Richard
Elite Member
- Joined
- Apr 6, 2000
- Messages
- 4,813
- Location
- Knoxville, TN
- Tractor
- International 1066 Full sized JCB Loader/Backhoe and a John Deere 430 to mow with
Dad called a couple weeks ago. The power company came out & cleared some brush off his (95 year old) mother in laws side lawn and left a TON of stumps and brush. He wants those dug up so they can turn it into a regular lawn.
Discussions on what kind of backhoe to rent, I told him bigger is always better. He ended up renting a Terramite T-7.
I drove to Columbia, SC last week to help him.
Now to keep in perspective, I have only worked two backhoe/loaders in my lifetime. Yes just two. First one was a rented (by me) Kubota L-35 and the other is my now owned JCB 1550-B industrial (15 ½ digging depth). I had maybe 10 hours on the Kubota as my initial experience and I have several hundred now on “Brutus”.
Enter the Terramite
When they dropped it off I was discretely laughing. Turns out I was somewhat wrong to laugh at it.
Yes it was a gasoline engine
Yes it was a two cylinder Kohler engine
Yes it is a single speed
Yes the loader control seemed unsophisticated
Yes the stabilizer controls seemed backward (lift up to lower & push down to raise.... with Brutus up is up with legs & down is down with legs)
Yes the reach was “pathetic” but then again, it only dug to 8 ½ feet verses 15 ½ so I’m spoiled
Given all those “shortcomings” when I put it up against what I’m accustomed to (that’s fair isn’t it? Putting up a (and I’m guessing) $20,000 machine in today’s dollars against something that cost $75,000 back in 1987???)
Ok, with that all out of the way, I want to add that in NO WAY AT ALL, am I disparaging this nor any other machine it’s size.
We had a work area about 20’ x 200’ as a guess. We were going to turn all the soil over and extract all the stumps.
I got started bright & early. Seems the soil is VERY easy to work with and is sort of a mixture of dirt/sand rather than the clay I’m more accustomed to here in Knoxville.
I started to dig/flip bucket after bucket. I came to my first stump. I was prepared to flick it out. Such wasn’t to be as again, this isn’t an 18,000 pound machine with like 11,000 pounds of breakout force (I forget what Brutus has).
I ended up digging around this stump and it took me maybe 20 minutes or so. Turns out this foliage was some kind of brush that sends out feeler roots.
During the whole process of digging this area up (and of course I forgot pictures), we dug up HUNDREDS and HUNDREDS of root shoots. It looked like a mass of snakes when it was all piled up.
I hit another stump & this one was big, relative to the first several. This stump literally grabbed the Terramite and shook it all about. At this point I started realizing the benefit of “bigger is better”. Brutus would have snatched that stump out in 2 minutes TOPS whereas I was fighting it again for probably 30 minutes.
The backhoe bucket was probably 12” wide and shallow. I’m very spoiled with a 2’ wide deep backhoe bucket. It took a LOT of scoops to dig & turn the earth.
As I was fighting the above mentioned root ball, an interesting thing happened. The backhoe just stayed there like it was napping. It would not stand back up. I immediately knew we had an issue & started looking closer.
Seems the wobble sticks aren’t designed very well. When you pull stick back to raise boom, it pulls the valve up. Well, not any more. What happened is the stick is connected to the valve assembly by a short threaded screw. The screw seems to be about 3/8” long. The female part of this (on the valve side) reamed out and the screw just popped out while the hoe was completely extended and laying on the ground. Hmmm... I was clueless as to how the rental guys would MOVE this thing, much less mount it onto their trailer.
After a 3 hour ordeal of hardware store & otherwise tinkering on this trying to fix it, I realized it was beyond my tools at hand so the BEST thing I could try to do is get the hoe pinned back up so I can at least use the loader.
I managed to screw the weak screw into hole and with a wrench lift it while trying to torque it sideways to jam it into it’s setting & thereby cause enough friction to hold onto the stripped threads & pull the valve up... IT WORKED!!!
Pinned the hoe up and used loader to move a bit more dirt & smooth out what we were able to get done (hoe broke about 80% way through)
Rental guy was cool about what happened. It was clear that it reamed out and shouldn’t have happened. IN fact, what he SHOULD have done was apologize to us and offer my dad some kind of recompense for the inability to use the machine. I think my dad felt we (I) got SO much more done than he expected, that he still got his money’s worth.
Myself, I knew that if he’d spent the extra 50% on a larger machine, we’d have had the entire job done HOURS earlier rather than not being done at all.
As it is now, he’ll have to rent something again and probably spend more money than if he’d just done it right to begin with.
What I learned from this is first the obvious, a Terramite is not an industrial. That said, I WAS VERY IMPRESSED with what it really did do. Had the screw not stripped out, I could have finished the job.
After the Terramite died, we (I) also had to dig four holes for trees that he’d been wanting to plant. I got to dig those by hand /forums/images/graemlins/frown.gif
My take on it is, it’s not something to be rented if you have other options. I think it might be better suited for the home owner who might have more time to do a project rather than have the clock ticking like you do in a rental situation.
Others may disagree and that’s fine. All I do is ask you to realize my only experience as an operator/ower is coming from the perspective of using something MUCH bigger and as such, I really had no where to go but down in my expectations of what it might do.
Would I WANT to rent a Terramite again? No
Would I WANT to use something that sized for a full days job? No I’d much rather pay DOUBLE the price and get something more than twice as capable. It would make the job faster easier AND with less wear & tear on MY body.
Would I prefer to disagree with myself on all the above and rent one in order to keep from having to dig holes by hand?
I’ll let you figure that one out
/forums/images/graemlins/cool.gif /forums/images/graemlins/wink.gif
Oh, and yes, I DO love being spoiled with Brutus
Discussions on what kind of backhoe to rent, I told him bigger is always better. He ended up renting a Terramite T-7.
I drove to Columbia, SC last week to help him.
Now to keep in perspective, I have only worked two backhoe/loaders in my lifetime. Yes just two. First one was a rented (by me) Kubota L-35 and the other is my now owned JCB 1550-B industrial (15 ½ digging depth). I had maybe 10 hours on the Kubota as my initial experience and I have several hundred now on “Brutus”.
Enter the Terramite
When they dropped it off I was discretely laughing. Turns out I was somewhat wrong to laugh at it.
Yes it was a gasoline engine
Yes it was a two cylinder Kohler engine
Yes it is a single speed
Yes the loader control seemed unsophisticated
Yes the stabilizer controls seemed backward (lift up to lower & push down to raise.... with Brutus up is up with legs & down is down with legs)
Yes the reach was “pathetic” but then again, it only dug to 8 ½ feet verses 15 ½ so I’m spoiled
Given all those “shortcomings” when I put it up against what I’m accustomed to (that’s fair isn’t it? Putting up a (and I’m guessing) $20,000 machine in today’s dollars against something that cost $75,000 back in 1987???)
Ok, with that all out of the way, I want to add that in NO WAY AT ALL, am I disparaging this nor any other machine it’s size.
We had a work area about 20’ x 200’ as a guess. We were going to turn all the soil over and extract all the stumps.
I got started bright & early. Seems the soil is VERY easy to work with and is sort of a mixture of dirt/sand rather than the clay I’m more accustomed to here in Knoxville.
I started to dig/flip bucket after bucket. I came to my first stump. I was prepared to flick it out. Such wasn’t to be as again, this isn’t an 18,000 pound machine with like 11,000 pounds of breakout force (I forget what Brutus has).
I ended up digging around this stump and it took me maybe 20 minutes or so. Turns out this foliage was some kind of brush that sends out feeler roots.
During the whole process of digging this area up (and of course I forgot pictures), we dug up HUNDREDS and HUNDREDS of root shoots. It looked like a mass of snakes when it was all piled up.
I hit another stump & this one was big, relative to the first several. This stump literally grabbed the Terramite and shook it all about. At this point I started realizing the benefit of “bigger is better”. Brutus would have snatched that stump out in 2 minutes TOPS whereas I was fighting it again for probably 30 minutes.
The backhoe bucket was probably 12” wide and shallow. I’m very spoiled with a 2’ wide deep backhoe bucket. It took a LOT of scoops to dig & turn the earth.
As I was fighting the above mentioned root ball, an interesting thing happened. The backhoe just stayed there like it was napping. It would not stand back up. I immediately knew we had an issue & started looking closer.
Seems the wobble sticks aren’t designed very well. When you pull stick back to raise boom, it pulls the valve up. Well, not any more. What happened is the stick is connected to the valve assembly by a short threaded screw. The screw seems to be about 3/8” long. The female part of this (on the valve side) reamed out and the screw just popped out while the hoe was completely extended and laying on the ground. Hmmm... I was clueless as to how the rental guys would MOVE this thing, much less mount it onto their trailer.
After a 3 hour ordeal of hardware store & otherwise tinkering on this trying to fix it, I realized it was beyond my tools at hand so the BEST thing I could try to do is get the hoe pinned back up so I can at least use the loader.
I managed to screw the weak screw into hole and with a wrench lift it while trying to torque it sideways to jam it into it’s setting & thereby cause enough friction to hold onto the stripped threads & pull the valve up... IT WORKED!!!
Pinned the hoe up and used loader to move a bit more dirt & smooth out what we were able to get done (hoe broke about 80% way through)
Rental guy was cool about what happened. It was clear that it reamed out and shouldn’t have happened. IN fact, what he SHOULD have done was apologize to us and offer my dad some kind of recompense for the inability to use the machine. I think my dad felt we (I) got SO much more done than he expected, that he still got his money’s worth.
Myself, I knew that if he’d spent the extra 50% on a larger machine, we’d have had the entire job done HOURS earlier rather than not being done at all.
As it is now, he’ll have to rent something again and probably spend more money than if he’d just done it right to begin with.
What I learned from this is first the obvious, a Terramite is not an industrial. That said, I WAS VERY IMPRESSED with what it really did do. Had the screw not stripped out, I could have finished the job.
After the Terramite died, we (I) also had to dig four holes for trees that he’d been wanting to plant. I got to dig those by hand /forums/images/graemlins/frown.gif
My take on it is, it’s not something to be rented if you have other options. I think it might be better suited for the home owner who might have more time to do a project rather than have the clock ticking like you do in a rental situation.
Others may disagree and that’s fine. All I do is ask you to realize my only experience as an operator/ower is coming from the perspective of using something MUCH bigger and as such, I really had no where to go but down in my expectations of what it might do.
Would I WANT to rent a Terramite again? No
Would I WANT to use something that sized for a full days job? No I’d much rather pay DOUBLE the price and get something more than twice as capable. It would make the job faster easier AND with less wear & tear on MY body.
Would I prefer to disagree with myself on all the above and rent one in order to keep from having to dig holes by hand?
I’ll let you figure that one out
/forums/images/graemlins/cool.gif /forums/images/graemlins/wink.gif
Oh, and yes, I DO love being spoiled with Brutus