Mini ex or back hoe?

[8ob]

Morning all,
I am after your learned opinions / thoughts. We have some land and need to remove top soil and grade out with recycled crushed concrete or similar MOT for a small parking area, do the same for a about a 50m track and again remove top soil and grade for what will be a "workshop" / barn extension.

Budget is tight as always compromises are made.

What's your opinion on what (very old) machine to buy.

With the amount of work you are trying to accomplish I think you would be better off hiring in a ten ton plus excavator and dumper for a week and crack out the majority of the work, then buy in a small excavator that's got a useful working life left in it for the rest. They hold their value so buy the the most expensive you can, nothing worse than having to work on a machine every time you need to use it.

Bob

 

[jmp49]

nothing worse than having to work on a machine every time you need to use it.

Bob

haha bob feel's my pain

 

[sako243]

I use a 1.5 ton mini digger, with a tipping trailer for most things now, but can borrow a 3 ton 4x4 dumper any time I want. Did the drive, shed bases, and my parking area with the digger and dumper. About 200 Ton of stone. Also have a loader tractor, but didn't use it much for moving stone. Though a 4in1 bucket is a useful thing on a track!

I kind of wish I'd been better skilled and there was a bit less play in the back actor of my 2CX when we did the drive. We brought in 425 tonnes of stone for it, took Bernie the 360 operator and myself (dumper and roller) best part of 2 weeks to do it. I've seen someone else operating a JCB where they did the same length of drive in a couple of days.

I'm far from the best operator but I did a 100 yard path to the log shed in the evening to use up some of the half decent stone we'd found doing the drives. The same length took longer on the main drive and there were two of us. It took some practice but unless you go specialised bits of kit there's little to beat grading on a backhoe with a 4 in 1. Get the angles right and reverse as fast as you feel comfortable. Even on my wee 2CX that's 6ft wide done in one pass.

Horses for courses though, when we did the drainage in the paddock she simply sank and I had to figure out how to walk it out on the back actor and loader bucket as the wheels were useless. Mind you even Glyn struggled in the mini excavator so I didn't feel too bad.

 

[8ob]

haha bob feel's my pain

When god was still a boy I bought a Massey 200b crawler with a backhoe on it, needed to shift/level thousands of tons of chalk that was tipped in 20 ton piles around this place, think I spent more time refitting the tracks and working on it than I did using it. Got there in the end but if you value your time and there is a lot to do buy/hire a decent machine .

Bob

 

[minimutly]

I could be in the same position in a short while (if the farmer behind me finally gets around to relinquishing the corner of the field behind my workshops). For me it's a question of job in hand and room to work - a jcb type is a big footprint, add a dumper alongside and you need a lot of room. A small tracked mini digger on the other hand, although less capable bucket size wise, takes up a lot less room. Used backhoes are cheap as chips though.
One thing to remember, nearly every house around here was built with a JCB backhoe, back in the day.
Oh, and one other thing - backhoes are harder to tip upside down..

 

[Jelly_Sheffield]

On the duck's, I'm not convinced they are not the worst of both worlds, they have wheels so get stuck in boggy ground, and they are a excavator so are difficult to drive/move on road & I think they're cheaper because of this. I always see them on road gangs working from a tarmac surface for this reason.

Yeah, if you're dealing with boggy ground they're vulnerable (although anything without substantial tracks would be too), but on well drained unmade ground they do just as well compared to a 2WD backhoe with infinitely variable hydrostatic drive, 4WD, and lot of tyre.

I don't think they're any more difficult to road move than a backhoe, once the boom and cab are locked in travel position your visibility is pretty good, and it drives much like any other wheeled vehicle, in both cases [rubber duck and backhoe] more than about 15-20 miles and you really want to put it on a wagon.

The big difference over a 3CX or a mini digger is just how capable they are, by virtue of being a larger 360 design, capable of fast travel and fitted with a grading blade and outriggers

For work like leveling a parking area or laying a track they're really in their element, which is why they're used so frequently during road construction.

 

[jmp49]

I could be in the same position in a short while (if the farmer behind me finally gets around to relinquishing the corner of the field behind my workshops). For me it's a question of job in hand and room to work - a jcb type is a big footprint, add a dumper alongside and you need a lot of room. A small tracked mini digger on the other hand, although less capable bucket size wise, takes up a lot less room. Used backhoes are cheap as chips though.
One thing to remember, nearly every house around here was built with a JCB backhoe, back in the day.
Oh, and one other thing - backhoes are harder to tip upside down..

Technically if you have a backhoe you dont need a dumper. Its a bit of a pain to shift out of position to go scoop up another m3 of gravel etc when you run low, or move the spoil, but you can live without one (I dont have a dumper). Its the opposite with a mini digger, you more or less are obliged to have one if you need to move stuff in addition to making holes.

On the harder to tip upside down I have a cautionary tale. I have a 38dt in my 3c3 which is out of a 3c2 that ended up upside down in a lake and nearly drowned the operator who only got out alive because the windscreen popped out with a boot when the cab deformed as the door was jammed. He was digging away at the bank, and it gave way with the weight of the machine on the stabilizers near the edge, and over it rolled into the water. They had to take the back acter off in situ to get it out, and the cab was a funny shape (I have a picture of it somewhere), and I bought it solely for spares as imho it was too far gone to fix. When I stripped it, the chassis itself was leaking fluid from a few fractures. I still have the main chassis, but its the table for my cnc plasma cutter project now. Waste not want not

 

[Kj1123]

If its any more than an hours worth of digging to be done then definitely hire or buy an excavator for the job. We have both an old jcb 3cx grey cab and a 1.5 ton volvo mini excavator, I can honestly say the back actor on the digger hasn't be used in years. They are just a pain to use even when brand new and nice and tight and responsive, add into the equation 30 odd years of wear and its 100 times worse, it like trying to play snooker with a lenght of rope u just end up frustrated. If we get any work the 1.5ton can't handle we just hire in a suitable sized machine so much better. The 3cx for front loader work is were it shines absolutely brilliant machine for that and the odd very small digging job 20mins down the road type of work.