Rigs on Ebay.

An interesting question, and one worth addressing here. Anyone who has done some searching will come across some of the trucks on Ebay, and quite possibly find something that presents some interesting possibilities. And if you are looking for something in the age bracket you are asking about, and the concurrent price range, the possibilities get a little bit wider.

I have looked frequently at trucks listed on Ebay, and for my own curiosity have from time to time stopped in somewhere to see if the actual truck matched it's description. And often it does. A few weeks ago, I stopped just outside of Chicago and looked at a 2000 Sterling, 77 inch sleeper, 435 Cat, 10 speed, and the truck had a buy it now price that I thought was pretty reasonable at about 18,000 dollars. This would have been a very nice truck for someone at a decent price, though I looked merely out of curiosity as it didn;t match the specs I would be looking for.

The key to doing this lies in two things. One, make sure before you start that you know what your specs are and what you are looking for in a vehicle. If you don't have that planned out before you start, then you really have no idea of what you are looking for. By having specs for hp, model, engine brand, and whatever else you think important, you can sift through the ads and eliminate the ones that don't apply to you.

Second thing to do is to use the search feature that brings up trucks in your reasonable area. In the case of a truck, I would not consider buying one unless I had personally looked it over before the deal closed. It would have to be within a reasonable weekend driving range for me to look at it, and actually see the truck before I spent the money one would cost me. I recently bought a skid steer loader based on the pictures and description, and a phone converstaion with the owner, and that was a 4000 dollar item and about my upper limit for a sight unseen machine. If the truck wasn't located within whatever range you are comfortable with traveling on a weekend(about 300 miles in my case) then I would be disinclined to bid on it without actually having held the steering wheel in my hand.

You can't get overanxious, and you have to be immune to "bidders frenzy" to make it work. Any one who gets into a bidding war on Ebay deserves the results. It's like any other auction, I set my price and will go up to that but no higher. There is always another machine available somewhere down the line, and if I don't get one today, I might get lucky on another day. But if you do it right, and take our time researching what you are buying, I have seen some very good deals come across on Ebay. I search it quite often and can even identify a couple of dealers in the Chicago area that have repeatedly had decent used trucks for sale, and can recognize their ads.

And if you think you can get by with a cabover instead of a conventional, there always seem to be some really great deals on cabovers. Most regular dealers aren't interested in handling them anymore, and they always seem to have a lot of nice ones going cheaply on Ebay. They aren't fancy, but if you want to get the most truck for your dollar, they represent a heck of a value. My 02.

 

If you are not really sure what to look for and even if you do know what to look for, you should have the truck taken to a dealer and have them inspect it as well doing a engine test.. They would know better what to look for because they deal with it everyday, therefore their eye is better in seeing something you may miss. $200 for a truck inspection on a truck is well worth it.

 

I guy I know was running containers into the city up here in the northeast with a "Freightliner Select" factory refurbished tandem sleeper to daycab conversion he had good luck with - we also have one of these in our operation and it is a nice truck. You should be able to find one of these mid to late 90's for about $15k and they are much more practical pulling containers than a sleeper - but he got stuck with all the more difficult deliveries!