Since you have a long post I get to have one also /forums/images/graemlins/grin.gif
At one time I sold greys, Chinese (Kama, DF and Jinma) and Korean (TYM). I started with grey but to grow the business I took on Chinese then Korean. The Chinese tractors almost put me in the poor house. The amount of parts required to keep a few hundred of these tractors going is enormous. We were used to grey machines and didn’t prepare for the parts onslaught. We still have a dozen or so of each model we sold out back that were stripped while we were waiting for parts from china.
Half of the Korean tractors came back in the first year for repair. Clutches, housing cracks and electrical were the common failure. Tractors were under warranty for the customer but they were never happy about having to bring it in for repair. With that said that was over 2 years ago with a smaller company, I would feel very comfortable buying from Mahindra, Montana, Kioti or the like.
Greys have been our staple that we can depend on, less than 1% failure rates, I know if I send one out that it wont come back and if it breaks we can fix it. We do repair/prep them when they come from Japan, if we sent them out the door untouched almost all would come back. I have a much harder time finding parts for US tractors; we are constantly selling grey parts to fix US machines that have discontinued parts support. Mahindra35 was right on one thing though Vietnam greys are crap.
Not having ROPS used to bother me until I lost my first customer to a rollover, he had ROPS and a seat belt. Then I lost my second customer in a roll over who also had ROPS and a seatbelt. After that I realized human error is impossible to overcome completely, safety devices used properly can minimize the error not eliminate it.
Mahindra35, I can sell anything I want and I choose to sell only grey tractors. If they were half as bad as the daily rhetoric I have to listen to I wouldn’t be able to stay in business. Last month a customer came in and was looking at a tractor, he said he was at the Massy dealer and he told him you can’t get parts for greys (weird, I have never heard of a dealer making something up to sell a tractor….odd). This was the very same dealer a week earlier that bought a new Hinomoto starter from me to repair a Massy in his shop because the massy part was discontinued.
I want to start some new rumors so I have some new rhetoric to listen to…. Try this…. “I hear if you buy a grey tractor you can get butt cancer from the inferior padding on the seat” or “grey tractors are really aliens disguised as tractors” or “if you buy a new “real” tractor you can save a ton of money on your car insurance” remember you don’t need proof for these sayings to be true just say them enough till you believe them.
Iplayfarmer, give us an idea of the amount of money your friend has to work with and what he will be using it for (short term and long term) and then we can give you a more unbiased opinion.
Buck
