Mind you, I'm not knocking the other brands here. I know they need maintenance and repairs like all machines do as evidenced by posts in other threads. My point being the more costly initial purchase price and (apparantly) cost of repairs appears to be greater?? Maintenance costs are probably equal, oil and filters being just that...unless dealers charge more for brand specific. That is the basics of this thread.
When I first got my Kama, I had never driven a tractor before ... let alone know anything about it. I had read up on them and made spread sheets to compare features and specs vs price with other tractors so I could make a relatively "educated wild guess" as to which one I would buy. Even scarier, I was going to buy "online"... sight unseen. I had gone to the local tractor dealer but the Kobutas and MF I saw were out of my price range, and I had seen many ads on eBay of some brand new nice looking tractors that had similar hp ratings and much cheaper.
I decided to buy Chinese because of the huge price difference and was really not sure how much I'd actually "use" the tractor, so no sense in buying something expensive when this one wil do just fine. Now I had to figure out "which" Chinese tractor to buy. I chose the KAMA 554 for it's robust construction and many features for the same price or better price. The downside was it was not as popular as the other brands, but heck, I really didn't know anything about THEM either. Using my engineering smarts from way back, I tried to focus on those features I knew were mechanically sound.
I was aware of it's features but not experienced in using them. Least of all was knowing it's "real world" capabilities. As it turns out, this machine is "quite" capable of doing every task I've set out to do, within it's capacities. I've had zero mechanical problems failures. The only thing I had a problem with was some loose ground wires that took me a while to figure out and then I changed the fuses to like what's used in cars. I've done the scheduled services myself including valve lash adjustment and head bolt re-torquing, further adding to my savings. I've also made many improvements and customized it to my liking ... which I would have done regardless which brand I bought.
At this point, after nearly 200hrs of service, the tractor has paid for itself. My road guy charges $87.50/hr (way more for the dozer) so if I called him for every hour I spent on the tractor ... well, you do the math. The 200 hours are really more like 300 or 350 because the tractor's hour meter only reads true when running at rated rpm and I rarely run it at those rpm. So I figure I've gotten my money's worth and then some already.
