Think I’ll Paint Winnie the Pooh on it for Nose Art

With some trepidation, I am making a third effort to write this blog post. The first time, I started and then drove to Walmart, and when I got home, the Notepad window I was using had disappeared. Ironically, I have gotten used to using Notepad because my power used to blink while I was using a browser and WordPress. Notepad saved a number of essays. But it only does that when you save your work manually from time to time, and I quit doing that a long time ago, probably because I developed some faith in my backup power supply.

The second time I tried to write this post, my wife knocked the cord out of the back of my PC with a mop after I wrote maybe 500 words. I’ll bet they were great.

One more time, from the top:

I am pleased to say that I now have an excavator of my very own.

I have wanted an excavator for years. My farm has a lot of problems excavators are the best tools for fixing. Tree stumps. Not-quite-buried rocks that dent my mower blades. Holes that need to be dug. Trees that should be pushed over instead of being felled with saws.

An excavator is an amazing thing. You can use one to make beautiful, very deep holes with clean vertical sides and flat bottoms. You can dig long trenches with them, and you can fill the trenches in very quickly. You can tear unwanted trees up. You can dig up and lift boulders.

For digging, an excavator is like a number of sturdy potential deportees armed with shovels, fresh from the parking lot at Home Depot, except it won’t case your house and come back later to steal your jewelry and oriental rugs. And it won’t try to vote in your elections.

Why didn’t I buy an excavator sooner? Because I am cheap. I would rather watch my property deteriorate than part with a sum I wouldn’t really miss.

That sum is around $25,000. That’s about as little as you can hope to pay for a 6-ton excavator that isn’t ready for the scrapyard. You can go cheaper, but you should expect to have a lot of down time and repairs.

I didn’t spend $25,000. I spent $5,000. For a brand-new excavator. How did I pull that off? Well, I compromised. A little. I shaved a little bit off the desired tonnage. About 80%, give or take. And I went Chinese.

For some time, the Chinese have been making little-bitty excavators weighing as little as 1500 pounds. Real manufacturers make small excavators, too, but theirs are fancy and have diesel engines. The Chinese go bare-bones, and they use the sort of engines Briggs & Stratton makes. Like big lawnmower engines. Gas-powered.

I used to see tiny excavators going up and down the road on trailers, and I thought they were silly. I couldn’t believe they were worth buying. I was sure a 1-ton excavator couldn’t pull a tree over, for one thing.

Recently, I saw a video that changed my mind. A huge Youtube star bought a used Chinese excavator for $3,000, and he loved it. This is a guy who owns huge track loaders, dump trucks, bulldozers, skid steers, and diesel excavators. He knows all about the real thing, but he enjoyed a Chinese toy.

He did things with it that surprised me. He lifted a tree that had to be 40 feet long, and he drove off with it.

I thought that was pretty neat. I started thinking I had made the perfect the enemy of the good. So what if I ended up with an excavator that couldn’t take a tree down? It would still be great for little stumps and digging out rocks. It would work for digging holes, like the one I need to dig to fix my gate’s car sensor.

I looked around, and I found out Chinese baby excavators started at around $6,000 for the bare minimum. But then I got lucky. I saw an ad for a brand-new excavator with 15 horsepower and a hydraulic thumb. Price: $5,000. The manufacturer charges $8500, including shipping.

How was I supposed to say no to that? The excavator in the video had 12 horsepower and a stationary thumb, and it was still wonderful. The one in the ad was a lot better, and because it was new, it probably wouldn’t fall apart for at least a year and a half.

Incidentally, these machines used to cost more. For some reason, the market is flooded with them. I don’t know if Trump scared the importers into dumping them or what.

A Kubota the same size retails for about $29,000. A Kubota is a WEE bit better, and by “WEE bit,” I mean “a lot,” but it’s not $24,000 better.

Today I drove out and looked at it, and a couple of hours later, it was in my yard. Here’s a photo.

It’s a monster, isn’t it?

It really works. It’s not quite as strong as I had hoped, and it doesn’t break through roots the way it needs to in order to dig fast in Northern Florida, but on the other hand, it digs much faster and better than I can, and while it digs, I don’t get dirty or sweaty. I don’t get sore. I don’t strain my back. I can dig all day. In the past, I used to go a couple of hours and then quit and expect to feel sore the next day.

This machine can go down 65 inches. That’s really something. I believe the deepest hole I ever dug in my life was about 30 inches, and it was a horrible experience.

I have a couple of partially-buried rocks I really want to get rid of. The tractor couldn’t do anything, even when I used a subsoiler to go around it. I am planning to use the excavator to go down 65 inches, and if that isn’t enough to loosen them up and allow me to pull them out with the tractor, I’m going to rebury them and paint the tops bright pink so I quit running over them.

Actually, I might use the rotary hammer and wedges to break the tops off of them. That would be good enough.

It’s not fun to use. Yet.

The controls are not intuitive. It appears it will take me a day of practice to get to the point where I’m not doing things like lowering the bulldozer blade when I think I’m curling the bucket. Also, the machine’s movements are very jerky. You push the levers carefully, trying to ease into motion gradually, and at first, nothing happens. Then the excavator leaps into action. It’s like riding a mechanical bull. Hard to predict. You can actually throw yourself out of the machine if you aren’t careful.

I have read that these little excavators use the same pumps diesel excavators use. Gas engines run at higher RPM’s, so supposedly, this results in too much fluid pressure. I don’t know if it’s true.

A guy who claims he sells these machines says the problem is that the manufacturers don’t adjust the pressure well at the factories. He says you can fix it with a simple gauge and an Allen wrench.

I’m going to improve my skills and see if that fixes the problem, and if it doesn’t work, I’ll look into pump adjustment.

Some people think cheap Chinese hydraulic fluid makes the machines jerkier than they should be, and they also say it should be changed right away anyhow, because it’s no good and may also have bits of metal in it after the machines have run a few hours. I plan to hit Tractor Supply tomorrow and buy real fluid.

I don’t know if this excavator will be of any use with my big stumps. Maybe if I’m patient. But I have a bunch of little ones, and I also have a lot of shrubs I want to rip out. It will be great for those jobs.

Just about all the parts that may go bad are available on Amazon, and they are cheap. I don’t have a warranty, but at this price, and given the simplicity of the machine and the cost of parts, I don’t care.

If I decide I don’t like it, I can probably get most of my money back out of it, so there is not much of a down side. I might lose two grand, but I’m sure I can do more than two grand’s worth of work before I do.

Today I realized I needed to think more about machinery that does work for me. If I’m going to continue living in the country, I mean. I’m strong now, but old age is just about here, and people don’t stay strong forever. And my time has some value, even if it isn’t much. There is a lot to be said for turning a hard two-week job into a one-day job you can do sitting down, especially when you have a wife waiting for you to finish and move on to the next chore.

I could just pay people to do things. I would hate to feel helpless, though, and paying people isn’t always cheaper than buying equipment. For example, I can buy a used diesel mower for $9,000 and use it until I die, with only only routine maintenance. I can’t find anyone who will charge me $9,000 to mow my grass for that same period. I would go through that in a couple of years.

I am considering upgrading my tractor for $30,000 minus whatever I get for the old one. That would include buying a flail mower that could probably replace my garden tractor for lawn work. A bigger tractor would make things go much, much faster and easier. If I had to pay people to come out and cut and move trees instead of using a tractor, I would probably end up spending more over time. I was quoted $800 for felling one tree and then walking away.

I like the idea of showing my son how to do manly stuff. I once competed in a fishing tournament on my dad’s boat, and his partner hooked a sailfish. The drag was loose, and he needed to turn the drag knob to tighten it. It was a spinning reel with a knob that had a right-hand thread. I told him to tighten it, and he had to ask me which way to turn it.

My son will never have to shame the family like that. Imagine a grown man not knowing which way a screw turns. Willy Loman said it best, to another character who marveled that Willy had put up a ceiling: “A man who can’t handle tools is not a man. You’re disgusting.”

My son’s dad will be able to teach him welding, machining, basic electronics, painting, forestry, how to run and fix a tractor, how to run a diesel yacht, fishing, shooting, reloading, how to run woodworking machines, how to make a real pizza, and how to run a tiny Chinese excavator. Maybe a bigger excavator some day. I’ll be able to teach him basic car repair, so he won’t have to pay people to change his oil or do his brakes.

I keep hoping my son forgets about college and starts a business that begins with a trade and ends with a fleet of trucks or machines and a stable of employees.

My wife gets annoyed with me sometimes because I don’t like to pay people, but I can’t believe what some tradesmen charge. Home Depot wanted $200 to install two blinds. That’s 4 holes and 4 screws. A chimney guy charged me almost $400 to go up on the roof and give me an estimate.

She practically begged me to hire painters, but when we did our own painting, she had to admit our work was better than the pros’ who came before us, and it was free. We probably saved $3,000, and we still have to do two stairwells, two baths, and the kitchen. Imagine what that would cost.

I can’t believe what painters charge. I used to paint entire apartments for $300 plus materials, and I did good work.

I started working on one of my buried rocks today. Tomorrow I’ll get back to it. I’ll be disappointed if I don’t get it out; for all I know, I’m digging around a tiny projection on a rock that lies under the whole neighborhood, like a wart on a whale’s butt. But at least I’ll be able to say I found out and didn’t chicken out like a soy-eater and pay a big strong man to do it for me.