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Posted by David Sherman [24.32.202.83] on Sunday, September 06, 2009 at 23:43:16 :
In Reply to: Re: What is the best non-Ebay way to buy a PW from afar? posted by Kevin in Ohio [67.150.54.124] on Sunday, September 06, 2009 at 19:14:29 :
If the amount of money you're spending is enough that you wouldn't like to lose it, you pretty much have to go look at it in person. You can use friends, photos, and good questions to weed out the ones that aren't worth looking at, but at this point I wouldn't pay money to someone I didn't know for any vehicle, unless it was so cheap that it would be worth it even if it was a rust bucket, without looking at it in person first.
We bought the Mine Tour trolley for $50,000, sight unseen, based on some pretty pictures and the representations of a national trolley broker. It came from Lake Geneva New York, so naturally I didn't want to fly back there to look at it, but in hindsight it would have been a bargain to do that. The first clue when it got here was the duct tape holding down the low oil pressure override switch. I won't list all the problems, but suffice to say it kept me busy for many many days just untangling the electrical mess and fixing all the little things that needed fixing before we could use it. The biggest problem, though, was that it as a cosmetic rebuild of a completely rusted out city trolley from Syracuse. Virtually the entire body frame was 25% rust holes, but the rebuilders had scabbed new square tubing along most of the rusted out tubing to make a frame that more or less held together. Up close, there were rust bubbles under the paint in numerous places, and many spots that had been damaged and patched, none of which showed up in the pictures. The broker apologized all over and said the seller misrepresented it to him and that's the first one he ever had that was so bad. The seller basically told us to take a hike. For the same money, and a little more looking, we could have gotten a much better one if I'd gone to look at it in person, even if each look cost $1000 in travel expenses.
Granted, most PWs aren't $50,000, but if it's so cool that you can't find one for sale locally, and if you're willing to pay probably thousands to have it hauled home, then it's probably a rather expensive truck ($10,000 or more), which means in the overall scheme of things, it really is worth the price of a plane ticket and a rent-a-car to go look at it in person with cash in hand.
The most expensive thing to fix is the body, and rust and bondo underneath a fresh paint job never show up in photos. That's my opinion anyway.
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