Abraham Lincoln, or Rudolf Diesel?

I have put around three hours on my tiny Chinese excavator, but I have to report I haven’t made it to China yet.

I wonder if millennials will get that. “What does digging have to do with China?” “I don’t know. Should we be offended or just go somewhere quiet and invent a new gender?”

I put $5,000 into this new machine, figuring it would be very handy around the farm. As of today, I think it will be useful enough to justify keeping it, although it has some problems.

As I noted in another post, and as may or may not be true, these machines have gas engines that run very fast, and they are said to be based on diesel machines with engines that run slowly. The actual figures are 3600 and 2050 RPM. The scuttlebutt is that the Chinese did not change the hydraulics to cope with the higher RPM’s, so these excavators pump fluid too fast, resulting in jerky movements that take a lot of skill to control.

Whatever the reason, the jerkiness is there for sure.

The controls allow you to lower and raise the blade, move each track independently, curl and uncurl the arm and bucket, raise the arm, spin the excavator on its tracks, and use the hydraulic thumb.

The jumpy nature of the machine is fairly manageable except when you use the tracks. There is one stick for each track. Moving it forward makes the track go forward, and pulling it back gives you reverse. Moving the sticks in different directions makes the excavator turn.

One of the big problems is that if you try to go forward or back without great care, the excavator may jump. This jerks your body in the direction opposite to the machine’s progress, and that makes you pull the sticks in the direction that makes it stop or go the other way. Then you naturally push to resist the jerking, so you start it moving again. The result is that you bounce. Forward-stop-forward-stop-forward-stop. It’s like riding a mechanical bull.

I’ve looked into solutions.

One is to replace the hydraulic pump with a slower one. The pump puts out around 0.37 cubic inches per revolution at 3600 RPM’s, so moving to something like 0.20 would make it more like a diesel machine running at 2050. But the tracks would be unbearably slow. As it is, it’s almost motionless at full speed.

The pumps are cheap and easy to replace. I should be able to do it for under $150. But if I want to use the excavator at the other end of the farm, it could take an hour to get there.

It would be great to find a little diesel engine that would work, but I think that’s a pipe dream.

I do not like gas engines, and I am sure this excavator’s carburetor will cause me problems eventually, but the price was very good, and I don’t expect to need the excavator often enough or in a big enough hurry to make occasional failures intolerable. Hope I’m right.

As for capability, the excavator is pretty weak. A Youtuber says these machines can lift something like 550 pounds, which is very little. The bucket’s curling cylinder isn’t strong enough to make it dig into dirt unless it’s pretty loose. You have to rely on the arm.

I’ve also gotten the excavator stuck on sandy ground. The tracks flat quit turning. I have read that this may be caused by a bypass valve that protects everything when the excavator is held in place by dirt pressing against the underside, but it’s hard to believe that happened in the relatively flat place where I was digging.

Breaking through roots is not possible if they’re over maybe an inch in diameter. That surprised me.

As I probably said before, it’s like having two men with shovels. It’s not going to move the stump of a hundred-year-old oak, but it will dig a hole in cooperative ground about as fast as two men, and all I have to do is sit and work the controls.

I can’t smooth things out when I’m finished. It’s way too jerky for that, and the bucket is small anyway. I would have to go back over everything with the tractor bucket and probably a shovel.

The earth-moving ability of two men with shovels is good enough, believe it or not. I have been out there with a shovel, myself, and it was not pleasant in 95-degree weather with blazing sunshine, high humidity, and no breeze. The excavator is not as great as I thought it would be, but it is great.

As for other machinery, I tried to buy a used 60″ diesel zero-turn today, but the place advertising it lent it to a customer, so I could not see it. I left contact information, but they have not gotten back to me yet. I wanted a Kubota, and this machine is a Gravely with a Kubota motor. I like Kubotas because they have built-in jacks for changing the blades, but they are hard to find at good prices, and I am tired of waiting. Gravely supposedly makes tougher bodies, and I can always use my floor jack.

I feel better about buying machines because I used Grok and ChatGPT to do financial analyses of the cost and return. Grok said continuing to use a mower would eventually save me $75,000 in landscaping payments, which could actually be true.

I should be able to keep a diesel mower going until I die, and I would guess that would save me $6,000 2025 dollars per year. Call it $150 per week and something like 40 weeks per season. That’s $6,000 per year in labor costs saved, so over 20 years, $120,000. If I live longer, I can always get an apartment.

I could get a used gas mower, which would be much cheaper. Then I’d have the giant hassle of ethanol problems, and I would have to buy and install a new engine every 750 hours, so at 80 hours per year, starting with a used mower, I would have to buy and install at least two engines, at a cost of something like $4,000 2025 simoleons. A used diesel engine should outlive me with no major overhauls.

A used gas mower would be maybe $2,000 cheaper, but it would cost me $4,000 to replace the engine, so an eventual net loss of $6,000, and it would be a horrible product I would hate, compared to a diesel. And it would burn a lot more fuel.

New gas mowers cost more than used diesels, which makes me wonder why anyone buys them. I don’t even understand why professionals buy them. Of course, I can’t assume every man who cuts grass for a living knows a lot about smart investing.

I know this is the kind of thing people say in order to rationalize impulse buys, but here it is anyway: AI helped me realize I would be throwing money away if I did not buy a diesel mower. Of course, I could keep the one I have running for maybe 5 more years, but I just can’t face doing the maintenance, and this mower is very slow. Changing the oil and sharpening the blades are torture, and a new mower should be able to shave off over a third of my mowing time.

This mower may die for good unexpectedly. The hour meter was frozen when I bought it (Surprise!), so for all I know, it has 4,000 hours on it. Important parts are rapidly being discontinued, it has already broken down three times, and I could find myself presented very suddenly with fast-growing grass and the need to buy a mower quickly.

Given how hard it is to find a mower at my leisure, I know that would be unpleasant.

I looked into mowers a few years ago, and I decided to be smart and keep my old mower going. Guess what happened? Prices of new mowers went up maybe 30%, and the value of my old mower dropped by around $2000. And I got to continue suffering needlessly. All that time, I could have been riding a better mower.

AI also thinks a real excavator, like 11,000 pounds, would pay for itself. I could do a lot of beautification and repair, and I would get a tax deduction. And it would be fun.

I could get something pretty good for maybe $25,000. It’s not that hard to make $25,000 worth of improvements on a farm with an excavator.

The final idea AI liked was getting a bigger tractor and a flail mower, but I didn’t point out that I already had a tractor which is adequate. My tractor will do most of what a bigger one will do, but it will do it a lot slower, and I will have to help it by getting off and doing more manual labor.

People like to say a small tractor will do anything a big tractor will do, slower. Not actually true.

You know who says that? Guys with small tractors. Especially guys who couldn’t afford, or were too cheap, to get bigger ones. The 50 million guys in the US who bought 25-horse John Deeres and Kubotas. Some made the right decision, because some properties don’t require big machines. Others doomed themselves to unnecessary misery and failure.

I can wait instead and make the most of what I have. And of course, the cost of a new tractor will go up, and the value of my old tractor will go down.

I’ve also realized that machinery expenditures are not lost. A good used machine is an investment. You can sell it if you have to. It’s not like a trip to Singapore or a year’s worth of restaurant meals. It’s not like a new machine, which depreciates off a cliff the second you buy it (12-25% for machines with top resale value). A used machine may depreciate, although the way things are going, it may not. Many appreciated during the Bidencaust.

It probably won’t increase in value like a piece of real estate or shares of stock, but it should beat rapidly-shrinking cash by a wide margin.

I believe that if I pick up a couple of useful machines that will enable me to keep my property up without dying of heat exhaustion, in the end, I should be way better off than if I had paid tradesmen or spent thousands on rentals. My property will look a lot better and possibly be worth more. My own suffering will be greatly reduced. It sounds pretty good.

I’m glad I bought the small excavator. It is already proving useful, even if it’s rough around the edges. If it turns out I’ve overestimated its usefulness, I’ll be able to get every penny I paid back out of it. Not bad.