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Unless you own a tractor or have some strange attraction to greasy, hydraulic leaking equipment you may not know what a BobCat is. A BobCat is a type of tractor, well for me a manure-hauling tractor. They are stout machines, built more for taking a beating than for comfort or pulling your kids around on a hay wagon for Halloween. They are also designed to be rather stable, but I soon learned that on my particular model stability was still a work in progress in 1980.

“Manure-hauling tractor?” you say. Well you see, I have the great fortune of owning three horses and the pleasure of having a nice home and barn on several acres right up against the National Forest here in beautiful New Mexico. I've learned several things about horses through the years. For one, rather than feed them hay you might as well feed them money. And all that money has to be processed into manure, and then if you stack up that wonderful byproduct and let it bake for a while, you can make some high-cost, but not highly-prized, fertilizer. You would be amazed at how much “byproduct” can be produced in the course of a month, causing the need for a tractor to stack the stuff and move it around to help Mother Nature do its composting work. To give you an idea of how much “stuff” there is, our horses will go through 50 pounds or so of hay in the a day or two, and as far as I can tell they are only one percent efficient in processing “stuff.” You can do the math (I hope) of what 30 days of the process stuff amounts to. If you need horse manure fertilizer, PLEASE let me know.

So my tale begins a few years ago when we bought this 1980 vintage BobCat, supposedly with a rebuilt engine, perfectly sized for the job at a cost of a few thousand bucks. The bailing wire used to create linkages where parts had long ago had rusted off, did not deter me. Ah yes, my BobCat is, or should I say was, a trusty old machine once you learned how to deal with its many quirks. But near tragedy struck in the spring of 2008, when I decided to relieve my BobCat of its normal manure moving duty and foolishly thought dirt -moving work was what it needed to break up the routine. On my very last load of dirt moving, I managed to tip the BobCat on its head (see Figure 1). At that moment, the value of my BobCat was probably negative, but I evoked my many years of lessons learned in engineering school and used the great secrets of the Egyptian pyramids (think fulcrum and jacks) to right my trusty workhorse. The value of my BobCat was restored, or at least I thought so, until just a few weeks later my spark plug decided to eject itself out of the engine head. So the BobCat laid in the yard, sparkplug-less, and I learned that there are no repair people that can come to our place for 20 miles around.

I was not deterred. Surely the son of a helicopter mechanic and machinist can fix a simple single-cylinder, 16 horsepower engine. A retread repair of the “head” actually seemed to work and I confidently put the sparkplug back in its rightful place, cranked the engine and, well, nothing but “putt, putt, putt.” So I continued my journey, replacing the point (a “point” in the engine world is the mechanism for timing the firing of a sparkplug) which had rusted while the BobCat sat for moths in what I thought would be its burial place. I replaced the point, turned the crank … still nothing. Then a neighbor suggested siphoning off and replacing the gas, because it might have gotten “stale” while sitting there. I gained a new appreciation of how much volume three gallons of gas represents as I sat there draining the tank into liter bottles. That solution, unfortunately, didn't work either. Next step was the carburetor … the gas sitting in there probably gunked it up. I cleaned the carburetor, still the engine wouldn't work. So I order a new carburetor, installed it, and the same result—nothing.

So finally, our hay supplier made a delivery in November, and I asked him if he could take a look at the tractor. He graciously said yes. I turned the crank and he said “no compression”—two words you don't want to hear when diagnosing an engine. Before I knew it, we had the engine ripped apart and discovered an exhaust valve was bent and not closing. It likely was damage during the great sparkplug launching event. So I ordered a valve and after a lot of primordial grunting and some well-chosen words (if you saw how to install this thing you would empathize), I somehow managed to install the valve with my beautiful and talented assistant (my wife). I put the engine back together and turned the crank … and there were a few hopeful “puffs.” So I played around with the carburetor adjustments and, it was hard to believe, the engine turned over. Life was good. I had a flat tire, which was irreparable since it had just about rotted in place, so that had to be replaced as well, but my BobCat is now alive and well. Oh yeah, earlier in 2008 I had to replace the starter and now I'm thinking of investing in a new muffler since an old sock would probably work better as a muffler than the 29-year old rust bucket muffler I have on the engine now.

Now suppose that some kind person is actually interested in buying my BobCat now that it is purring like a kitten and we need to agree to a price. As you might imagine there aren't many 1980 vintage BobCats for sale, so doing a market comparison (“comp”) is really not a great way to value such a beautiful machine. In the utility industry we have a similar challenge. Because utility assets are rarely sold, we need to use other techniques to value the assets. The analysis normally begins by using three different techniques. The techniques used are these rather sophisticated sounding terms like Original Cost Less Depreciation (OCLD), Reproduction Cost Less Depreciation (RCLD), and Replacement Cost Less Depreciation (RCNLD). In my next IssueAlert article on February 2, 2009, I will step you through the key points of these valuation techniques as we try to put a value on my BobCat.

In the meantime, if anyone has an interest on bidding to buy my BobCat, perhaps as a museum piece, please let me know and we can try to establish a market “comp” value for the tractor.