Am looking for mini skidder to mainly bore holes for decks/porches, etc...and was thinking stand on type, but after some reading it souds like the 43 may be better suited and would work well for winter time clean up as well. Do they take all the attachments their big brothers run? How much pwr do they have for typical digging-mine would mostly be snow in tight parking area between cars, but I'm sure I'd play in the dirt as well if it's scrap out sod or dirt for fine tuning grade for concrete mechanically before we break our backs with shovels and hoes. So any experience with the 463 is appreciated.
I would consider a mini excavator with a auger attachement over a small skidsteer if your into trenching and digging holes. If you had a small enough machine that will work for your needs you will be busy digging trenches for water lines etc. You just need a machine that will dig 4' down which is about frost line in most areas.
Ford LT: A mini excavator would be cool if I did more trench footings or egress windows, but I dont do enough of them to warrant the expense of that type of machine since it could not be fully utilized with what I doing with my business now as I sub out those aspects the few times we need it. I could see it being useful when we get ready to expand again however and keep more in house and also get on a list of guys to call when they need stuff done. Right now my main priority is post holes first and foremost as we dig quite a few a year, and secondly I could use this little 463 in my apratment complex parking lots to remove snow in hard to reach places with our full trucks...would make it easy to send out one of the guys to "cut in" then send out the trucks for the blunt work and have spot free lots when we're done...I cant imagine myself or anybody else standing on the back of a walk behind or ride on mini skidder for that type of work:spaz too xxxxxxx cold!!!!
What type of soil do you have in your area? Bobcat's website lists 3 different models of augers, with only 1 fitting the 463. This is the high speed/low torque auger. I wouldn't expect this to work very well in rocky conditions, more of a topsoil kind of application, like the videos on their website. A guy out by me has a T190 with the 30c model (high torque/low speed) with the rock bit. It's taken up to 3 hours to dig a 3' hole in basically granite. We're on the coast remember. He does alot of work for sign and fence companies. Usually when we do sona tubes or "bigfoots" people will use a mini-x because it's faster and the augers won't drill a 24" hole through the crap out here. Make sure the auger/machine you purchase has enough balls for your conditions. I don't know what the aux flow on the 463 is but it probably isn't much. You might want to look at a light materials bucket for the snow. It would help speed things up instead of using the 3' bucket.
We're lucky here as the worst we get is clay and that's very dependant on where we're working, but mostly it's just black dirt and sandy soil so power wise it wont take too much.