:ditto:if its running and working i would go 650
You need to buy a high hour Onan and then have to rebuild it. Your tune will change in a heart beat when you see the price's.Asking for the reading on the hour meter I think is pointless and irrelevant. Plus, not all of them had an hour meter. It's a 30+ year machine, and it's going to have a lot of hours on it, plus what would your price gauge be if you had the hour reading?
You need to buy a high hour Onan and then have to rebuild it. Your tune will change in a heart beat when you see the price's.
If they used it 50 hours a year or 100 hours a year matters to me. Time's that by 30. If your going to buy it to park in the garage then no hours don't matter. If it's going to be a worker, hours matter.
Most people would rather not buy a so called restored tractor. When they hear restored they think, worn out, rusty old junk with fresh paint that someone did not take care of. Why else did it need restoring ?
Rare means nothing inless you have a buyer, restored means even less. Low hours means a lot.
The 19.9 I had did have a hour meter.
I think that's a big generalization. I define restored as someone re-investing in the machine. For me, that has nothing to do with paint, all mechanical. I would agree that some sellers slap a quick coat of paint on a rusty tractor to flip them over at a higher price, but those types of machines as most of us know are easier to spot. I don't think I or "most people" ever looked at machine suspiciously from the onset and asked myself why did it "need" restoring.
It's pretty self explanatory when you look a machine over to see who put the time in and took care of it. That's plain to see if you know what to look for mechanically, but as you know it's not an exact science. Paint doesn't mean anything to me. I was told the hour meter on my GT quit working back in the 80's, so it was irrelevant to me in the buying process. I could tell the true level of wear on it after I pulled the engine apart and started looking at the internal components. Also, what if those supposedly low hours were really hard hours.
It would be great to know the amount of seat time the tractor/engine has on it at the time of purchase, but more often then not, it's impossible to tell on many of these tractors just by eye balling them.
I can do the math in my head, and if someone put new tires, new belts, new batt. and obviously took care of the machine, I have a ball park figure in my head to work off of. It would be impossible to pop the heads off of every engine when sizing it up in a driveway to see if it needs engine work etc.. Normally, I think you just rely on your eyes and ears and take a gamble.
Low hours mean something to buyers that can actually ascertain whether or not the machine actually has "low hours". When we deal in buying used high and low hour earth moving machines at work, hour meters have bearing. But with a machine such as this where the meter can be disconnected and reconnected at anytime, nah.
I got my hour meter working when I restored it. It would be easy to disconnect it, put it on a shelf, put hundred of more hours on it and then put it back on when I sell and tell the owner "has only xxxx low hours on it!"...
