To Rent or To Buy?

The road project required us to invest in two very large pieces of equipment in order to move the amount of material we needed to move. The first was everyone's favorite, the famous Caterpillar D8H. The second was the big Caterpillar 330 excavator. Surprisingly, both of these machines cost us roughly the same amount of money. We spent $21,600 on the dozer and roughly $24,000 on the rental of the excavator (half on the hammer, half on the machine itself).

So, which machine do we feel like was money better spent?

In regards to the dozer, we purchased the cheapest one we could find that was big enough to get the job done. When we purchased the dozer, we knew it was on its last legs. It had a long hard life logging in the mountains followed by an even harder life in a quarry. When we bought it, it was already at a point in its life plagued with "good enough" repairs. For us as well it was difficult to justify the cost to fix things the right way. We feel extremely fortunate that the dozer was able to get the job done and every day we operated we knew that day could be its last. Of course, now the dozer sits crippled with what could be a major transmission problem. But even still, at this point we feel like we've gotten every dollar of value out of it and it was money well spent.

With the excavator, we shopped around pretty extensively for  something over 30 tons and we just couldn't find anything that we could afford that seemed worth spending the money on. With Tyler and his family scheduled to come help on the road for a month we also knew there wasn't time for breakdowns. We needed to get the project DONE. Initially we rented the Cat 330 for a week hoping that would be enough time to break up the rock, and then our newly acquired Hitachi 120 could take over. We soon figured out that the rock was much harder than we anticipated and the Hitachi just wasn't up to the task (another lesson learned the hard way). We extended the rental of the 330 to a month because the economics of the project just made more sense with that beast on the job. We had some minor breakdowns (which the rental company repaired) but for the most part the Cat 330 proved to be very reliable and very efficient. Aside from putting fuel in the tank and daily grease we didn't have to worry about it and we could focus on the project at hand.

So what's better? Owning equipment or renting? If the goal is to get the job done, then based on our experience we feel that renting large equipment is the way to go. Now that the project is complete we really don't have a need for the big and broken D8 dozer. We could have spent the money we used to buy the dozer on renting a new modern dozer and accomplished the project more quickly, without fear of breakdown, and without the stress of needing to repair and maintain the equipment. At this point the dozer is really just worth its weight in scrap.

With that said, the rented 330 didn't have the same charm as the D8H. The experience of owning and operating a 60 year old piece of American construction history is one that I will never forget, and we loved the opportunity to share that experience with you and our channel.