All great looking backhoes! And it looks like you done a awesome job on the homemade one!
Thanks, farmall. It was fun to build. It was even more fun to get it out and start scratching it up.
JT42,
How long did it take you to build it?
hugs, Brandi
About six months of evenings and weekends. A couple of 5/8" thick plates warped during welding and since the instructions said they needed to be perfectly flat I took them to a professional welding shop and had them pressed flat on their 75 ton press. Everything else I did myself. I've read about some other folks who have built the same model and it's taken them anywhere from three months to over a year depending on need and schedule, so I felt pretty good about my six months. It is by far the biggest welding project I've ever taken on.
Jt42 what kind of motor runs it and it HP? And what size pump do you have on it? Also is this machine worth the cost and efforts it took to build it?
It has a 9.5 hp Kohler horizontal shaft engine turning a 4 GPM pump. As for cost, it was a labor of love. They claim it can be built for under $3k but I think that's if you scrounge up some of the parts. I could have purchased a commercially made towable backhoe for less than I spent building it. I never added up the total (mostly because I didn't want to know), but I know it was more than that, especially since I also bought some new tools -- a 20T shop press, 1" and 1-1/4" reamers, 9/16 - 1" drill bit set, and many more that I can't think of right now.
Like 3v0's Dirt Master, it can move around on its own, but for going longer distances it's much faster to reconfigure it from "dig mode" to "tow mode" and pull it with something. I made sure to build mine with highway-rated hubs and wheels if I ever need to take it off my property. When I moved it from my build site to my rural property I had it up to 60 MPH at one point and it towed wonderfully. Similar commercially-produced units from DR, Northern Tool, and Harbor Freight have warnings not to tow it above 25 - 40 MPH, depending on the model.
As 3v0 said, it takes a little practice to get it to move around under its own power, but once you have the technique down it can go pretty well. The last time I used it I pulled it with a garden tractor to a stump. After digging out the stump I had it crawl on its own power about 75 feet to the remains of a rock wall that I've been moving. I crawled along the entire length of the old wall (about 300 feet) digging up rocks that were the base of the wall. Then I converted back to tow mode to move it back to storage.
I don't have a real tractor yet, just the garden tractor, so the towable backhoe is a big help.
I also built a thumb for it but it's not installed in that photo. It's manual, not hydraulic, but it has a few sets of mounting holes so it can be adjusted for the job at hand.
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