crawlers for hire?

[Joel Shackelford]

Hey guys,
Anyone here ever hire their crawlers out for money? And if so, I wonder what would be a fair price per hour? I can imagine a great difference in price from one part of the country to the other. I guess the size of the machine would make a big difference too.
Regards, Joel

[2010OWNER]

Joel,
My experience has been that you'll be lucky to break even...
You'll need a good triple axle to haul it around. There's license and tonnage to buy.
Old iron; seems like you spend as much time under it as on it. Parts, such as chains and sprockets are getting hard to come by and very expensive.
Time: if you have a full time job during the week, you can kiss your weekends goodbye. You'll either be working with it or on it.
Oh yeah, a few people will never pay you. On one job, not only did I get stiffed for the money, but someone stole my battery and fire extinguisher.

All that being said; if you've played with it all you can on your place, you have to go somewhere else if you want to play some more.
Since I work at a full time job, I charge 1.5 times my regular wage for my operating hours and the same for my toy. I double that for the 1st hour to cover my hauling costs. i.e. if you make $15 an hour at your regular job = $22.50 per hour for you plus $22.50 for your toy = $45 an hour; $90 for the first hour.
If you get too much work, raise your price.
Have fun,
Brian

[Lavoy]

I do work mostly for friends or at the least local people that I know very well. Often this is one of those, they offer to pay, I decline, that is the way neighbors work type of deal. I would never actively seek out work, not enough time, and the risk of liability is terrible, what if you damage something of the person's you are working at. I have heard of contractors going out of business because the insureance costs are too high.
If you mean rent out, then no I never do that, parts are too expensive, and inexperienced operators can wreck a lot of stuff.
Lavoy

[NNAATZ]

i do hire out to only people i know for little to nothing,i dont seek work it seems to find me. you have to realize the size of job and in my case anyway i am working with 40+ year old machinery. parts are hard to come by. i have lent out machines to friends but their operators as a living and been around these old tractors. but when i do get into work it is only a few hours in the after noon (3-4hours) i think that is all these old machines want to work any way, use a little common sense.

[carolina crawler]

If you look through your local yellow pages or a local classified ads, you will find rental companys who will rent you a deere, Cat, or another type of crawler, for a fair price, and only if you know how to operate them..these are always fairly new, and easy to operate, I rented a 955 loader once and was $1000 a day....but it earned it.....good luck...Mark /Cc

[Tigerhaze]

In my area (Kansas City metro area), you can rent a CAT 939 HST from the local CAT store for around $500/day (8 hours run time) or $1500/week (40 hours run time). When I rented, mob/demob was about $120 for 40 miles one-way; that was through the CAT dealer and before diesel fuel spiked. That rental cost excluded a 10% insurance coverage fee and also excluded fuel which used about 40 gallons per day if run hard.

I agree with the others; it is too easy to break parts on these older machines especially by others not used to running them. You could easily lose all the money made by renting them out. However I have done what others on here have done; I help out my neighbors when I can with my machine because they have repaid the favors tenfold.

[Toivo1037]

I rented a JD 640 from a cousin last year when I had a huge amount of fill to level. He charged me $60/hr delivered, and including fuel. Worth it if you ask me. I would not rent out our JD 440, if you are not used to it, too easy to mess it up.

[Joel Shackelford]

I was just thinking if I get this 350B or maybe a 450B I could help pay for it by working it locally. I have the equipment to haul it and I need one to clean up an area where I am digging topsoil with my backhoe. Might be a bad Ideal, I don't know.
Regards, Joel

[Lavoy]

I think trying to generate a little extra money is a great idea, and I bet you would get work depending on how many small operators are left in your area. My main concern is liability at the job site, one booboo and you have eaten up all your profit. Check with your insurance guy, but I would be that you would be looking at several thousand dollars a year for some sort of liability.
Lavoy

[townlineterry]

Joel, I might have alittle different take on this because I am a logging and excatvation contractor. Biggest thing is liability insurance, got to have it or you risk losing everything you own. This is one sue happy nation. You might think your just doing a favor for a friend, but something gets damaged or a person hurt things can change real fast.
I pay around three thousand a year for all my insurance, general liability, inland marine and commercal auto. Sounds like a lot, but I can make it up in two weeks or less.
As for old iron breaking, well new iron breaks too, and it ain't cheap to fix. I think past usage is more important that age. I have a 1971 Case 580CK backhoe. Local machine I knew the former owners I knew it was well maintaned and not beat on. Had few problems with it, and found a good source of parts so far it's been a good machine for us. Also have 1010 crawler, bought that 2 years ago, it still had paint on the skid plate. So was pretty sure it wasn't used to hard.
The trade off here is I don't have payments and the stuff is easy to work on when I need to.
As for rates, I live in NW Pa. last season we charged $65 an hour for either machine with a 4 hour minimum with in a 25 mile radius, after that we charged a mileage fee depending on total distance and lengh of job. This comeing season, with fuel prices it will probably be 75 or 80.
As for people not paying, well last year had a guy didn't pay for the gravel we spread on his driveway. Was working the area again so we took the hoe and truck over and repossed it. Over all I lost money on the deal, but I felt better about the whole thing, and word got around.


Terry

[dale]

As for people not paying, well last year had a guy didn't pay for the gravel we spread on his driveway. Was working the area again so we took the hoe and truck over and repossed it. Over all I lost money on the deal, but I felt better about the whole thing, and word got around.

Terry

Did he ever call you or the police about his stolen property? Sure would have been a nice "Kodak moment" when he drove up and realized what happened

[Stan Disbrow]

Hi,

I bet not. He'd have to field the awkward question as to why it might be that someone would come in and swipe driveway gravel. That one would probably be question #2, after 'any idea who dun it?'.....

So, the cops go to 'who dun it' and ask 'did you?', and get a 'yes, because of no pay' and then they go back to the no-pay guy and charge him because my now they're ticked off at having to spend their time on such a fool's errand.

Sort of like the guy that has his car repo'd and reports a theft......

Stan

[townlineterry]

This guy had ignored a registered letter, so I was probably on pretty safe ground legally. Still it probably was a bold move. What got me mad enough to do something like this was, here I am trying to scratch out a living and this was somebody that wasn't hurting for money.
I mean if you can afford a big Dodge diesel dually jsut to haul groceries why are you trying to stick to an honest workman?
Funny, when I pass this guy on the road he doesn't wave anymore, just looks straight ahead. On the bright side guys at the local waterhole thought it was pretty funny and I got a few free drinks out of it.

Terry

[Ray III]

That's great about repossessing the gravel, thumbs up to ya. The nice thing about working on something on wheels (or tracks!) is you always get paid for it, or the owner doesn't get it back! We had to hold on to something for a year once, but after the guy got a letter from a lawyer that the machine was to be sold at auction, he couldn't get his checkbook out fast enough.

I was told a contractor might want to rent my 420, because he can't get into people's backyards with his D5 and has to pay $400 a day to rent something. Good idea to let him use it, and for how much a day? He's honest and good with equipment.

[townlineterry]

Again, we come back to the issue of liability. Here in Pa. if you own the machince you may be liable even though you aren't operating it. I'd get a written rental or lease agreement stateing the contractor was responsible in case of a lawsuit, and for any damage to the machine that was not normal wear and tear. The damage part can be a real gray area.
I've had people want to rent or borrow my eqpuiment, I tell them they can rent it but it comes with an operator. My policy is the only people who run the machines are myself and my son, who works for me. Don't even let the son-in-law touch anything. Same with tools.
I figure a man has four sacred things you should never touch, his tools, guns, dog and pickup truck.


Terry