Mini-hoe attachment

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Marco

New member
Joined
Oct 27, 2008
Messages
2
Bought a cheap mini-hoe and thought I'd share my bad decision. So far I've got about 20 ft of trench excavated and only broken my skidsteer twice. If I was a contractor, I'd run screaming from this attachment. As a hobby farmer, I'll keep it as I don't plan to use it much. Here's what I've learned: 1. QC Plate -- reinforce this. Mine is already slightly bowed. It needs to be reinforced instead of just the plate. Mine was also a little sloppy with the QC attachment which lead to it unhooking itself during operation (you get what you pay for). This resulted in snapping a bolt that holds the pin handle on the skidsteer side. I added some steel bar to the attachment's plate to get a snug fit on my QC, fixed my bolt, and was back to work. 2. Pressure relief -- I thought I was taking it easy but I guess not. I bent a cylinder rod from the loader to the QC. This damage was caused by backing the skid steer with the hoe in the trench which overloaded the cylinder. Really stupid looking back at it but it leads to point #3. So no moving the skid steer with the hoe in the hole. This is too bad as it worked pretty good to drag loose soil out instead of scooping it. I'll add a pressure relief to this circuit so I don't do this again. 3. Operation -- Right now I have the curl cylinder hooked up to my auxilary hydraulics (will be adding pressure relief here too but no problems yet). This makes it very awkward to operate. My right joystick runs the loader arms and QC tilt and I have to let go of this joystick to run the auxilliary hydraulics to curl the bucket. Any thoughts on improving this? I'm thinking adding a remote DC switch.
 

Tazza

Moderator
Staff member
Joined
Dec 7, 2004
Messages
16,829
I assume this is the style that has a fixed boom with a cylinder to curl the bucket rite? You need to manually skid side to side to dump the dirt?
If so, you should install a relief in your lift circuit too, with the extra force that is generated with the bucket curl you can build up too much pressure in your lift cylinders.
I was lucky enough to buy a *real* excavator attachment, works pretty well. It wasn't cheap though but does a great job.
 

Luthor

Well-known member
Joined
Nov 15, 2005
Messages
179
Marco, what model Bobcat do you have as some of the later models already have the relief valves fitted . On 743's etc it is mandatory to fit a relief valve to the tilt circuit when using this type of hoe as I found out after damaging my machine.
 

Skid Steer Solutions

Active member
Joined
Feb 11, 2007
Messages
35
Please do not give up hope on this style of attachment. Skid Steer Solutions has been making these for 10 years now and they have been very successful. Your point about cheap is where you need look. We realized within the first couple of years that a relief valve was needed because people would not only dig but try to pull and tear using the pulling power of their loaders. They first broke our buckets, so we toughened them up. Then they broke our pins, so we made them bigger and out of 4140 material. Then the really bad stuff started. They broke the mounting pins on their quick attach's and the tilt cylinders on their booms. We knew that we could never stop people from trying to always get more pull out of these backhoes so we embedded the relief into the main circuit. Since we did this there have not been any further issues. You can pull as hard as you like but when you reach a certain threshold, the bucket will release.
Now along comes the competitors. Always a buck cheaper and looks kind of similar so off they go. As soon as customers start having these costly issues, they disappear and start up again a few moths later with a similar looking device and a new eBay store. I have watched this cycle gone on for years. It comes down to this. If you buy a cheap item that seems too good to be true off of eBay, it probably is. The best thing to do is to get ahold of them and ask for a past customer list. If there is any hesitation, run. We are proud of our products and will happily run a report for people of the past few hundred buyers of a certain product.
The companies you buy a product from should be proud of their sales not afraid of them. If an of you have any of the knock off models that are prevailent on eBay and need help, drop us a line through the site and we can supply you with our old system of pressure relief valves as we now manufacture our cylinders with the relief built in.
Rob
www.skidsteersolutions.com
 
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