Cost of temporary mini digger ownership?

[donnk]

8 hours ago, Matthew Storrs said:

word spreads fast! Yeah nearly had to abandon Landy going up from Dousland cos of the drifts. Got to go back in the morning with my tractor to pull a freelancer out of the ditch!

 

some serious drifting on the open moor!

if your off up the moor, dont call in the Slaughtered Lamb for a pint on the way back......

[WesD]

8 hours ago, Matthew Storrs said:

Got to go back in the morning with my tractor to pull a freelancer out of the ditch!

Hope you have paid him/her more than £150 and left him/her a few blankets!

[Matthew Storrs]

9 minutes ago, WesD said:

Hope you have paid him/her more than £150 and left him/her a few blankets!

? Sorry not sure what you mean!

[donnk]

freelancer / subbie 

[Matthew Storrs]

44 minutes ago, donnk said:

freelancer / subbie 

Cheers! That one went straight over my head!

[JimE]

If you buy right then you might even make money on it.

I would suggest 2.6 or 2 tonner, much easier to sell on and you could even trailer it to do a few jobs for people.

A small machine will do most what a big machine will if you take your time.

[Mick Dempsey]

I had a digger for years, finally sold it last year after a decade or so (1.5tonne Takeuchi)

 

Had nothing left on the property to do with it, it got so that every time I brought it out I had to spend the first day getting it going, lost a grand on it, not bad I thought.

 

Definitely worth buying one if you’ve a lot to do.

 

I just hire these days on the odd occasion I need one.

[Matthew Storrs]

Hiring can work out well because it’s generally pretty cheap to hire- particularly if you save the jobs up a bit and get the machine in for a week.

but the problem I always have with hiring machines is its generally not to hand when you need it, also to get the best out of a mini you invariably end up with a portfolio of attachments to increase its versatility which isn’t easy if you having to hire in with the different hitches/pipework etc. 

Diggers hold their value like crazy which works both ways. One digger I had ended up costing me something like 80p an hour used  in depreciation! I think for the occasional/landowner digger owner- something older with relatively low hours works out the best value. Newer machines with high ex contract rental hours put on them still seem to command a staggering amount of money to buy.

Current digger is 10 years old when I bought it last year, it had a mere 1000hrs on it and was in pretty much ex demo condition- had sat in a barn doing very little for the last decade- Very very hard to find stuff like this to be honest.