Seeing DYs Whoas and excellent planning being screwed by major breakdowns ,and numerous other expensive repairs and replacements looming on the near horizons has me changing my thoughts from a future truck purchase of a old pre EGR truck to a new Glider.
My thinking is this.
Good Pre EGR trucks are getting hard to find for a decent price and you are probably looking at paying 20 to 25000 for one these days and most could use another 5 thousand put into them right off the get.
A thirty thousand dollar truck is going to run you 15 cents a mile to keep up with the future repairs.The missed days of work can add up in a hurry as we are seeing.In the end that truck is not appreciating one bit from the repair monies you have spent on it . It's only return value is it can provide a daily living.
On a 100 thousand mile year that old truck is costing you 15 thousand and numerous missed days of work. Some months not so many but sometimes you could have a whole missed week.
I think I would rather take my initial 30 thousand I would have spent on a old truck and put it down on a new glider and finance that for 6 years at 1500 a month .
1500 a month is 18 thou a year, 3000 more a year than your old truck but it is a fixed cost and your monies spent is lowering the debt in the truck faster than it will depreciate.
After 3 or 4 years sell the truck for half its value and buy another one with a little more money down because the truck you sold had 60 thou in equity in it .
I know truck prices will continue to go up but so will parts and labor for fixing your old truck.
Some would say buy a used 3 or 4 year old glider for half the price as a new one . Now you are buying the back end of the service life of the truck where all the repairs start to rear their ugly heads .
If you are going to spend 70 thou on a truck wouldn;t you rather own it during the 1st 400 thousand miles instead of the last 4 or 500 thousand when it starts needing all the repairs.
Just my food for thought.
Double Yellow's Company Driver to Independent Thread
Discussion in 'Ask An Owner Operator' started by double yellow, Nov 5, 2014.
Page 82 of 198
-
-
Trucking Jobs in 30 seconds
Every month 400 people find a job with the help of TruckersReport.
-
-
-
-
Yes. Verified the big box said "Detroit Diesel" and the smaller boxes that held individual liners said "reliabilt"
Eventually. But the current trucks really are not that aerodynamic. When they start focusing on the underbody, efficiency will really jump. Until then, a reasonably aerodynamic old truck + mods is probably going to be the lowest overall cost of ownership. That's what I'm gambling on, anyway.
Curves make things a lot more complicated. There would be a gyroscopic effect, but I think it would be dwarfed by the increase in rolling resistance from the tires' scrub angle.
Aluminum rims would have a smaller moment of inertia than steel, but the tires play the biggest part. Mass farther from the hub exerts more leverage and is more important. Wide singles cut down significantly on the moment of inertia by removing 2 heavy sidewalls from each position.
As an aside, the lighter the "unsprung weight" the better the ride quality. Newton's second law of motion says F=ma (force = mass times acceleration). When your tire hits a bump, it has to accelerate up (along with the wheel, part of the axle, etc). If you're going a certain speed and you hit a bump, the acceleration is pretty much the same, but the lower the mass the less force you exert on the body.
You're thinking of Newton's universal law of gravitation. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction is Newton's 3rd law of motion. It means that if a bump exerts 1000 lbs of force on a tire, the tire exerts 1000 lbs of force on the ground. If the ground was unable to withstand 1000 lbs of force, it would give way...
To be fair, it has never broken down -- something I can't say for the new emission trucks I drove as a company driver. And I was prepared to face an overhaul right off the bat so getting 75,000 relatively trouble-free miles (aside from unplanned A/C & headlight repairs) first was a pretty nice bonus. Every other repair (brakes, seals, etc) was planned and/or done while on hometime.
And I could have just replaced the 1 injector along with the injector harness and perhaps gone another year before needing an inframe, but I prefer to do things right the first time. In this case, that involved removing the head to replace the injector cups at which point the labor was high enough it didn't make a whole lot of sense not to inframe now considering the scouring in the 1 cylinder.
In this case, it was a blessing in disguise to do it now. The liners had a little bit of pitting on the backside:
But more concerning was one of the bearings was not long for this world (and the others weren't too far behind it):
(sorry for the crappy picture)
The KR strategy, as I understand it, is to buy an old truck, run it into the ground, and then buy another & repeat. My strategy is to buy an old truck, repair it as if you'll be driving it forever, take the occasional lumps along the way, and hope that in the long term it'll all even out.
Twice I had repairs lasting over 1 week on trucks with less than 150,000 miles. A glider is probably going to be much more reliable, but I think a better plan is to expect to have a certain amount of downtime no matter what you drive.
I think that is a perfectly reasonably plan, if you really have 60K equity. I kinda doubt it though. 30K down + 6 years @ 1500/month = $138,000. Assuming a $120,000 initial purchase, that works out to a 7% interest rate on the $90,000 financed:
After 3 years, you would have paid $84,000, have a principal balance of $49,700, a residual value of ~$77,000, and ~$27,000 equity. That works out to $19,000/year plus ~$1500/year in additional insurance, plus $5,000/year in maintenance. Net cost: $25,500/year
After 4 years, you would have paid $102,000, have a principal balance of $34,300, a residual value of ~$65,000 ( http://www.truckpaper.com/listingsdetail/detail.aspx?OHID=5451619 ), and ~$31,000 equity. That works out to $17,750/year plus ~$1500/year in additional insurance, plus $5000/year maintenance. Net cost: $24,250/year
VS old truck:
$15,000 (once) plus $15,000/year maintenance
3 year net cost/year: $20,000
4 year net cost/year: $18,750
It still seems like a small advantage to the old truck (assuming you do take the time to find a reasonable ~$15,000 one like Blair and I have done -- I think he actually paid $12k?). The glider would have to have an additional 2 weeks uptime per year to make it worthwhile (from a cost perspective).
So for this year a new glider probably would have been better, but next year? and the year after? Time will tell...
I wouldn't mind buying a glider to hold for 10+ years, but the "good deal" gliders aren't spec'd anything like what I'd want. For example, the typical Fitzgerald Columbia comes with no side skirts, leaf spring suspension, sub-optimal rear end ratios (from a mpg perspective), high RR tires, etc. By the time you custom order one to your liking, you're looking at $150K after all is said and done.
Take that same $30,000 and put it into modifications on a $15K truck and you'll be at 10+mpg on flat terrain at modest speeds...Last edited: Jun 14, 2015
csmith1281, spectacle13, Grijon and 4 others Thank this. -
Updated load data:
blairandgretchen and scottied67 Thank this. -
-
Trucking Jobs in 30 seconds
Every month 400 people find a job with the help of TruckersReport.
Page 82 of 198