GeneV
Elite Member
Ok, well if you wanna know with all the detail...
Look, first I wanna give him some props here, both his step and skid plate seem legit. If I was in the market for a skid plate (and didn't already have my customer experience with him), I'd buy his plate. Seems like a pretty good product.
But, his backhoe q/c bracket he sent me was just terribly made. He had everything welded up at angles, it wasn't square. Evidently he got heat shrinkage when doing one side of the plate, and rather than pounding it out to square before welding the other side, he just ran a bead on the other side as is. It just look amateurish. I'm a terrible welder, but even I would be more careful make sure everything was properly tacked up and square before running full beads.
So, pretty ugly to begin with, but then it also didn't fit my backhoe bucket, I couldn't mount it with both pins. The "custom" he's referring to is, I was wanting the bracket to have both ends closed off instead of having one open end. The reason for that is I wanted to use the bracket to quickly flip my hoe bucket around to face outward (I had an application requiring me to have that function). I didn't want a weak spot where the open ends would be, as the most force would be applied there when using the bucket when it's flipped around facing outwards.
So what he did is size the on-center holes for the pins to exactly match his backhoe bucket. What he should have done instead was mill out a small pocket in one of those hole sets to allow for some slight tolerance differences. When I told him the bracket doesn't fit, he started blaming my backhoe lol. First it was some bs about welds on my bucket being in the way. I was like, no, there's no welds in the way. Then, he was blaming it on my backhoe bucket being warped from abuse, again, no. And why is my bucket is warped from abuse, as opposed to your bucket being warped?
But I also ordered another part from him, basically the ripper tooth base w/o the ripper. I was wanting to weld a claw thingie onto it, had plans to create a poor man's grapple out of the backhoe (something that would work better with the thumb than the bucket does). Again, this thing was welded all crooked just like his q/c bracket. But even more interesting, this plate and q/c bracket didn't mate either! I could only get both pins in it by pounding them in with mallet, and I mean pounding the crap outta them (per his instruction). This should be slip fit, I shouldn't have to be pounding those pins in and then pounding them out to put my bucket back on...which whoops, didn't fit my bucket at all anyways, even with all the mallet pounding.
