Looking for input here. Visited a customer who hired a Gradall to clean a farm ditch. The operator ran this machine full time and the ditch was damned perfect. Consistent shape , grade , and clean of spillage. He was loading out the spoils into a single dump trailer so he had spare time in the cycle i suspect. From what I was told it was two buckets and move. Anyone have experience with doing this work either with a gradall or tilt bucket care to weigh in? Which is best?
I'd put my money on the Gradall . Machine that has stood the test of time from it's beginning in the " Warner Swasey " day's . Our county road department uses them . 90% of the time with a 4' smooth bucket . Pretty impressive what it will do for the size machine . http://www.gradall.com/excavator-models/en/highway_wheeled.php I'm looking around at an old rubber tire G3WD unit for short tasks & tag teaming with the skid loader on jobs where it won't justify moving in the tracked excavator . Pretty handy to just hop in the truck cab & peel out to the job site .
I work for our county highway dept. (We maintain 2500 miles of roads - 600,000 population + 300,000 in the cities). We have 3 gradalls (down from 4) and 2 excavators with twist wrists (up from 1). My opinion is the wrist on an excavator increases the efficiency if your doing excavating and restoration type work on smaller sites. It makes a decent operator a better operator in the sense he / she doesn't have to re-position as much. Probably don't need it for mostly digging storm sewer or pipe runs. We even put a twist wrist on our TLB.
Gradall's are the only thing our county uses.....can't recall anything different. Ed
I missed a deal on a Gradall 660E last year . Still looking . Low profile boom for working under utility lines or inside a building . Not to mention the attachments that can be added . I like the " telestick" at 2:32 in the video .
One problem with gradalls trying to tunnel around utilities. Another is digging in a trench box. Like most machines they have their places
Gradall live Boom Attachment ..... http://www.gradall.com/excavator_attachments.html