What's your "sold it but still here" story?

I had an old Hopto Backhoe that had been sitting in a barn for 10 years and had not run.  I put a fresh battery on it, it started right up.  I sold it to a guy on Craigslist who came and gave me an deposit, and took some extra buckets and a clam bucket that I had for it.  After a year of trying to call and email him, and even sending him a letter in the mail, he never returned anything about picking up the backhoe.  By this time, the backhoe had been sitting over the winter outside, and when I went to start it up in the spring, the starter was shot.  Instead of trying to fix it, I just sold it as is because I just wanted to get rid of the thing.  So I sold it to a guy who drove 100 miles for it, and when he got to my place the motor broken on his winch.  After several hours of trying various things, we ended up hooking up the hydraulics from my front end loader to his winch and using the controls on my tractor to move it.  It was an awful lot of work to sell a dumb backhoe.

I had an old IH disk of grandad's that I sold at a neighbor's farm auction and the guy never picked it up.  Neighbor wanted it gone so I towed it back home and called the buyer and told him to come pick it up at my place. He never did, so  after a couple of years I finally sold it to someone else.

I am using several grain bins on a rented farm that were sold at a farm auction back in 1986 and never got moved. 

We have an old 1970s Cat D8 dozer that someone else sold and never got picked up.  We had a guy doing some work cleaning up around the edges of some fields on the farm with it years ago and he got sick and never came back to finish the job, then he died.  His son sold it to some guy from out of state and he was supposed to come pick it up from our farm.  The buyer called me several times and said he was coming to get it but he never showed up.  I called him several times and left messages to see when he was coming to pick the thing up but he never returned my calls. I finally called the guy who had sold it and asked him what I should do with the dozer and he said "I don't give a damn what you do with it I already got paid."

That was 15 years ago and I have gotten a lot of use out of that dozer! 


Edited by VAfarmboy - 22 Apr 2016 at 11:25pm

The only one I've ever done on this subject I was on the buying end;

Years ago I was looking for tires for my truck. I drove by a place locally that had (2) full sets out front for sale, (4) of one size I needed, (4) that weren't.

I knocked on the door and asked if they'd split them up. The lady said no, but if I wanted all (8) of them I could take them for $50.00. Obviously I said I'd take them but I looked a bit happily confused so she explained; she was moving literally in an hour and needed the tires gone. A guy had stopped a few days earlier and said he'd take them. She explained they needed to be gone that day. He was good with that, paid her all but $50.00 and said he'd be right back. 2 days later, the guy was nowhere to be seen and she was leaving. I paid the $50.00, used the ones I needed, sold the other set at a nice discount and everyone was happy. Well...I'm thinking the first guy wasn't too happy.

I've always wondered if he was trying to wait her out and cheat her out of the last $50.00. If that was the case his plan backfired.

Not my story but my brother. He helped a navy friend pay a debt off for a deal gone bad before he left ship to go home during Vietnam. They guy gave him a Gretch electric guitar, the guy never paid my brother back before going home. My brother kept the guitar, and looked him up 30 years later on his ships web page. Contacted him, and the guy paid the cash owed, and received the guitar back. No 30 years of intrest, just money owed, my brother probably lost money on shipping.