Buying a truck

Which cat engine?

do a dyno, blowby and ecm dump, have a mechanic check it out.

 

What?

Parseing as best i can. Twin turbo means an Acert most likely. Those engines are....alright but are know to have issues. They can be reliable but with basically a million on the clock and no history id assume its going to need a rebuild right off the line or in short order likely a lot of that truck is badly worn tbh..... So 10k to buy it + around lets call it a worst case rebuild.... call it about 60k. So 70k all in if someone who knows what they are doing does it. 30ish if you do it yourself.

Acerts can be reliable if maintained right but a lot of people hate them because compared to the 3406E and early C15s they are junk. Still better then a DEF truck but not as reliable as old iron. They also have parts that are pricy as hell to fix and the EGR system on them is an absolute peice of crap.

As for wanting a sleeper. You can add them but unless you do 100% of the work its can cost a fortune. You may need to extend the frame. Put a new cab on or modify the existing cab. Add all the straping airbags levelers and such. And a rush job is going to cost even more.

By the time you rebuild it, put a sleeper on it and get it road ready id assume your going to be out 100k+. Id just buy a new or lightly used rig. Hell you can go find a 400-500K emissions truck. Drop 10ish K to have the whole emissions system cleaned serviced and rebuilt and have a far better lower mile truck for around 70k.

If you meant you need it now....dont do it. That 10k truck is likely going to be on a hook within a thousand miles.

 

Well, lot of miles, but the salvation there is most issues have probably been addressed, at least once. $10gs is peanuts today for a tractor that operates at all. I've always liked IH, electrical gremlins will drive you nuts, but all trucks with that mileage do so, except maybe KW. I say it's a great idea without going too far in hock, good luck. Caution be advised, however, as someone here has an older FL that they are pouring good money after bad, trying to remedy a bad vibration. Please, DON'T do that. If it runs out okay, use it, but any major repairs should be given a lot of thought. A more common sense approach, would be trade the daycab for one decent ( KW) sleeper truck. Life is just a lot simpler that way.

 

I'm of a different mindset than most. It's a $10k truck with at least a million miles. It's going to be far from perfect and I would be buying it with the assumption it will need $40k-$50k dumped into it the first year.

$10k trucks are FAR from being turn key and go to work. Many are pretty well thundered at that point.

 

When you are looking at $10,000 trucks, at least look for a truck that has the least expensive engine to rebuild.

That one is like mortgaging a house to rebuild it.

The rule of thumb when you buy a used truck is this.

If you buy something with reasonable miles it looks like it's in good shape, figure a good 10 to 15,000 before you turn the key, or possibly shortly thereafter.

Could be double that.

Buying an unknown truck with unknown Miles when it's like a million miles with no history...

That is a gambler's game of rolling the dice.

You might get lucky and it may run you long enough to make money to buy something better.

Then again you may just try to go to work and kaboom! you better break out your checkbook. And then it'll happen again and again and again and again.

You know I've been looking to buy a truck, and I have encountered all kinds of people that buy trucks and run them and do absolutely nothing to them except change oil and they sell them.

If someone had a truck for 4 years and he did nothing to it, and the person before him had the truck for 6 years and did nothing to it, do you think there's any possibility whatsoever that if you purchase a truck like that it would just keep going and going?

In that case, all of those years of neglect that they suck the life out of the truck, if you buy a truck like that you have to repair all of that and pay for all of that that they did not do.

And then some.

Never forget that when most repairs are not done, that creates a worse repair or larger repair later.

If you are a really really really really really experienced mechanic with an extremely sharp eye you may find a diamond in the rough somewhere that requires quite a bit of elbow grease, but even at that, it's still a gamble.

 

What’s it got for trans and rears? Because all your doing is buying a rolling set of cores