LeeBoy 685 Grader vs. 8500 Asphalt Paver: Which One Do You Buy First?

Why a compact grader and an asphalt paver end up in the same decision

I've been handling equipment orders and spec sheets for grading and paving crews for 11 years. In that time I've made — and written down — 9 purchases I'd call significant mistakes. All in, they cost somewhere around $214,000 in wasted capital, rework, and resale losses. Two of those mistakes are why this page exists.

On paper, the LeeBoy 685 grader and the LeeBoy 8500 asphalt paver aren't competitors. A grader shapes and maintains ground. A paver lays asphalt. Different machines, different days.

But that's not how the decision actually shows up. If you're a contractor with one trailer, one line of credit, and a season to fill, those are the two machines you're weighing. You aren't buying both (unless you're in a much better position than I was in 2023).

So here's the framework I use now. Five dimensions, and I'm going to give you a winner on each one instead of the "it depends" answer.

1. What the machine actually does on a bid
2. Purchase price vs. cost per working hour
3. Parts and dealer reality
4. Which machine actually keeps working — the one that surprised me
5. How it exits — resale and liquidity

Dimension 1: What each machine does on a bid

The LeeBoy 685 is a compact-class motor grader. It shapes, cuts, spreads, and finishes. Gravel road maintenance, subdivision rough grade, parking lot base, ditch and shoulder work, backfilling behind other crews. It's the machine that lets you bid grading as a line item instead of subbing it out.

The LeeBoy 8500 asphalt paver does one thing: it places asphalt behind a truck or a material transfer vehicle, and the screed sets the mat. Narrower work, but a different tier of contract entirely.

Winner on job count: the grader. Winner on job value: the paver. That's the honest split, and it's the reason this isn't a "pick the better machine" article.

Here's the number that changed how I think about it. On the bids I tracked through 2024 in our region, a paving line item on a commercial job routinely carried 3 to 4 times the revenue of the grading package on the same site. One machine gets you more shots at small work. The other gets you fewer shots at much bigger work. Those are different businesses, not better and worse versions of the same one.

Dimension 2: Purchase price vs. cost per working hour

Everything I'd read before my first purchase said the cheaper machine is the safer first buy. In practice, on the grader side, I found the opposite of what I expected: the lower sticker price was hiding more cost, not less.

Graders eat wear items quietly. Cutting edges, moldboard wear strips, circle and drawbar play, tires or tandem chains, articulation pins. And grading quality is unforgiving — a sloppy operator on a grader leaves a sloppy pad, and the GC sees it. The paver is a heavier check up front, but its wear parts are more predictable, and your output is metered in tons placed. You can actually cost a paver per ton. Grading is harder to meter, so it's harder to price, and harder to price means harder to bid.

Let me give you my worst example, because it's the one that taught me the rule.

I bought a used 685 grader for sale in March 2023 with about 4,100 hours on the meter. Upside: roughly $31,000 less than a comparable newer unit. Risk: the circle assembly and the tandem. I kept asking myself, is $31,000 worth potentially parking the machine in July? I told myself July was a slow month. July is not a slow month.

It went down in week two of July. $16,400 in parts and labor, plus 19 days out of service. On a machine I'd owned for four months. The right purchase price didn't help me at all, because I hadn't budgeted the repair window.

Worst case on that unit was a full circle and drawbar rebuild — call it $22,000 plus three weeks of downtime. Best case was $0 and sixteen good months. The expected value said buy it. The downside felt catastrophic, and it turns out my gut was closer to right than my spreadsheet was.

Winner on predictable cost per working hour: the paver. Winner on entry price: the grader.

Dimension 3: Parts and dealer reality

This is where I'd spend a full day before signing anything, and I'd do it differently than I did the first time.

What I do now, in order:

• Download or request the parts manual for the exact serial number before I look at the machine.
• Call two dealers — not one — and ask about the five specific parts I'd expect to replace in year one. Not "do you stock parts." The part numbers.
• Ask how many of that model the dealer's service techs have touched in the last 12 months. If the answer is vague, that's an answer.

The counterintuitive finding here: the paver's consumables — screed plates, auger segments, wear strips — were easier for me to source and better documented than the grader's circle and blade hardware. Paving contractors burn through those on a schedule, so distribution keeps up. Grader-specific hardware is more of a special-order situation, and special order means lead time, and lead time means your machine is a paperweight on a job with liquidated damages in it.

Per FTC guidance (ftc.gov/business-guidance/advertising-marketing), a seller's performance and condition claims have to be substantiated. That doesn't mean they will be — it means you're allowed to ask for the documentation behind them. So ask. Service records, hour meter history, the last two inspection reports. When a listing says "excellent condition, ready to work," I assume nothing and ask for paper. If they can't produce it, I walk. That one habit has saved me twice since 2023. I do not negotiate with people who won't show me records.

Winner on sourcing and documentation: the paver, in my experience. That wasn't the answer I expected going in, and I'd have argued with you about it in 2022.

Dimension 4: Which machine actually keeps working

The conventional wisdom is that the grader wins because it does more jobs. My experience running both across a season suggests otherwise, and this is the conclusion I'd defend hardest.

Grading work is schedule-flexible and it gets bundled. It's a line item inside a bigger bid, it's often moved when weather or another trade slips, and — here's the problem — every contractor with a skid steer and a laser level thinks they can grade, so it gets underbid. Your utilization on the grader depends on how good you are at winning a commodity service. That's a marketing problem dressed up as an equipment problem.

Paving work is date-locked. Asphalt has a temperature window, the plant has a schedule, and the GC or the agency has a date written into the contract. It won't wait for you. That's a hard constraint, but it cuts the other way too: fewer people are willing to buy the paver, carry the screed, and staff a paving crew. The barrier to entry protects the work.

In our shop, the paver's booked hours per season have been more consistent than the grader's. Not higher in every month — more predictable across the season. Predictable is what pays a note.

Winner on utilization predictability: the paver. This one still doesn't sit well with me, since I bought the grader first. Looking back, I should've bought the machine that matched work I already had scheduled rather than the machine that matched the most job types I could imagine. At the time, I hadn't lined up a single dated grading contract. I had a bid list and hope. My choice sounded reasonable and was still wrong.

Dimension 5: How it exits

Nobody wants to talk about resale while they're buying. It's the first thing I look at now.

Graders — especially the compact class — have a wide but thin buyer pool. Farmers, small municipalities, and general contractors all want one. That means it moves faster when you need to move it, but the price is more exposed to condition, because the buyer may not know what they're looking at. Compact models in that class trade in a market where a missing service history costs you real money at the table.

Pavers have a narrower buyer pool — mostly another paving contractor — but that buyer knows exactly what screed condition and hour history are worth. Keep the screed plates and wear components in good shape and the percentage of purchase price you get back holds up better. Beat the machine and the discount at resale is brutal, because the buyer can price the rebuild down to the part number.

Winner on speed of sale: the grader. Winner on percentage retained: the paver, if you maintained it.

So which one do you buy first?

Scenario-based, because "it depends" is a cop-out and picking one winner would be wrong for half the people reading this.

Buy the LeeBoy 685 grader first if: your work is grading, gravel road maintenance, site prep, shoulders, or ditch work; you're in a rural or municipal market; you already own or can access the trucking to move it; and you're going to operate it yourself. You'll get more small bites, you'll get in cheaper, and you'll learn the trade on the machine that forgives a bad day more gracefully.

Buy the 8500 asphalt paver first if: you already have asphalt work committed with dates on it; you have a crew, because a paver doesn't run well solo; and you can carry the higher entry cost and the seasonality. Fewer jobs, bigger checks, better cost visibility per ton, and a better parts story than I expected.

Buy neither if: you can't put a written list of the next 12 months of dated jobs on the table. That single rule would have saved me about $214,000.

The pre-purchase checklist I use now

1. Parts manual for the exact serial number — in hand before the inspection.
2. Two dealers called, five specific part numbers quoted, lead times written down.
3. Service records and hour-meter verification requested in writing.
4. Worst-case repair estimate for the two most likely failures, budgeted alongside the purchase price.
5. A dated job list for the next 12 months that actually justifies the machine.
6. Someone other than me to look at it. Every machine I bought alone, I bought wrong.

We've caught issues on 11 of the last 14 units we've looked at using that list. Not all of them were dealbreakers. Three were — and one of those three was a compact grader with a circle that had been shimmed instead of rebuilt. That's the kind of thing you find when you ask for paper instead of trusting a listing.

The fundamentals of grading and paving haven't changed. What changed is how much information a buyer can demand before signing. What was best practice in 2020 — show up, kick the tires, trust the seller — isn't going to hold up in 2025.