Excavators

From a mini that fits through a gate to a 320 that travels on a lowboy:

size is the first split, and it decides how the machine reaches the job as much as what it digs. Mini excavators run on rubber tracks that spare a paved drive, and many have zero tail swing, so the back stays inside the tracks when they turn beside a wall. They open trenches for water and drainage and dig footings on narrow town lots. The cheapest Chinese minis are worth what their engine is worth, so read the engine plate, not the brochure. The mid-size crawlers Guatemalan crews call a 320, whether a Cat 320, a Komatsu PC200 or a Case CX210, run on steel tracks, load trucks, cut back road banks and dig silt out of rivers and dams, and they move between jobs on a lowboy. A backhoe loader such as a Cat 416, Case 580 or JCB 3CX is the opposite trade-off: it digs less deep, but it drives itself to the next village and carries a front bucket for pushing a landslide off the road. For light trenching, a three-point backhoe on one of the tractors or a skid steer with a digging arm costs far less.

Matching an excavator to the work it does most weeks:

the biggest job it might one day get is the wrong yardstick. Each step up in weight class buys reach, depth and bigger trucks to load, and charges for it in a heavier lowboy and more diesel every hour. If the machine will break boulders out of a landslide or demolish concrete, it needs an auxiliary hydraulic line, because without one a hammer cannot be fitted. On a backhoe, four-wheel drive earns its keep on wet road shoulders, and an extendable stick reaches depth a fixed one never will.

Where a used excavator hides its repair bill:

mostly underneath, where a quick look misses it. A backhoe around ten years old with a few thousand hours still asks in the region of Q450,000, while a 20-tonne crawler that has barely worked passes a million quetzales, so an older 320 offered for far less is usually cheap because of its undercarriage. Track chains, rollers, idlers and sprockets are among the dearest wear parts on a crawler, and a worn set swallows most of the saving. Look for sprocket teeth worn into hooks, slack track, rollers weeping oil and oil around the final drives. Swing the upper and rock the bucket against the ground: any movement you can see at the swing bearing is too much. Check the boom foot and the boom-to-stick joint for cracks, and for weld beads under fresh paint. Time a few full cycles once the oil is hot, because a pump that slows when warm is tired. Set the hour meter against the pedal rubber, the play in the pins and the bucket teeth. A freshly painted 320 at a suspiciously low price is often an old machine rebuilt, so the serial plate should match the model and year, and the invoice and papers that go with it should come too. Teeth, pins and bushings sit under industrial parts.

An excavator listing that shows the machine digging:

answers what a buyer would otherwise cross the country to ask. Photograph the serial plate, the hour meter, both sides of the undercarriage with the sprockets close up, and the boom foot. Film a cold start, a full swing each way, straight-line travel and a few buckets of real soil. Name the buckets, hammer or thumb that go with it, and say whether a lowboy can get to where it is parked. A contractor coming from Huehuetenango for a backhoe will want to dig a trench with it before talking money, and a pump only shows what it has left with the oil hot and the bucket in the ground, so park it on soil, not on a concrete yard.