I thought I would give you all an update on the 420 backhoe and 307 excavator we bought. I am very impressed with both machines. The backhoe is a very tight machione and the controls are smooth and powerful. The pilot controls have absolutley no "feel" to them however. I have been running backhoes pretty consistently since I was 14 ( I am now an old man at 33) and have tore up more stuff in the past 6 months than I believe I have in the last 15 years. I am so used to feeling that little bump in the controls of hydralic control. You just dont have that with a "fly by wire" machine. Hopefully I will get used to it. The only gripe I have is that it is a lot more goosey with the exenda hoe fully extended than the New Holland was. But we usually have the 24" bucket on it and that is a lot of weight hanging out there. The thing I like best is way the bucket opens for staright wall digging while maintaing the breakout force you get when you have a conventional "2 hole position " bucket at its non straight wall position. It is just a powerful nice machine. The 307 is also great. It will out pace the backhoe by 70 to 100 feet an hour. The crowd seems a little weak though but the lift makes up for it. I have not ran a lot of excavators but it seems as if with a backhoe you are crowding in and scraping to fill the bucket and with the excavator you crowd in at the bottom of the ditch and lift up, tearing through the dirt in a more upwards lifting motion to fill the bucket. You guys that have ran a lot of excavators..... is this just how you dig with these machines or is the crowd on our machine weak as compared to a backhoe? Other than that the 307 was well worth the money. Please let me know about the digging styles issue. Thanks, Hotwire22
The short time i had the 420IT it was great I love the excavator joystick control, the all open backend and the easy of switching from bucket to forks . The only thing is that they want a little to much for them .
I love digging with our 420. It has tons of power. On a recent job, I filled the front bucket with dirt and flipped the stabilizer pads to the dirt setting and it ripped stumps out of the ground with authority :eek2 . The job was also real muddy, but that hardly slowed it down at all.
While I don't know for sure, I believe a great number of issues with Cat loaders are being worked out as we speak. I have heard that Case's pilot controls are really sensitive (and you can feel a bump as well), but I'm not sure of the validity of that. As for 307 crowd being weak, that's odd... I'm assuming you're talking bucket, right?
What type of issues? Our 420 is one of the first 300 made and we have had no problems at all. I'm just curious if I should be looking for something?