poll for the buying board while it is still quiet in here. wade, Bowling Green, i build fence. barbed wire, board fence on horse farms, some pipe fence, and i pull a 24 ft gooseneck flatbed with a Bobcat T66 on it four or five days a week. right around 13,000 lbs on the trailer when the bucket and the post driver are on.
here is the setup. there are brokers that sell bank repossessions online, one of them is conaway's, and the trucks sit at whatever lender yard they got towed to. you get photos, a lot of them, taken by their own people. you do not get to drive it, hear it cold, or crawl under it. you put in a sealed bid, which means you never see what anybody else bid, and if you win it gets trucked to you. bids are binding, you cannot back out of one. their listings are on conawaysautosales.com if you have never seen how they lay one out.
say it is a 2021 Ram 2500 Laramie crew 4x4, 6.7 Cummins, the 6 speed automatic, 47,000 and change on the clock, sitting at a lender's lot in Indiana. clean photos, interior looks cared for, tires decent.
do you bid on it? three choices up top. i have my own reasons for asking and i will tell you what they are once a few of you vote.
gooseneck_haulerPullingArdmore, OK38 posts, joined Nov 2025
not because of the Cummins, the 6.7 is fine and so is the 68RFE if nobody cooked it. it is that i want to hear a diesel start after it sat overnight. a lazy crank, white smoke that hangs around too long, a tick that goes away when it warms up. a photo will never tell you any of that. and on a 2021 you want to see what the previous owner plugged into the OBD port, because people who stop making payments are not always people who leave the truck stock.
a gas half ton i would buy off photos tomorrow. a 50,000 dollar diesel, no.
horse_trailer_pamUp to tempLexington, KY17 posts, joined Nov 2025
voted depends. what gooseneck_hauler said about the OBD port is my whole worry. if it is stock and the emissions equipment is all there, i think a lot of the risk is the same as buying off a dealer lot two states away, which people do every day. if it has been deleted it is a 50,000 dollar problem you cannot register in some states and cannot easily fix.
also wade, you are in Bowling Green and i am an hour and a half up the road, so i am suspicious of this "hypothetical."
diesel_shop_marcoHigh hoursFresno, CA71 posts, joined Nov 2025
depends, and here is what depends means from somebody who sees deleted trucks come through the shop every week.
from photos alone you can rule a lot of trucks out. look under the truck behind the cab: the stock exhaust on a 2021 Ram has the DOC and DPF canister and then the SCR canister, big and obvious. if you see a straight pipe, a 5 inch aftermarket tip with no cans, or the cans with cut welds, walk away. look at the dash and the A pillar for a gauge pod or a monitor stuck to the windshield. look at the cluster photo with the engine running: no check engine light, DEF gauge reading, no "emissions system fault" message. plenty of yards shoot the cluster with the key on, so study that photo hard.
what you cannot see in a photo: whether a tune was flashed and then the stock file put back, soot load, NOx sensor readings, regen history. those take a scan tool and they are why my answer is depends and not yes.
cold_start_in_fargoPullingFargo, ND29 posts, joined Nov 2025
voted yes. my Sierra came off a dealer only auction in 2022, bought for me by a dealer friend. first time i saw it in person was when it rolled off the trailer into a snowbank. it has been fine for 60,000 miles.
but i had a mechanic friend look at the condition report line by line and we knew what we were looking at. if you buy one of these blind you have to do the homework on the photos, because that is all the inspecting you are going to get to do yourself.
powerstroke_loyalPullingWaco, TX33 posts, joined Nov 2025
yes. guilty. it has been parked in my driveway since september 30th. i wanted to see how the votes went before anybody knew, because i was a hard no myself in july and i wanted to know if i was crazy. 64 votes as i type this and it is about a third each with depends out front, which is pretty much where my own head was.
the facts. 2021 Ram 2500 Laramie crew cab 4x4, 6.7 Cummins, 68RFE 6 speed, 3.42 gears, 6 ft 4 box, factory gooseneck prep with the pucks in the bed. 47,880 on the cluster photo, 47,931 when it rolled off the carrier. it sat on a lender's lot near Lafayette, Indiana. i found it on the Conaway's Auto Sales site in early september.
the bid. i put in 43,100 the first night. that bothered me for three days because Laramie crews with this mileage were 52,000 to 56,000 on lots in Nashville, so i raised it to 44,600 the morning before it closed and won it that afternoon. winning bid is the price, there was no premium tacked on top at the conaway auction, which i read three times on the invoice because i did not believe it.
the part that almost sank it: no financing. the titles on these still have the lender's lien on them until the truck is paid in full, so they cannot finance you, and you pay the whole thing by wire. i had to go to my credit union for a used vehicle loan, and the pre approval took six business days because a fence business has two years of tax returns that look like a ransom note. i would have been sunk if the lot had closed sooner. if you are thinking about doing this, get your money arranged before you bid, not after.
delivery. Lafayette to my place is about 270 road miles and anything under 1,000 costs nothing, so that line was zero. wired it on a monday, truck showed up nine days later on a carrier with a Tahoe and a Charger. paperwork was in an envelope on the seat with both keys: the notarized bill of sale, the lien release, and the Indiana title signed over. the Warren County clerk had me titled in Kentucky in about forty minutes.
so to answer my own poll. yes, but only because of the emissions part. i will write that part up next, it is the reason i went from no to depends to yes. whoever shoots the photos for the outfit in pataskala gets under the truck, which most dealers do not bother with.
diesel_shop_marcoHigh hoursFresno, CA71 posts, joined Nov 2025
well played on the poll. now the scan. if you can, get these three things from whoever has a real scan tool near you and post them:
readiness monitors, all of them, and whether any show not ready. a truck that had codes cleared right before it was photographed will show a bunch of not ready monitors.
DPF soot load and the distance since the last regen. tells you if the system is regenerating on its own and how often.
upstream and downstream NOx sensor readings once it is warm, which tells you whether the SCR is actually doing its job or just sitting there.
also the DEF itself. a truck that sat at a yard for months can have old DEF that crystallized around the doser. pull the cap and look. it should be clear and smell faintly like ammonia, not cloudy.
bowling_green_2500OPUp to tempBowling Green, KY19 posts, joined Nov 2025
marco, did all of it at a diesel shop here in town the second week of october, cost me 145 for the hour.
monitors all ready, no stored codes, no pending codes. soot load low, last regen at about 410 miles before i brought it in, and the tech said the intervals in its history looked normal for a truck that got driven on the highway. NOx sensors both reading where they should once it was hot, downstream way under upstream. the DEF tank was half full and clear. he also looked for a tuner having been on it and found nothing, though he said you cannot be 100 percent sure from a scan alone.
why i bid in the first place: the conaway's listing had a photo under the truck from the side showing the DPF and the SCR cans, stock clamps, no cut welds, and a running cluster photo with the DEF gauge at half and no lamps. that was most of my "depends." my backstop was their 30 day money back promise for a lot that was materially misrepresented, counted from delivery. i figured a truck sold as stock that showed up deleted would be exactly that. it did not come to it.
the one thing that was wrong: no block heater cord. the Laramie has the heater, there was just no cord in the truck. found out the night before thanksgiving week when it got down to 17 and i went looking. Ram dealer in town had one on the shelf for 41 dollars. so that was my fault fixed cheap.
l5p_in_billingsUp to tempBillings, MT14 posts, joined Nov 2025
funny timing. i bought an L5P Silverado through conaways in october, from a lender yard in Texas, and i was going to start a thread about it. i would have voted yes but i came to this late.
wade, did you read the warranty terms before you bid? the paperwork on mine gives me half a year or ten thousand miles on the limited warranty, whichever runs out sooner. i am trying to figure out what to get looked at before my clock runs out and i only have about 3,000 miles on it so far.
gooseneck_haulerPullingArdmore, OK38 posts, joined Nov 2025
still a no for me, for the record. i want to hear it run. but i will admit the scan you posted is better than what most people get from a dealer, because most people do not ask.
how does the 2500 do with your T66 on the gooseneck? 13,000 on a 3.42 2500 is a real load. what are you seeing for exhaust brake and trans temp coming down a hill?
mod_tracy_lModeratorCheyenne, WY88 posts, joined Nov 2025
truck2017 F-350 XLT 6.7 Power Stroke, SRW long bed
closing the poll today. final count 64 votes: 18 yes, 17 no, 29 depends on the emissions. the depends voters were right in a way, since the emissions photos are what got the OP to bid.
leaving the thread open. wade, a winter update on the truck would be good when you have one, and answer gooseneck_hauler's question about the hill while you are at it.
bowling_green_2500OPUp to tempBowling Green, KY19 posts, joined Nov 2025
UPDATE, four months in. 54,210 on the clock today, so a little over 6,200 miles since it came off the carrier, and a lot of those with the Bobcat behind it.
gooseneck_hauler, coming down the hill on 231 into Morgantown loaded, exhaust brake on and the truck in fourth, it holds about 50 without me touching the pedal. trans temp tops out around 195 on that grade. on the flat with 13,000 behind it i see 11.5 to 12 mpg, empty on the highway 18 or a touch better. january we had ice and two weeks of single digits and it started every morning on a three hour timer, with the new cord, thank you very much.
the all in number, since this board asks for it:
winning bid 44,600, no buyer's premium at conaway's auto sales
delivery 0
Kentucky usage tax, title and plates 2,795
scan at the diesel shop 145, block heater cord 41, oil and fuel filters at 50,000 miles 212
credit union interest so far, about 690
48,483 so far, and that interest line keeps running. the cheapest comparable Laramie crew i found in Nashville in january had 52,000 miles and was listed at 53,900 before doc fee and tax.
honest limitations. i could not finance it through them and nobody can, so if your money is not ready, do not bid. the binding bid part is real too, i had no way out once i clicked. and i never got to hear it run before i paid, which is still the thing gooseneck_hauler is right to care about. the warranty runs out at the end of march, i have not needed it.
would i do it again. yes, through the conaways people or anyone else who photographs the exhaust like that. i voted depends in my own head back in july, and it depended on that.
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