Buying a digger in from china?

No way even with import duties it would be a lot cheaper to buy from China. But spares are an obvious issue and you can hardly get them to pick it up to sort out a warranty issue :-)

It will be grand till the war kicks off. At that point it will start playing communist music, Jinping's mug will appear on the display and it will roll out the gate before embarking on a spree of destruction all by itself till the fuel runs out

Yep - received last week my latest order of filters and a spare set of keys. Over the course of two years or so, my Ali supplers have been a heck of a lot more reliable than AutoDoc or any of the other European suppliers I've been using for the equivalent spares for the car or camper.

I recently saw a Chinese Hitachi knockoff 6 tonne or so.

DidDidn't think such a thing existed but comparing even photos, the Chinese machines undercarriage appear to be so slender compared to genuine. Pure muck I'd imagine.

I've no idea whether the micro diggers would be any good. Some advertise kubota engine but that's possibly a copy of a kubota engine.

What size is it? @dzer2

Well you may ware.

Depending on the use you have, perhaps buy a second hand machine currently in the country, with a branding the is easy to repair.

Janey … so much hate !

I've said it before, and will say it again because it's true: my cheap Chinese (mini) digger was and still is worth every penny I didn't spend on renting any well-known brand for just a couple of weeks.

Easy to operate, easy to service, easy to enhance with my own choice of after-market modifications (some of which I see have started to appear as standard on the more recent factory models). One of the best "tools and equipment" purchases I've made in the last twenty years.

Nope, Risk Neutral at worst. I did the sums, I made contact with the supplier, I asked for further information about various features, I scoured YouTube for other people's experience (wasn't much at the time, now there are a lot more), and when I was satisfied that there was minimal risk, I hit the "buy now" button.

At the time, I wasn't even thinking about buying one. I was checking rental prices and trying to work out what jobs I could line up for what period of time to make best use of a rented machine. Presumably on account of those searches, an ad appeared (badly configured work PC … ) suggesting I could buy one outright for the price of a fortnight's rental. Not too good to be true, as it turned out.

Throughout the whole process, the only (very slight) hiccup was at the French end, where the handling agent charged me for a truck with loading platform, then said they couldn't use their pallet lifter because of the shape of the crate and I'd have to organise unloading myself … but didn't refund me what they'd charged.

The machine is/has been so reliable that the only reason I've had to contact the supplier again was to get clarification on the threads used on some of the hydraulic fittings when I wanted to upgrade them and wasn't sure I was interpreting the Chinese labels correctly. Human response within 24 hours giving me the details.

Wrong. We bought a 1 tonne brand new kubota in 2020 with side arm controls for digging graves.

What brand of digger did you get was it 1 ton and any issues sourcing spares