[sorner]

As a seller it is only right to tell everything you know about the item being sold to the potential buyer.

As a buyer, you have to take what a seller says with a grain of salt, it should be pretty easy to tell if someone is sincere or looking to offload a piece of crap.

When dealing with older equipment like these older tractors, the seller could be honest and sincere, and then a month or two down the road something happens to it... this is to be expected in my opinion with used equipment, and not a con job.

Personally, I am as honest a seller as they come, if someone buys something from me and then they have a problem with it, I can guarantee it was something I didn't know about. For example... I once sold a Kawasaki KZ305 motorcycle that I rode to work in the summers in nice weather, and put a lot of work into over the years. Then two days later I receive an email from the buyer telling me that the clutch stopped working and it left him sit. I got his address and went to his house the next day to look at it with him, and found that the clutch cable broke inside the housing. I helped him locate the replacement part and replace it, and he was happy.

I sold a Dodge Grand Caravan very cheap last summer that had rusted out rocker panels to a kid who was down and out and needed something to get him to work for a couple months, through connections his boss is good friends with my father in law. I told him everything up front, and that he only had a few months on it because inspection was due in January, and it would not pass due to rust. Three months later I get a call from my father in law telling me he blew the engine because there was no oil in the engine. He drove it for three days with the engine knocking and his boss said it doesn't sound right, so he checked the oil and saw it wasn't even on the stick. They put 4 quarts in it to get it back to full, and on the way home that very day the engine failed and now the van is in a junk yard somewhere. That van never leaked a drop of oil for me, and I had it for 6 years and changed the oil regularly. I know where he lived and where he worked, and he worked 5 days a week. I figured out by simple math how far he would have probably driven in that time just to and from work, and it would have been about 7000 miles. No way I could have been in any way responsible for that.

So, S@#$ happens sometimes. I have a conscience, and I think most people do... but there is always one person out there to ruin trust for everyone. I've been on both sides, if I buy something privately used and it has more issues than were disclosed, I feel like that is something I should have seen and missed, so it's on me to fix or deal with.