New Equipment has Arrived

All of the discussions, research, analyzing, negotiating, and communication for the new equipment came to fruition last week as our equipment package was delivered.

Thank you to the membership approval for replacement of our main key 20 peices of equipment.  We ended up selecting majority John Deere equipment with a few peices of Toro.  All together we have 68 peices of equipment at the maintnance facility, and we replaced 20 of the 68.  So it wasn't the majority of our fleet, but it was the main equipment that we use on a daily basis like our fairway mowers, rough mowers, greens, tee, and approach mowers, utility vehicles, heavy duty vehicles, sprayer, and our transporting maintenance carts.  We are excited to see the conditioning of the golf course that we can deliver with this new equipment.

It was a matter of our aging fleet truly catching up on us with repair and maintenance costs and extended beyond the life expectancy of the equipment.  I converted the hours on each peice over to miles on a car and our rough mower had 535,000 miles on it, our greens mowers had 485,000 and 465,000 miles on them, and the utility vehicles where in the range of 384,000 - 554,000 miles.  Life expectancy on most golf course equipment is 200,000 - 300,000 miles, due to the harsh environment they operate in (constant wet grass), operating full throttle under a constant work load, and hauling or towing the majority of the time.  We had 4 peices of equipment that had serious breakdowns at the end of the season last year, and the repair cost on those items were greater than the cost of a new peice of equipment.  We can feel good that our mechanical service over the years allowed us to get beyond life expectancy out of our old equipment, as several of the peices leaving here had to be loaded onto the trailer with a tractor and chain.

Just like your own vehicles, farm equipment, or any tools you buy, it is amazing on the engineering improvements this new equipment has undergone, but also the price tag that is associated with it.  Our new rough mower was $72,500, the fairway mowers are $54,000 a peice, greens mowers are $32,000, and a utility cart is $7,500.  We did select all demo units that were 2012 models, and have a range from 2-80 hours on them.  This helped considerably in the bottom line.

 

We are now completly going through cleaning and organizing the facility, creating parking spots for each peice, and setting up our management plan and maintenance schedule for the new fleet.

An exciting week at LGCC.