Yes, seriously. I've mentioned it in the past a couple of times but never really given much info because I hadn't used it enough to know if it was worth the price of admission. Now I have.
This isn't a HF tool but it is a cheap (relatively) Chinese tool. I was originally going to put this in the HF thread but decided it deserved its own page.
The first of the year, I decided I had the need to do a bunch of digging to install power and water for camping pads at a property my family bought in the mountains. I looked into renting an excavator or trencher but most of them are $200-$500 per day to rent so I started looking at used ones on CL and FBM. An excavator would be preferred if buying because they are more versatile. After several weeks of beating around marketplace, I came across a post for a brand-new Chinese mini excavator. It's a 1-ton class excavator. The gent had imported 10 of them and was selling them for $8900.00. To rent an excavator this size is $500 a day so the payoff would only be 17.5 days of rental. I have some work around the house that would make it handy as well. I went and took a look at them and they looked surprisingly good. 13 hp Briggs engine, very well built, clean welds, plenty of digging depth. Worst case I could buy it, use it for what I needed to do, and sell it and still be money ahead of renting one at $500/day.
So I bought one.
It's perfectly sized for a grandchild. I, on the other hand, look like I'm sitting on a Tonka toy.
Initial impressions were pretty good. It's not exactly up to the quality standards of a $30k Bobcat E10 but it's damn good for less than 1/3 the price. It is very powerful for its size. Like strong enough to turn itself over if you aren't careful. Even with my fat ass sitting on it, it desperately needed some additional counterweight so that was 1st on the list.
That consisted of 4 - 45# plate weights and a wall mount bolted to the back of the excavator. They helped a fair amount.
Next on the list was a trenching bucket. I needed to bury a 2" sewer line, a 1" water line, and a 350 mcm quadruplex wire. I didn't need a 12" ditch for that. Our friends on Amazon had an 8" bucket for cheap that I figured I could modify to fit. I ended up cutting the mounts off the back and welding a new set to match the quick-change mount on the excavator. They are made out of 3/8" plate and welded on the back of the bucket with 3 passes with my welding machine running at 200 amps. Naturally, the pins aren't quite 1" so they required a light pass on the lathe to get them down to size. Yes, I know the welds aren't perfect and pretty. I don't care and I'm happy to report that after digging 300' of trench through rock-strewn clay the bucket stayed together.
After playing with it for a few weeks, a friend of my son came by the house. He loved it and wanted to borrow it to replace a fence. I had mentioned that they had a hydraulic auger attachment for it that I thought was fairly reasonable. He offered to buy the auger if he could borrow it for a week or so. I agreed and ordered the auger attachment.
It mounts with the same quick-change setup that the buckets use and the hydraulics are driven from the same circuit that drives the hydraulic thumb. It will sink a post hole 24" deep in about 30 seconds in the sandy soil at my house, even through the roots. It's not quite that fast in the rocky soil of NC but it sure is faster than post-hole diggers.
That's pretty much all I have done to the machine and this past week it was put to the test. When I hauled it to NC it had about 8 hours on it. It now has almost 30 hours on it and it worked hard for every one of them.
The 300' of trench we put in last week was close to Rock Creek in NC and the stream is aptly named. The ground is full of rock ranging from pebble size to 300-400 pound boulders. I was impressed at how well it did through that soil.
I had my doubts as to the usefulness of the thumb when I first bought the machine. After moving 25-30 boulders in the 100+ pound range, I can say it's a very useful option. This boulder was heavy enough to tip the machine at full extension. At a guess, it's 300-400 pounds. Fishing it out of the bottom of the trench by hand would have been impossible without the thumb.
In the 30 hours I have spent running it I have run into exactly one problem. The bolts holding the track carriage to the frame worked loose. Tightening them back up solved the problem.
I'm giving this particular Chinese tool a resounding thumbs up. It has been worth every penny spent so far and I have a lot more projects planned for the future.
I'll post here again if I change my opinion but for now, I can recommend one of these if you have the need.
