because the answer is not nothing and it is not catastrophic either.

He would have bought a mechanically sound machine with four thousand two hundred dollars of tires that had to be replaced before the following spring, four hoses that would fail one at a time over eighteen months at the least convenient moments, a crack in a loader bracket that would grow, and a power take off guard that would not have passed anybody's idea of safe.

None of that would have stopped him buying the machine. All of it would have arrived as a surprise across the following year, in the way that unbudgeted things arrive, and the crack would have gone from an eight hundred dollar repair to something considerably worse.

Which is the argument for the second step rather than an argument against the first. The audit told Vern the machine was worth an inspection. The inspection told him what the machine would cost in its first year. Neither one substitutes for the other, and the order is what makes the pair affordable.

Reuben's own view, offered while he packed up, is that most of his pre purchase work is on machines that were never going to be bought, and that the man who arrives having already eliminated four candidates for free is the man he can actually help.

What Vern Learned

• Roughly half of what makes a used tractor expensive has no wires attached to it and will never appear on any screen.

• Tires fail from age and sidewall cracking as much as from tread wear, and on a machine wintered outside that is a four figure item.

• Loader mount brackets, the frame rail below the cab, and the drawbar and hitch castings are where a loader tractor cracks.

• Look for fresh paint in one small area and for weld beads that are not factory. A disclosed repair is fine. An undisclosed one tells you about the seller.

• Scan first, because it is free and eliminates most candidates. Inspect second, on survivors only, because it costs real money.

• Hire an inspector...

This curated preview is provided for personal reading. Copyright remains with Nobo Astoria.