On Mon, 20 Nov 2017 14:18:00 -0500, "Mr. Luddite"
wrote:


I had the backhoe attachment for the John Deere tractor I had. Not big
(12 inch wide bucket) and not super powerful but it did a lot of work
over the years. I dug all the electrical and plumbing trenches for the
pool when we had it installed. The contractor had some kind of machine
but had a hard time because of all the rocks and boulders. The JD
handled them well, although I overloaded the hydraulics many times.
Trenches all had to be four feet deep and collectively there were about
150 -200 feet of them.


Cool. I always wished I had a decent reason to buy a backhoe. I played
with the one my nieces hubby borrowed to dig out my sister's abandoned
septic tank when they built their pool. If you only had one machine
that is probably the one to have but they are really not that popular
here. One of the guys I talked to said the arrangement of the hoses to
the backhoe arm on the traditional one is susceptible to too much wear
from the sand. In Maryland they were everywhere.
In the 1&2 family biz here an tracked Bobcat is king. We are not
digging deep foundations and you can do more with the Bobcat.
When my wife was building, there was always a Bobcat in the
neighborhood and MartÃ*n the operator was her buddy.