My trailer , with CAT pic.

Thats my friends little cat, that thing is awsome. I dug down 7ft to fix my foundation leak with it. I trade him hay for the use of it. Im waiting for it to come down in value so I can buy it from him. He rents it out to select people right now, $30,000 new. They must have 8 excavators all the way up to a 325 cat and I dont even know how many CAT front end loaders they have.

I've rented one like that & what a sweet machine. Real nice for puting in water & gas lines or for diging footings. Gerald

You got that right. Funny thing is when the kid bought it, his dad told him "thats no better than a shovel" Guess whos eating his words and loves it. LOL

How does it compare to a backhoe on the back of a tractor? Obviously you cant pivot like this fine machine but power wise how does it compare?

I think the most useful machine ive used was a backhoe attachment for a Skid steer personally

There is no comparison to a tractor backhoe. With this you can do mutipal hydrulic functions at the same time. You can swing, extend the boom and dump the bucket all at the same time. Its hard to explaine. With a tractor backhoe you can only do one function at a time. Lift, turn dump, with 2or4 sticks. With the cat its 2 sticks that do all sorts of functions.

All functions will work at the same time on a tractor backhoe. Using at least 2 functions at a time is the trick to making any backhoe smoother to operate. 2 joy sticks is the most common on any hoe, whether it's a backhoe or an excavator. There's only 4 main functions; boom, stick, bucket and swing. An excavator has a big advantage in that it can swing 360 deg. and is easier to reposition. In soft conditions an excavator has a big advantage as well. A tractor loader backhoe is more versatile than an excavator though. A TLB will have oodles more digging power than a mini excavator like that one. Excavators are still nice to operate and you can see better on them than a TLB. Dave

A skid steer backhoe attachment is a real pain compared to other hoes. To see good, you need a seperate seat mounted on the hoe but to reposition you have to get back in the skid steer to move. If you run the hoe from the skid steer seat, you can't see down in the hole you're digging. They do make the poorman's backhoes for skid steers that just have an arm and a bucket and are turned with the skid steer. For shallow trenching, they'd be OK but no comparison to a mini excavator. Dave

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.

Most trackhoes use 2 pumps to split the functions, whereas a backhoe uses only one pump with a diverter to switch the hydraulics from the loader to the backhoe etc. Thats why trackhoes generally have a lot smoother fast actions. The same can be achieved on a backhoe, but you have to be familiar with the machine and know the characteristics since some movements will tend to naturally draw more power. Now on the new "pilot control" backhoes they have done something to counteract that and make them run exactly like a trackhoe. what that is I don't know, but I can tell you a new deere 310j is a far cry from a 310d. Very nice smooth consistent power. On most hoes the extendahoe function tends to dominate your movements, as you can use that by itself quickly, or do it all at once slowly. Not the case on the newer machines. Very very nice.

Really don't need two pumps - just one that's big enough. Ultimately it comes to gallons per minute at pressure, and horsepower to drive that.

Certainly no need to use the loader at the same time as the backhoe on a TLB under any normal circumstance. As for running the hoe cylinders all at once .vs. several at once, all at once certainly takes more fluid, but the neat part on a properly designed hoe is that "which cylinder takes the fluid" naturally balances when you have them all hauled in. You can fight the ground if you like, trying to dictate exactly where you grab that bucketful from, but you get a hole faster if you let the machine dig (within the reach of the hoe and the area of the hole you actually want - on a trench, that's everything within reach of the hoe).

Using the bucket to grade (pushing or pulling) is more of an artform or test of the delicate touch on the controls, whether the controls be 4-stick or joystick.