I've been buying and renting construction equipment for 11 years, and I've made enough expensive mistakes to fill a checklist. My rough total is about $68,000 in wasted budget, most of it from choosing the wrong machine or the wrong attachment. This FAQ covers the questions I hear most: Liugong excavators, Liugong forklifts, breaker bars, straight-truck loading, and the classic backhoe vs excavator decision. I'll tell you what I'd do differently, not what the brochure says.
Liugong excavators are not the cheapest machines on the market, but they're also not the most expensive. I bought a 922E in 2017 because it cost about $14,000 less than a comparable competitor, and the local dealer could get parts in two days. That machine passed 3,400 hours last month and is still on daily duty. I bought a 925E in 2023 for heavier demolition work; it needed a track adjuster within the first 300 hours, but the warranty covered it.
I won't pretend every model is perfect. A 9018F mini excavator once sat in our shop for three weeks waiting on a hydraulic valve. The machine itself was fine; the supply chain was the problem. If you have a Liugong dealer nearby who keeps common parts in stock, that risk shrinks a lot.
One more surprise: the operator feedback. My most experienced operator was skeptical because he had run a major Japanese brand for years. After two weeks on the 922E, he admitted the controls were predictable and the cab was comfortable enough. That matters more than I expected, because a comfortable operator gets more work done in a day.
Before I owned either machine, I compared backhoe loaders and excavators as if they were two sizes of the same tool. They're not. A backhoe loader is a loader, a tractor, and a small excavator packed into one machine. An excavator is a specialist. It reaches further, digs smoother, and loads trucks faster.
In September 2022, I bought a Liugong backhoe loader because I had a commercial site with trenching, material handling, and truck loading all in one day. It seemed like the smart compromise. The trenching was slow, the reach felt short, and I ended up renting a 925E excavator for two weeks to finish the job. The rental was $3,600, which still makes me wince.
I still own that backhoe loader for small utility jobs and pallet work, but I stopped pretending it's an excavator replacement. Here's my rule: choose the backhoe loader if you need one machine that can do many jobs acceptably. Choose the excavator if your revenue depends on digging and loading.
Yes, a backhoe loader can load a straight truck, but the word 'load' hides a lot of frustration. A straight truck has a fixed box on a single frame, so it can't swing like a trailer or articulate like a dump truck. The driver has to get close to the work, and if the backhoe loader can't swing comfortably, you end up repositioning every few buckets.
In 2023, we loaded excavated clay into straight trucks on a tight residential street. The backhoe loader averaged about 18 minutes per truck. The excavator did it in about seven. With 11 trucks, that was almost two hours saved on one job. If you only load a truck once a week, the backhoe loader is fine. If it's part of your daily production, buy the excavator.
You don't need a forklift until you're moving pallets of pipe, bags of cement, or heavy attachments. Then it becomes the most valuable machine on site. Our tipping point came in 2020 when we kept borrowing a beat-up forklift from the yard next door. It worked, but it leaked oil and looked miserable. A client's project manager walked past and said, 'this says a lot about a contractor.' He wasn't trying to be rude; our equipment was telling him how careful we'd be with his project.
I rented a Liugong forklift for the next phase—I want to say it was a 2.5-ton diesel model, but I mix up model numbers. The difference was immediate. It loaded our trailers faster, didn't break down mid-shift, and changed how the client looked at us. If you only need one occasionally, rent it. If it will sit on site for more than two months, buy or lease a clean one. Visible quality is part of your brand.
One caveat: if you're working in a warehouse only, a cushion-tire forklift might be a better choice. On unpaved construction ground, get pneumatic tires.
A breaker bar is the steel carrier that holds a hydraulic breaker on your excavator arm. It takes repeated shocks, side loads, and vibration. In 2021, I bought an aftermarket breaker bar for a Liugong 9018F mini excavator because it was about $1,500 cheaper than the manufacturer-specified part. It bolted on fine at first. Two weeks later, the pin holes had worn loose, the breaker started moving around while I was working, and a weld cracked on the bracket.
Repair cost plus lost rental income: about $2,400. The original part would have cost roughly $1,300 more. I saved $1,500 and spent $2,400 to fix the result. That's the kind of math I try to avoid now.
Does that mean aftermarket parts are always bad? No. But for high-vibration attachments, the mounting geometry and steel quality matter more than the price tag. A cheap breaker bar can also overstress the boom pins and seals, which turns a $1,500 mistake into a $7,000 one. And if you rent a breaker, make sure the breaker bar is sized for the excavator's weight class. Oversized attachments on a mini excavator can damage the stick.
Dealer support is not a side note; it's the main event. In 2018, I bought a Liugong 856H wheel loader from a dealer three states away to save $7,000. The loader was fine. But when a rock dented the bucket cylinder, the remote dealer couldn't get the replacement part to my site for 12 days. My crew stood around, the client's schedule slipped, and I had to rent a loader from the local dealer—who happened to stock Liugong parts because they sold more machines.
Same brand. Same quality. Completely different experience. Now I search for a Liugong excavator dealer near me before I even look at the price tag. And I ask one question first: how fast can you get common wear parts? A $7,000 saving disappears the first time a part takes two weeks to arrive.
After the mistakes above, I run every machine and attachment through five questions:
That last question sounds superficial, but it's the one that has saved me the most money. A machine that looks broken tells the client you don't care. You don't need the most expensive equipment in the industry. You need equipment that looks and performs like you take your work seriously—and that's the standard I hold every Liugong purchase to.
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