DH220LC-7 vs PC240LC vs EC290: Which Mid-Size Excavator Has the Most Tamper-Proof ECU?

The seller who was a freight consolidator in a half-frozen yard near Riga swears by his mother’s grave that the machine read 1,247 hours. Single owner leaseback with a Finnish contractor.

Once a dealer replaces an ECU, they will record the old hour reading in at least three locations—on the work order, parts invoice and on a tamper evident sticker they slap on the replacement ECU. This machine was lacking in all that.

With their ability to cross borders easily, they’ve also been the most sought-after victims for odometer fraud – unlike smaller machines.

If a $400 bluetooth OBD thingy that is made for freight yard mechanics can do it in 20 minutes, that’s a problem. If a factory level diagnostic tool, a security seed-key algorithm and physical access to a soldered EEPROM chip is required, that’s a much higher bar.

In all honesty, for all the pre-2016 DH220LC-7s, the security of the ECU was developed at a time when “password protection” consisted of a four-digit PIN code which a lot of the techs in Korea knew by heart.

This diagnostic port on these machines (green six pin connector behind the access panel on the left) is like saying, “Come on by. No challenge-response authentication. No encrypted handshake. A CANbus adaptor is installed, a software package written by another member of the grey market community since 2018 is launched and you can see the instrument cluster memory, raw read and write. I can only say that I was in a hotel room in Gdańsk, and took 11 minutes to write a new time into the hour counter of the DH220LC-7 from 9,200 hours to 890 hours.

Over the past 18 months I’ve checked three DH220LC-7s that had less than 2000 hours on the dial, but over 100,000 hours on the injection shot counter. One of them on display in a Dubai auction with fuel pump controller displaying 1.83 million injection events is from 2015. The dash said 1,650.

I was able to feel that same heat-checking under that same machine when checking the track rollers: those little cracks on the surface caused by prolonged exposure under high temperature. This one was located in Lebanon where the ambient temps were normal.

I know this because 2 days ago I was in Komatsu, at Chattanooga assembly doing a factory tour, one of the production engineers said to me pointblank:“Everything that was produced since July 2016 has KOMTRAX Gen 4 hard wired into the boot sequence of the ECU; it’s a factory thing, there’s no option.”

Suppose someone attempts to alter the hour meter, then the telematics log on the Komatsu side will show a discontinuity (a time where the reported hour moved backwards or forwards that is not consistent with fuel burn reporting, GPS movement data or hydraulic pressure cycle data).

PC240LC-10 made from 2013 to mid-2016 has the highest level of fraud of any 24-ton excavator. The machine wasn’t without all the wiring and mounting brackets, but the actual telematics module never did live.

On Gen 10 machines without live telematics, the ECU maintains a local log of fuel burn vs the engine hours with an index. It’s a problem if you find a machine that shows 3200 hours but the log of the fuel used reveals that 18 000 litres were used. A PC240LC will consume approximately 14 to 16 litres an hour (at normal digging duty). That’s closer to 8,000.

If the power-on event counter gives me 14,000 starts, and my dash gives me 2,200 hours, there must be something wrong with it. A digger won’t be used like that 6 times an hour unless it is being used as a Mobile Generator–which still wouldn’t be the same amount of fuel consumption.

The real low hour Komatsu seats have a particular vinyl feel. Just slightly tacky to the touch, and if you run your thumb over the bolster its slight factory mold is also palpable and creates a slight grid pattern to the touch. The texture level becomes smooth after approx 4,000 hours operation while being slid in and out by the operator. I have been called off”1,800-hour”machines with vinyl sewn into their seat that was akin to having a leather couch in the office. That’s 8,000.

CareTrack is more than a telematics box that attaches to the frame. It is embedded in the logic controller in the fuel system such that there is a physical checksum.

Clearly the only way to well reset that log is to desolder the chip and swap it out for a blank one and then to re-flash the firmware. That will take about forty minutes to do, if you know what you’re doing, with the use of a hot-air rework station and a steady hand.

If the seed is not found to match the fuel pump controller outputs a fault code, and the engine is derated to 40%. The machine can be started, but can’t be used to dig.

All of the data from Volvo’s cloud backend gets correlated with fuel burn to GPS movement, hydraulic cycle counts and the loading of the engine. If an 8000 hour machine is falsified into a 2000 hour machine then CareTrack will display 28,000 litres of diesel burn. If a buyer has access to the CareTrack portal, he can get that data in 90 seconds.

Data sources for the table above:https://www.heavyequipmentforums.com/threads/volvo-ec210cl-ecu%E2%80%99s-and-welding.99432/

Each aluminum fin is oxidized with age but after about 5,000 hours of life, the fins begin to get a drab, brownish tarnish. One of the fins, with my bare hand, I touched its texture was rough, almost chalky. That’s 7,000, minimum. So, I opened up the CareTrack log on my phone in the yard and yep, 7,340 hours, and detailed logs of full fuel and GPS usage back to the machine being delivered in 2019.

The control grips are made from a fairly unique elastomer compound and have this very peculiar behavior: the first 3,000 hours are super-smooth, but then all of a sudden they get rather sticky—you can’t tell because they’re so dry but it’s as sticky as a thin film of oil on the surface, even when it’s completely dry and pristine. I’m skeptical if a”low-hour”EC290 comes with that sticky smooth feeling on the grips. That’s a wear pattern that can only be achieved by someone who has been holding onto those sticks thousands of hours.