Riding Big-Boy's big brother

[richardbro]

I recently posted this picture:

http://www.tractorbynet.com/forums/...0142655-new-horse-stable-001-baby-big-boy.jpg

The little orange speck in the foreground is mine. Today the excavators came in for the backfill of my stable. They brought in something bigger (the 335) with a magician to work it. This guy is good, and he's known throughout the region. I never seen these big machines being moved so fast and smoothly without any to-and-fro wiggling - this guy was dead on the mark with the bucket.
Afterwords we chatted and I told him I was impressed - he laughed and told me he could take the hat off my head with the bucket - I kindly declined. Then I got the bright idea of (jokingly) asking if I could try it out, seeing as how I was also a rider of these beasts. He said sure, go ahead. So I got to sit down and move the boom and bucket with the right-hand joystick and the stick with the other (the other position on the left joystick moves the whole cab around). He's got a pump on each joystick, no doubt slightly stronger than my BX24 pump... fun stuff!

 

[Solo]

It's always fun to watch someone who can run equipment well.

Solo

 

[cityfarma]

"When I grow up, I want to be a ...."

 

[AndyMA]

That's a 33.5 ton machine, my Hitachi is a 22 ton. It's actually much easier to operate the large excavator than a small backhoe. Not to say the guy wasn't a great operator.

Andy

 

[PineRidge]

Whenever I see large equipment being operated and there's a few minutes to spare I stop to watch. Machinery has fascinated me since I was a kid.

That's a great picture that you took.

 

[daTeacha]

That's for sure. I had one of my former students using a hoe to level out some holes left by trees that blew down in a storm. While he was swinging the bucket this way and that, he suddenly slowed the engine, reached out with the bucket, barely scraped the ground, then swung it over to me and asked "Is he okay?". He had seen the garter snake just as the bucket passed over it, slowed down to pick up the snake with bucket, and delivered the snake, with very little dirt, to me. I was pretty impressed.

The same guy, on the same machine but a different job, was very ticked off when I had him digging out for a walkout door from the basement and he scratched the tar on the block wall with one of the bucket teeth. The scraped area is about 6 inches long, maybe an inch wide, and just barely the depth of the tar on the blocks.