Cwrighttractors, I'm not trying to start a dogpile, but am afraid one might be coming. There have been members here, who are distinctly NOT dealers, who have had fairly wretched experiences with Vietnamese reconditioned tractors. The machines themselves have been unacceptably cobbled together, sometimes from parts sourced from entirely different tractors.
You may be an upstanding dealer who offers excellent customer support. I hope that is the case. I would like to welcome you to forum, as a contributor to the general knowledge base. I need all the help I can get, goodness knows. I know nothing about you or your business, so am not trying to reflect on that.
However, I do know some things about the members of this forum who have purchased reconditioned tractors and been burned. The general business model of reconditioned dealers, it appears to me, tends to exacerbate the overall poor experiences with the machines.
It's not right or fair for you to denigrate the members' experiences here on the board by saying that unnamed dealers were being undersold on their inferior equipment. The service that people here have personally experienced from some of those dealers who would seem to be included in your blanket statement is exactly the opposite of what you're describing.
I own, I think, a Vietnamese reconditioned tractor. I'm extremely happy with it. But I also know I am lucky. Sometimes that happens. But generally speaking, I'll take a used-looking machine from Japan any day over a "reconditioned" Vietnamese import.
Again, I'm saying this all respectfully. However, to show up somewhere, and in your very first post call Hoye, LMTC, Fredericks, Coldwater, Mark777 and numerous others, plus many members here, deceptive in their practices and statements goes against all the collective experiences. They don't need me to defend them; their reputations speak for themselves. But a new tractor buyer (As I was when I got my 1401D) may not know about the YEARS of reputation building those guys have done through their integrity, willingness to help, and so forth. Trying to ruin that reputation isn't right for you to do, and I want to make sure that anybody who reads this in the future, and is ignorant, as I was, is not misled.
Again, your products may be sound, and you may be a terrific dealer. I don't know, and am not speaking to that. Certainly good dealer support makes any troubles much easier to accept. But offering a 90 day warranty, for instance, isn't really that great. A normal user isn't going to put 250 hours on it in that time. They wouldn't, probably, get half of that. After 100 hours on a newly purchased tractor, I'm thinking about changing the fluids, maybe putting on a fresh belt if it didn't have a new one on when I bought it, not warranty items. That's true of a used one or a new machine.
The dealers whose warranty for 90 days only covers parts aren't really helping me at all. I have to do all the work myself; even an injection pump is only a few hundred dollars. In my view, I'm better off to buy a cheaper used machine, and pocket the money for any of these repairs. Of course, that's a personal thing, not an ethical issue, but it's food for thought.
I am interested in learning about your company, and experiences with these machines. What percentage of machines do you sell have warranty issues? (Is there a warranty period for you?) What are the types of troubles, and their frequency? Do some models have more issues than others? I look forward to learning from you, and, again, welcome to the board.
Guess I'll give Howe a call. RCO in Austin is only about 45-50 miles from my property so it would be pretty convenient.
