Spend a few years running a 4-stick hoe, and you'll have multiple functions down. It's not hard, really. Two sticks in each hand. The simplest one is digging, where pulling on three (as I called them before I knew better, shoulder, elbow and wrist) just naturally does about as good a job filling the bucket as can be done. When you get to depth, you adjust position a bit before hauling them in. Just a matter of what you are used to.
All modern hoes (or nearly all) use two joysticks, same as the excavators. You can also retrofit joysticks - somebody has pictures of that on here someplace. Good farm-shop conversion, not overpriced stuff - just some hinges and bearings to replace two levers with one lever, pushing and pulling the same spools as the original controls. Being used to 4-stick, I doubt I'll bother, but might if I find the mythical spare time.
I had to rent a bigger (18,000 lb) excavator to finish an electrical trench (on a tight schedule) where my hoe decide to have the steering give up 1/3 of the way onto the trench, and I had to commit or get out halfway into it, and really didn't feel like I could make it through with the hoe while doing crude brake steering through tight trees (though I did get from 1/3 to 1/2 that way).
I cannot say I loved the joysticks, but that is because I've used 4-sticks for over a decade and was trying to get the job done and the overpriced equipment out of my woods. I could see getting used to them, and certainly got much better with them in 2 days of running it.
It's harder to keep on track - anything with tracks tends to slide sideways, and you can't level up with stabilizers on a machine with no stabilizers. Also, the seat (on the one I rented) is off to one side, where I'm used to sitting in line with the hoe. One set of trees I could get through with the backhoe had to be cut (wider body, wider body all the way up, side hill - hit tree trunks) and then stumped (kept sliding into downhill stump, rubber tracks are expensive and far from indestructable). Still, a very capable machine, and not all clapped out like my hoe - but the rental price of that sort of thing is the whole reason I own a hoe at all. It was for sale at $59,000 used at the same time I was renting it - so far out of my league that I was happy to see it get back on the truck and go.
On the whole, for what I do, the Tractor-Loader-Backhoe is far more useful, though I can certainly see places where the excavator would be better. The TLB is more versatile all-around.
This post was edited by Ecnerwal at 22:04:25 02/05/10 3 times.
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