I don't get paid to love machines. I get paid to know what they cost. I'm a procurement manager at an 85-person excavation contractor, and for the last six years I've tracked roughly $180,000 in equipment rentals, parts, and attachments in our cost system. No projections, no manufacturer math—just invoices.
The question I hear most often is the one we argued about for years: should we rent a drill rig or buy one? We looked at ABI drill rig packages, talked to two rental dealers, and ran quotes. Eventually we bought one. What settled the argument wasn't a preference for new iron. It was a cost-per-hour comparison that made the old rental habit look expensive.
This is not a "buy everything" article. Our own numbers show that renting wins below a certain utilization rate. But the common rule—"we don't drill enough to own one"—cost us roughly $8,000 per year before I actually checked the data. If that sounds familiar, keep reading.
What I Compared
Option A was a self-propelled hydraulic drill rig rented from a local dealer and billed weekly. Option B was an ABI drill rig that mounts to our existing 20-ton excavator, based on a March 2025 quote. Two important details: we run our own crews, so neither option includes an operator, and we already owned a compatible excavator. If you don't have a suitable carrier, Option B starts with a much larger machine cost, and this whole comparison changes.
The rental quote came in at $4,300 per week based on a 40-hour week, with a refundable damage deposit and freight charged separately. The ABI purchase quote was $61,250, including the hoses, couplers, and freight needed to make it work on our machine. At our usage level, we expect a seven-year service life.
Here's what the comparison looked like across five dimensions.
Round 1: Cash Out of the Door
Rental wins this round, and it isn't close. We paid the first week's rental plus a deposit before the machine ever arrived. That hurt a lot less than writing a check for $61,250. A rental also goes into the job cost rather than sitting on the balance sheet, which some accountants prefer when cash flow is tight.
If your credit line is already stretched—or you honestly don't know whether you'll have drilling work next year—renting is a reasonable decision. I've never told an owner to make a capital purchase when payroll is uncertain. Starting cash matters.
Round 2: Cost Per Operating Hour
This is where the rental argument fell apart for us.
The rental rate worked out to $107.50 per hour before freight. In practice, we usually rented for two-week stretches, so the round-trip freight added roughly $9 per hour. That put the all-in rental cost at around $110 per operating hour.
On the ownership side, the $61,250 purchase price divided by seven years gave us an annual equipment cost of $8,750. Add insurance and storage at about $400 per year, plus $800 in normalized maintenance, and we landed at $9,950 per year.
The break-even was about 90 hours per year. Under that, renting cost less. Over that, ownership started paying us back.
Now for the uncomfortable part. When I asked our foremen how many hours they thought we used a rented drill each year, the answers were usually 40 to 50. The actual tracked number for 2023 was 167 hours. We rented it five times that year. At 167 hours, the annual rental bill was roughly $18,400. Owning it would have cost us about $9,950. That's an $8,450 difference hiding behind a bad guess.
The lesson wasn't that buying is always better. The lesson was that our perception of utilization was completely wrong.
Round 3: The Costs That Hide in Fine Print
If the rental rate were the only cost, the decision would be easier. It isn't.
In 2023, we had a three-week rental that was quoted at $12,900. The final invoice was just over $15,000. The difference came from round-trip freight, a fuel charge because our crew didn't top off the tank before return, a cleaning fee, and a damage waiver that was buried in the contract. The rental company wasn't being dishonest—every line item was in the agreement. But the total was 16% higher than what our approval memo said.
Ownership has its own hidden costs. The week after we bought the ABI drill rig, I realized we needed to stock wear parts instead of waiting for a rental dealer to handle maintenance. We now keep a small inventory of ABI parts: spare hoses, wear teeth, filters, and O-rings. That inventory costs around $1,400. It felt like waste until the first hose failed on a Friday afternoon and we fixed it in 45 minutes instead of losing a day waiting on a part.
I'm not claiming ABI parts are the cheapest option on the market. But in a cost analysis, the part price is only half the equation. The other half is how long your crew stands around waiting for it.
Round 4: What Happens When the Schedule Breaks
In June 2024, we got a call about a slope failure at a commercial site. The general contractor needed soil anchors installed before anyone could work near the toe of the slope. I called the rental dealer. They were booked out for almost five weeks.
We had an excavator running six miles away. We moved it to the site on a Friday morning, mounted the ABI drill rig, and had the anchors in by Sunday night. The site never shut down. That job alone didn't pay for the machine, but it made us look like heroes to a client we've worked with for 12 years.
Looking back, we should have made this purchase in 2022. At that time, a similar emergency had forced us to hire a subcontractor at a painful day rate. I rationalized it as a one-off event. But over six years, urgent drilling needs came up three times. When the tool is in your yard, you can respond. When it isn't, you wait on someone else's schedule.
In hindsight, I should have run this full cost comparison earlier. Given what I knew at the time, though, the rental-only approach felt safe. Safe turned out to be expensive.
Round 5: The Same Base Machine Does More
One advantage I underestimated was how much value an attachment adds to an existing excavator. The same 20-ton machine that runs our ABI drill rig also runs the ABI Skull Crusher, a demolition attachment we use to crush reinforced concrete into manageable pieces before loading.
On a 2024 demolition job, we switched from drilling to crushing twice in one week. Each changeover took about 45 minutes. If we had rented dedicated machines for both tasks, we would have paid two delivery fees, two weekly rates, and two damage waivers. Owning the attachments meant only the base machine had to be on site.
We also bought an ABI Predator generator after renting one for a remote job. Yes, the name sounds like something from a movie, but it's really just a commercial-grade diesel generator. The rental cost was $1,150 per month including delivery. The purchase price was $5,900. If a site needs reliable power for more than five months a year, ownership wins. If every one of your jobs has grid power available, skip it.
There is something satisfying about opening the yard gate on a Monday morning and knowing you can react to the week's problems without waiting for a rental company to return your call. That's hard to put in a spreadsheet, but it's real.
Rent or Buy? My Actual Recommendation
If your total drilling time is likely to stay below 80 to 90 hours per year, rent. That's especially true if the work is irregular, your balance sheet is tight, or you don't already own a suitable excavator.
If you expect to drill more than 100 hours per year, work in remote locations, or need to respond quickly when schedules fall apart, buying an ABI drill rig is worth a serious look. The numbers get even better when the same excavator can switch between the drill, the Skull Crusher, and other attachments instead of sitting idle.
There's also a hybrid path: buy the attachment for jobs where you already have the base machine, and rent a self-contained rig for the rare project that needs more power or reach. That's not a compromise. That's a portfolio approach.
And if you're currently renting a drill on a regular basis, do one thing before you book it again: pull your actual usage hours from the last 12 months. If your rental dealer knows you by name, you're probably renting more than you think.
Equipment Terms Worth Knowing
Because a lot of people arrive at articles like this from search, here's a quick glossary of the terms I've used.
What is an ABI drill rig?
An ABI drill rig is a drilling system sold under the ABI name, often configured to mount on an excavator or as a self-contained rig. It is commonly used for soil nails, anchors, micropiles, and similar drilling work.
What are ABI parts?
ABI parts are replacement components made for ABI equipment and related attachments. For us, the important thing is availability. A stocked local part beats a cheaper shipped part that arrives after your crew goes home.
What is a skull crusher?
A skull crusher is a hydraulic demolition attachment used to crush concrete and rock into smaller pieces. In our fleet, the ABI Skull Crusher handles the work that would otherwise require a separate demolition machine or a subcontractor.
What is a predator generator?
A predator generator is ABI's commercial diesel generator, built for continuous jobsite use rather than occasional home backup power. It is the kind of unit you leave on site for weeks at a time.
What is a forklift?
A forklift is a powered industrial truck that lifts and moves palletized material. It's useful in a yard or warehouse—we use ours to unload ABI parts pallets—but it doesn't drill, crush, or grade. If you searched "what is a forklift" because you're comparing machines, the short version is this: a forklift moves material on improved surfaces. It is not an earthmoving or drilling tool.
Equipment decisions come down to math, but the math only works if it's based on your real usage. The spreadsheet doesn't care whether you prefer renting or owning. It just counts the hours, the invoices, and the days you wasted waiting on someone else's availability. In our case, the numbers pointed to buying an ABI drill rig. Yours might point somewhere else—just make sure you're looking at actual data, not a rule someone repeated for years.
