I have been thinking about this for several years . i started looking for a hoe but they were ether more money than i wanted to spend or to far away to bring home but i found one 25 mile away 2 weeks ago for about scrap price. I want to mount it on a truck. In the next 1 year or 2 i will be building a shop and maybe a house were i will need to do some digging and i will also build a grapple to load scrap iron. I have 3 trucks to chose from a low milage c60 that hasnt been on the road in 20 years a IH that is now my winch truck that i was going to replace with the c70 i bought or a 1961 f600 that i am leaning to it runs good and more important to me its cab is shorter in height and easyer to get in to. I am going to make it hinge so it can lay on the truck frame to go down the road but the cylinders for that will be the last thing i do.
I just sold one yesterday.
My older friend (now deceased) was born with too much money to work. He inherited several businesses & others ran them. He was a dabbler in whatever caught his interest. He bought an ice cream plant & turned it into a machine shop. At one point he acquired a Ford NAA "Golden Jubilee" tractor with a shop built backhoe. The hoe was too much strain on the old tractor & the differential casting broke. He had a Chevrolet 1950? tow truck with a Holmes twin boom wrecker. After repairing the tractor, he fitted the hoe to the truck. It became his "Tow Hoe". At one point, he made a half a$$ed effort at digging a sewer line to his man cave. It was too shallow, & I had to dig it deeper with my Case 580K.
I dug in a 3/4" gas line with mine. In places it was 3' deep. It would have been smarter to rent a trencher. That 2' bucket was not necessary. I am still packing in the soft spots years later.
Dang now that makes me want to mount it on my IH. Do i see right it has only one cylinder to stow it on back of the truck? I think i like the seat moving with the boom. Thanks the picture has helped me alot.
Yes, 1 cylinder folds it up. There are 2 chains to keep the boom from flopping left and right. One has slotted holes both ends the other has a slotted hole 1 end and a screw crank the other end to tighten it up for transport. The thing is at least 12 feet high when stowed. The seat did swing with the boom. I did not notice a whole lot of difference with that way of doing things vs the backhoe way of sitting still.
I am getting ready to start on my truck hoe. Can some one tell me what the distance is from the ground to the bottom of the hoe unit is on a case like this? I am thinking about building a air ride or a diffrent spring set up all together. I would remove rear end chop of the rear of the frame and mount new suspension so i would have zero over hang behind axle and have full frame not the neck down over the axle frame rails.
I can't say until I measure, I've had 5 backhoes, two John Deere, Three Case. I'll say they were near identical, 12" under the swing tower. Functional truck mounted were each designed more like a wheeled excavator. They have had a turntable & could swing 360 degrees except for the cab of the truck. I looked at a Power Wagon once, had a grafted hoe from a backhoe. Cliff had his "Tow Hoe". They didn't work real well. The only functional truck mounted was on a military surplus 6x6. George Connors did quite a number of cellar holes, & other homesite septic & other work when I was a child (mid sixties). If I recall, his was a Bantam. It had its own engine.
Here's some major dirt digging and scraping machines.
Designed to move money from your pocket to theirs, not to move dirt.
Why those are compact/and early compact money makers. The Gibson is a early Toro Dingo.
Neighbor got a belly blade for his Farmall Cub. I thought it looked like the sort of thing you could dress a driveway of processed material. WRONG! A fellow has a tiny Kubota, lawn mower size, with loader & hoe. We used it in 2011 when the flood undermined the "sugar house" I could drive inside with four feet of headroom. In that specialized application, it saved a lot of wheelbarrow work. Otherwise it is best suited for planting posies. Those tow behind things, I haven't used. I am only looking to the numbers, they weigh nothing. I doubt I could plant potatoes with one. A collector has a HOP TO DIGGER. It is two tons of trailer backhoe. Likely 1940 vintage. It is set up behind a John Deere crawler (green). I recently heard the story: Austin Rumney married into a family of 5 generations of merchants in the "hardware" business. He wasn't accepted by his in laws, so he busied himself elsewhere. He won a contract with the State of Vermont to install guardrails along Route 30. He was expected to dig post holes 6 feet deep by hand, but he bought the HOP TO instead. Made good money with his labor saver.