Bigiron MCP Server

BigIron

Search live and confirmed-sold ag/construction/livestock/transportation equipment auctions from bigiron.com, a national US online timed-auction platform.

Part of Pipeworx — an MCP gateway connecting AI agents to 1863+ live data sources. This is an independent, unofficial integration — not affiliated with, endorsed by, or published by the upstream provider.

Tools

The sold-price gap

BigIron does not expose the realized hammer price in the page shape this pack reads. Every closed lot's amount field reads 0 regardless of bid count — verified across 100 sampled sold lots, including several with 60+ recorded bids. The live figure is served by a bidding widget (SignalR hub) this pack does not call. bigiron_sold_search still returns real, verifiably-sold lots (title, make/model/year, quantity, seller, location, close date, bid count) with final_price: null and an explicit price_note — never a fabricated or implied number.

buy_it_now_price on active lots is a real asking price a buyer can pay to end the auction immediately. It is not a sold comp and is labeled as such.

Auth

None. Keyless, no login, no Cloudflare challenge.

Data sources

• bigiron.com/Search — server-rendered ASP.NET HTML. Every lot card carries a data-lot="{...}" attribute holding the full lot record as HTML-entity-encoded JSON (title, price, location, category, make/model/ year, seller, end time, buy-it-now, sale status).
• bigiron.com/Lots/{slug} — the same per-lot record plus a free-text description.

Upstream quirks (measured 2026-09-13)

• page=N paginates (20 lots/page); without filter=Sold results skew overwhelmingly Active — 7 unfiltered pages of "tractor" turned up exactly 1 Sold lot. filter=Sold (found via the site's own category nav links, e.g. /sale/farm-equipment-for-sale?filter=Sold) switches the whole result set to closed lots.
• /Past (the site's own "past auctions" link) requires login — redirects to /MyAccount. It is not usable keyless; filter=Sold on /Search is.
• robots.txt disallows AI crawlers by name (ClaudeBot/GPTBot/CCBot etc.), but the content is public and served without credentials — per Bruce's 2026-09-01 ruling ("public data is public data, regardless of robots"), this does not block building the pack. This pack crawls politely and identifies honestly via its User-Agent.

Quick Start

Add to your MCP client (Claude Desktop, Cursor, Windsurf, etc.):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "bigiron": {
      "url": "https://gateway.pipeworx.io/bigiron/mcp"
    }
  }
}

What this endpoint actually serves

tools/list at https://gateway.pipeworx.io/bigiron/mcp returns the tools in the table above plus the shared Pipeworx meta-tools — ask_pipeworx, discover_tools, search_within, remember/recall and the rest of the gateway-wide set. So the tool count you see is larger than this table: a single-pack endpoint currently lists roughly 30 shared tools alongside the pack's own. The connection's initialize response states its exact scope, and is the authoritative answer for a given day.

This is deliberate, not multiplexing by accident. The meta-tools are what let a scoped connection answer a question this pack does not cover — via ask_pipeworx, which routes across the whole catalog — without you adding a second MCP server. There is currently no way to mount a pack endpoint without them; if the extra schemas cost you more context than the routing is worth, connect to the full gateway once rather than to several pack endpoints.

Or connect to the full Pipeworx gateway to get every pack's tools listed directly, instead of just this one's:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "pipeworx": {
      "url": "https://gateway.pipeworx.io/mcp"
    }
  }
}

Both URLs reach the same gateway and the same 1863+ data sources. The only difference is which pack's tools are listed directly; ask_pipeworx reaches all of them from either one.

No MCP client? Call it over HTTP

curl -X POST https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/bigiron_search \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"query":"tractor","limit":3}'

No account needed for the first calls. Inspect any tool: GET https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/bigiron_search. Find one: POST https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/search_packs with {"query":"..."}.

Run it from npm

@pipeworx/mcp-bigiron is a local stdio bridge to the Pipeworx gateway: your MCP client starts it with npx, and it forwards every call to the same https://gateway.pipeworx.io/bigiron/mcp endpoint shown above. It needs network access; there is no offline mode.

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "bigiron": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@pipeworx/mcp-bigiron"]
    }
  }
}

Without a key it calls anonymously, capped at 50 calls a day. A free account raises that to 200 a day: get a key at https://pipeworx.io/signup and add "env": { "PIPEWORX_API_KEY": "<your key>" } to the server entry. The key is sent as a Bearer token, the same way a hosted connection sends it, so calls are metered and billed exactly as they are there.

It lists only this pack's tools by default. Set PIPEWORX_META_TOOLS=1 to also list ask_pipeworx and the other gateway-wide tools.

Behind an HTTPS proxy: Node's built-in fetch does not read HTTPS_PROXY by default. Newer Node releases honour it when NODE_USE_ENV_PROXY=1 is set; check your Node version's documentation.

Using with ask_pipeworx

Instead of calling tools directly, you can ask questions in plain English — this works on the pack endpoint above as well as on the full gateway:

ask_pipeworx({ question: "your question about Bigiron data" })

The gateway picks the right tool and fills the arguments automatically.

More

• Docs and guides
• pipeworx.io

License

MIT