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QUESTION:Currently I'm looking at either a 580K(or S) (or a cat 426 now I've seen
yours!).
I'm trying to compare the digging capability of a backhoe with an
excavator (trackhoe).
Is the 580 equivilant to a 4T Excavator or maybe a 7T excavator?
I want to dig a driveway (this is the "excuse job" to buy the backhoe
) and the contractor who quoted the job is talking a 20-25T excavator.
I'm thinking of doing it myself with a backhoe, but I'm not sure if it will
be seriously under powered / incapable of doing the job. (time is not that
critical - but I do want a driveway before I retire!)
ANSWER: The "tips" I was refering to date from just a few days ago in the post "OT
backhoe", and also there was some information from the beginning of last
year when I first started thinking about buying a piece of heavy equipment.
At that time, I was thinking about buying a small steel tracked excavator,
like a Hitachi EX60 or similar (about a 14,000 lb machine I believe).
Several people on the group suggested that if they could only have one piece
of equipment, it would be a backhoe. Oh, and also I had mentioned I want to
plow snow off my mountain road and they started making jokes about how the
steel track excavator would make a great bobsled in the snow. From that
point I started thinking about getting a 4x4 backhoe.
You probably don't need 4x4. You also probably don't need an S...that just
means it is turbo charged instead of normal aspiration...gives you about 10
extra hp, but the turbo charger looks failure prone and expensive to repair
IMO. The cat 416 would be comparable to a case 580....the cat 426 would be
closer to a case 590 I belive. I don't know the exact weight (depends on
buckets and stuff), but I believe it is close to 18,000 lbs for the cat 426.
Possibly it is going to work as well or better than a small excavator
because of its massive (to me) size.
I didn't get a 4 in 1 bucket. It is the only thing I would have liked, but
this machine came along at a good deal, and had the 4x4 and extendahoe
(which lets you dig a few feet deeper). From what I have gathered, the 4 in
1 bucket lets you do dozing, scraping, clamshell pickup of trash, and of
course loading. I am guessing you can do dozing somewhat with a standard
bucket...not sure about scraping. The case 580L manual (which I bought on
ebay to help get me up to speed on the case 580 series when I thought I
would be buying one of them) shows the 4 in 1 doing a 4 inch scraping cut.
Something like that would be very usefull on a driveway. With an excavator
you sometimes get a little dozing blade, but I don't think you can do much
with it.
The cat backhoes usually fetch a bit more used than the case backhoes for a
similar age machine with the same hours. However I have been told by many
people that the Cat will last quite a bit longer than a Case, so you could
take a machine with a few more hours on it and still have a good machine. I
will probably be doing well to put 200 hours on my Cat a year.....that is
nothing.
Feel free to ask me any questions, though these guys know a lot more than I
do. I don't even know how to operate my hoe yet! :-) Good thing I have a
large clear flat area already on the property to practice.
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