Buying a cheap value packed Chinese Mini Excavator Rippa

well hello I'm Mike FAA welcome back in the last few episodes of my mini cabin build I've been talking about that I bought a on tonon mini excavator so this is the first installment of a few videos on this series a few more in the future will be some upgrades maybe a digging claw and a rake that'll add to it later on right now this is just going to be initial video about purchasing it where I ordered it from why I chose this machine so I've had the machine put about 10 hours on it last month and a half and it's been trouble-free so far going to go into quite a bit of detail why I chose to get this machine rather than a lot of other ones sold on eBay there's a lot of Manufacturers sell on these this one just seemed to be a little Cut Above So this one has a hydraulic thumb a few other little features and it was $6,100 with free shipping to my door so it's the big time backsaver great for the garden great for using Around The Sawmill hauling rocks around my place so uh if you're interested in the video stick around and enjoy it so I should probably reward that didn't ship to my door I actually got it shipped to my business I work at it's a lot easier to receive it with the forklift than to try to De with the uh liftgate fee or anything like that at my house so unwrapped it here it came with a manual some tools grease gun basic stuff like that some of my friends came out to take a look at it and drive it off the pallet and uh drive it around the parking lot a little bit so one thing I want to note was as soon as I drove it off the pallet I could feel one of the tracks were tension too tight you could just feel it was more underload when you're driving that hydraulic motor so I just backed off the jam nut backed off the adjuster bolt a few turns and uh tightened up the jam nut again and it was good to go so when you get these things sometimes you got to Tinker with them a little bit that was about all I had to do but just pay attention to that you know I see a lot of people on forums having issues with these things all the time you got to be a little bit mechanically inclined so nice thing about it was it was shipped with just a little bit of gas it was clean no water in it started right up heard some horror stories about people getting these things from eBay and different parts of the internet and just having to work on them right off the bat I mean you're going to have to work on these things sooner or later but it was nice it didn't have any water in the fuel fired right up no bedet battery everything just seemed to work just fine so by the time I got it home it was dust so I took off the little sun shade roof and brought in my shop looked everything over some of the zerks were painted over but everything looked like it had a good douse of grease and all the bushings and pins uh looking at over the machine there are some features like this divider valve this little manual divider valve for the hydraulic thumb all the hydraulic lines had all hose wrapping all throughout everything which is just really nice A little extra Cut Above also the lines go into the boom which is another nice feature you see on more expensive uh machines and just everything had nice hose protection on it little badge right there for the make and model uh checking out all the thickness blade is 10 mm underc Carriage is all 10 mm everything seem seemed to be pretty sturdy gusseted blade 12 mm with the boom meets uh just stuff just seemed to be pretty well I just wanted to kind of get some of these shots in here to show the thickness of all the metal that's used on this machine another feature I was really looking for in a machine and this had it were actually large pins that held everything together with uh retaining bolts some of the cheaper machines were run big bolts and Nylock nuts on the other side this is just a nicer cut with the retaining pins and bushings when I got it I realized it also had this motor bar spreader here that keep the frame kind of gusseted and protect the motor in the back some of the cheaper machines definitely don't have that didn't make it here 100% pristine though there's some dents and some ding scratched off paint so there's some scratch paint there something that you can easily touch up with a little Rustoleum yellow and black but I just want to point that stuff out there's a few little little hiccups along the way so scratch paint little bits of dents here and there but hey man it's an ex it's a little piece of Machinery it's going to get scuffed up and scratched I don't mind putting a little bit of touch-up paint on it so this is one of the reasons I uh was looking over this model just a few little things has the external oil filter some of them don't have this for the hydraulic return everything's set up pretty well for the cable and choke poles little stainless steel clasp right here the throttle works great the choke works fine this model actually starts up pretty well even without the choke on I've had some cers and some some other engines that usually have to uh put the choke on even when they're warm to fire them up this one fires up right at idle without the choke I think the most of them are set up this way but the engine's all rubber isolated mounted on here not a ton of room back here to put a counterbalance but we're going to work on one of those in a future video probably supposedly it has a Parker pump so we'll pull off this side cover another nice thing is this one actually came with I don't know Seven 8 inch fan up here kicks on as soon as you turn on the ignition that's nice pretty clean pretty simple setup in here lock washer is nut and then another nut with a n loock on top of that ran down same for the engine mounts and bottle decent looking drives this is another cool thing I didn't realize some people are selling kits that you can put on here a weld on kit to kind of make sure this whole back area is protected by your Motors a little more keeps them from bending or anything like that I was able to tie this thing down in the bed of my truck with this big spreader bar I know that looks like it's probably eight or 10 mm something like that nice big spreader bar it's all welded in place back here get your pull start back up there's the 13 1 12 horsepower Briggs and Stratton this one actually has a plastic hydraulic reservoir tank I stopped by the gas station put a little ethanol free in this thing try to run that always in most of these small engines so it's always kind of good to check over a bunch of Hardware I'm going to run it for about 2 hours with the oil that's in it and then change the oil at least I'll know I got good quality stuff in there same with the Hydraulics I think in the next five hours I'm going to switch that that out I got some other hydraulic fluid but I noticed this um pump supply line was sitting right up on the frame rail here so I cut some probably a little under 8 inch plastic heated it with the torch drilled some holes in it and set it up just as a chafe protector cuz that hose probably over enough time would vibrate and get a little cut in it just definitely don't want to be fine hoses for this thing so look over your hose rout anywhere you see something shaing or anything like that wrap it with something that'll protect it so I'm getting ready to put the back panel on here the hardware came out kind of rough so I put a little grease on here that or never sees but um also don't want to rattling out so anticipation with this machine I ordered this little stainless lock washer set off of Amazon I'll put links below just figured out put these on on all this Hardware keep them from backing out rattling off [Music] the floorboard is actually pretty thick on here it's over 8 in I'm not sure what it equates to in a metric but it's actually thicker than the uh Yanmar I have floor plate so here's the hydraulic Reservoir right here it's got a little sight glass looks like it's a little on the low side I'm going to drain this out and put some uh 46 hydraulic fluid in here some people say some of these have like uh more of a vegetable based lower quality hydraulic fluid in here looks like an extra port on the side blow a little air in here and clean that out but that's kind of nice all these bolts have a uh stainless lock wire going through them so they can't loosen up on your swing motor that's kind of a nice little touch you know all these lines through here are all hose wrapped for protection bunch of the wiring has pretty nice connections on it jump to the other side take a look at it pretty decent Siz battery kind of wish this was located in the back any extra weight we can get back there the better yeah there's that stainless tie keep those swing motor bolts tight and not backing out pretty easy to get to everything in here little LED light see how was say wiring connections on here are pretty nice a lot of them have the lines over the top of the boom these ones run inside everything got nice hose protectors on it they got these divider valves up here so you can run your hydraulic thumb that was another nice thing is this one actually has a thumb on it that's actually hydraulic you can rotate these and run like a augur or anything like that and then turn them back and then start running your thumb again but yeah all the lines go through the boom here and they're all wrapped really well big rubber grommet right here where all the lines go into the house of the machine keeps them from chafing I guess which is nice may do some type of a guard here or might see if I can flip this cylinder around and put these lines on the inside if I have clearance but the pins I really like the way the pins are set up on here they got these retainer bolts everything looks like it's been greased pretty well from the factory which I'll pump some more grease in but it's got these like insert bushings in here feels like this one had just a little Cut Above see retainer pin on the other side and kind of a a bushing mounted in there everything sits nice compact up against the uh Dipper here NY loock on all this Nylock and all the hardware up here that holds these pins in I would like if these were encapsulated some of the machines have more of a encapsulated uh scraper blade but this is like all 10 mm it's got these slots in here I was able to use those to kind of hold it down on the better of the truck we'll see if this holds up it's all gussed in on the inside it's capped in right here this is all 10 mil it's gusseted on the inside with 10 mil all this stuff where I've saw a YouTube video where a guy broke this off on an old machine this is all 10 mm the whole bottom Carriage down here is all 10 mm really nice welds going through here pretty thick gussets so I think this is all going to be fine again everything's has been graced down here pretty well from the factory access ports up here for getting to your controls if you want to switch it over this is just set up the same as I think cat controls same as my Yanmar I'm just going to keep it that way pulled the uh little sun shade off in here that was even set up to plug goes into the top part and bolts onto here I think it might keep it if it flopped on side from going all the way over but it's not really erops by any means brought it off of here so I can bring it in through the door for my shop pretty simple little machine I like that about it it looks very easy to work on another nice thing is everything seems to have these quality control marks on here so everything's been torqued down and checked off with the FL paint marker on all the hydraulic fittings everything's been inspected and I mean it seems like this one's I've seen some stuff on some forums and things where they've been put together pretty scabby I mean maybe it'll come apart but you know everything's got marks on it that it's torqued get Briggs and Stratton like this but you can also get them with like a three cylinder I think 14 or 16 horse K cabota the K cabota this is probably a 70 lb engine the cabota has got to be 350 lb at least so I don't mind if I can put 200 lb back here it's not going to harm the machine at all oh this setup be kind of nice to mount some extra stuff too just wing nut this off this is where uh if you had a diesel model the fuel tank sat down here for the extra large diesel tank and there was a thread on fuel gauge that sat on there for a cap this feels like that's aluminum turn this on and turn the key on hear that fan kicks right on designed wi to pull the air out which makes sense take any of the heat from this side of the engine the fan on the engine's pulling air in that way and then that thing's designed to move all the hot air away from the exhaust and out this way no hour meter but that's fine I actually ordered a hour meter temp gauge and a bunch of stuff I'm probably going to put the temp gauge in the Hydraulics somewhere just to read what the Hydraulics are doing this the throttle headlight so all this Hardware came out pretty tight felt like it was kind of jammed in there one of them was cross threaded so I ran a tap through hopefully I clean it up but some reason this back panel most of the panels on here feel a little bit like handling washing machine panels maybe it's a hair thicker but not by much I mean it's dirty enough it's going to be fine unless you really slam it up against a rock or a tree all right enough overview let's get to using this thing here's some footage I compiled over the last month and a half doing some little grading alongside my driveway just cutting some stuff for some better drainage I found this machine is a little harder to grade with than my bigger Yanmar it's a single pump system rather than the triple pump in my Yanmar I'll go into some of that detail later on but you know it's better than a shovel and a pickaxe a lot easier stay the back doing some more a little water bar ditching on some of the trails going up to my Mill uh this is just the kind of stuff that you know I might get out there sometime with my bigger machine and clean it up but honestly since I've been running this little one I've been wanting to get some hours in on it and having that thumb for ripping out brush and doing weeding in the garden and uh moving logs around my Mill that little hydraulic thumb and how small this machine is has some disadvantages being the small small machine a little Tippy but it also has some big Advantage getting some tight spots here I'm getting ready to uh bring my tiny cabin home and I was prepping the spot getting some of this rock that I've had there sitting for a year and a half since I got it unloaded from my friend's dump truck and something too big to move around by yourself and this thing did a great job definitely good little machine I want to give a shout out to two different YouTube channels if you're interested in these mini excavators so a channel I want to give a shout out to is Ron at fabin Adventures he picked up a q12 used off of marketplace it was basically almost brand new but he had go through clean the carb do a few things to get it running he's got some good videos on doing some maintenance on them and he's starting to work on some buckets and some attachments like that and again his fabin adventures he's got all kinds of cool content on his channel has a really cool Suzuki Samurai build he did and a bunch of other neat stuff so go ahead be links below to his channel so check that out and next Channel I want to give a shout out to is Papa junk I came across his channel a few months back when I was looking over mini excavators and he had some pretty cool content he's he's an older fella and he does a bunch of Fabrication in his garage building buckets and different things and different attachments he hooked up a hydraulic motor to a mowing deck basically and built a really cool brush mower for it and runs it off the Hydraulics of his excavator definitely worthwhile check out his channel if you dig back on his channel too he's got a really cool little Powerhouse and a little Hydro El Electric System definitely some channels worth checking out again links Below in the description so all this video footage I compiled over the last month month and a half for two months using this thing and man having that hydraulic thumb for cutting firewood this is just some windfall fell alongside my driveway and uh was kind of a mess for a few days until I got time to get down there with the excavator and pick it up and it's so nice to be able to pull stuff out of the bushes and start uh cutting it up into firewood it's a backs saer it's nice to be able to cut at waist level as well rather than cutting on the ground and it sucks always hitting your chainsaw blade in the dirt and doing the blade so this definitely is going to be a game changer when it comes to processing firewood like I said I got a Yanmar it's a much bigger machine but never got around to putting a thumb on it yet I should have would have made a lot more useful but um this machine has a few features that the Yanmar doesn't have and that's it's being more Nimble small Yanmar I have to put on a large car trailer this thing is one ton so I can put in the back of my truck or I can haul in a smaller trailer and I got a few projects at some friends places doing some rock wall work and doing some trenching from water and power line and this is just going to be a lot better machine especially cuz I got a haul about a few hundred miles so it's got to be good to be able haul this right behind my Toyota FJ or something rather than having to use the big truck and a car trailer to move my bigger machine well spent about an hour cut up that uh tree that fell over there in a windstorm and got this stuff cut up here this is some Hemlock I've been needing to get to it's just been too hard with my other machine with the uh manual grapple on it so it's been sitting got it all cut up the machine's been running it's just above idle off and on for the past hour and the temperature on it the little temperature probe I put on says the hydraulic fluid is around uh 83 right now so that's not bad um I'm not doing a ton of crazy work just mostly thumb work travel little blade not doing a trenching but people talk about this running hot that's got the fan on the side I think it's about 48 to 50 out uh we'll keep doing some updates when we do some more digging and stuff and see how hot this thing really gets so here's another job that fell into the weeds basically I brought these home maybe four or five years ago there's some kind of Tea Bar pallet racking mainly for storing Lumber or metal on they end up making some good shelfing and I brought them back for my Mill so I could start getting some my lumber uh stacked up higher on these unloaded them I don't know four or five years ago with my tractor and just the weed started growing around them so got in there with this little hydraulic thumb on this mini and started lifting these out something two guys could haul each one out individually but it's hard to get extra hands around here to help so it's nice to have machine like this it's a complete backsaver for the $6,100 it's really hard to beat you got to put it in perspective of course it's not going to have Japanese quality like a k cabota or a new yanar it's not going to have triple pumps like those machines are going to have there's going to be some downsides with the single pump I'll talk with about later but one thing is you got to consider not beating up your body you don't want to hernia you don't want to have back problems I already have back issues so anytime I don't have to lift this stuff by hand the better for $6,100 another thing to put in perspective my Yanmar is like a 30 plus year old machine early '90s uh it's about 5,500 lb excavator doesn't have a hydraulic thumb I bought it it's got 3,200 hours or something I paid about 11,000 when I bought it from a great Market importer and within two weeks the final drive went out on it and that was $24 $2,500 just for the final drive motor for the machine still working great now after replaced it had no other major problems other than you know basic wear and tear going through rebuilding some cylinders here and there and luckily I can do that kind of stuff myself but it's not cheap to do and uh I worry about if a pump goes out on sometime might render the machine [Applause] useless so few things I want to mention about these machines there's no lockout on the controls so either turn it off if you're not right by it and you got kids around or anybody and always lower it down don't make a mistake by doing something dumb like climbing on and grabbing a joystick cuz you can pull it swing it right onto you you know another thing I'm going to shut it off I'm not exactly sure why you shut it off and takes like 5 seconds before it completely shuts off maybe it's got a little solenoid in the car I don't know never leave a machine with the Hydraulics up like this cuz again kid could be picking around on it kids think these are toys you know I mean adults think they're toys but see even with it off there's no lockout so I always make a point to lower the blade lower the uh bucket anything like that make sure there's no pressure from the Hydraulics at all if you're going to park it and leave it cuz it will stay up for a long period of time like that but just take someone to mess around with it pull the valve and drop it down not a big thing but just something to pay attention to so like I said earlier this is a single hydraulic pump system not a triple pump that's a way they save quite a bit of money building these things so if you're traveling and you pull both levers back both tracks move at the same time but you release one lever and all of a sudden more flow goes the other track and the track spins about twice the speed that's why these can be pretty jerky when you run them I run this thing around third throttle maybe half but it has plenty of power at that RPM just makes it travel smoother but also here I'm traveling back now I go to rotate see I'm going track slow way down or if I drop the blade or raise the blade travel speed slows down it's a big difference on the single pump but it's what makes this thing very affordable and it makes it very simple to work on Myanmar for instance a lot of name brand machines run triple pumps which are Super costly thousands of dollars for a hydraulic pump and the way they work is like one pump will run one track the right track other pump will run the left track and the third pump on my Yanmar for instance will run the blade so you can grade and it doesn't slow or speed up any track when you're grading and those same functions run for different functions on the say the curl the Dipper and the boom so if you're traveling you try to move your boom on my Yanmar one of your TRS will slow down so that's way they kind of get around it for uh making this a very simple machine and just going to make travel and movement a little more jerky but with that being said you can do quite a bit with this machine even at a third throttle it has plenty of flow even for a single pump uh you can raise for instance up the uh boom and curl the bucket at the same time right here I'm rotating and raising up the blade all that stuff works just fine even with the flow rate of a single pump right here I'm just moving the lever back and forth hard and stopping and people talk about these being really jerky but you can finesse them run them smooth but a lot of people just jam it over like that and move around with the lever Full Tilt you don't really need to run it you can really run these things pretty smooth they're a little more bouncy being a lighter smaller footprint machine and a little more Tippy but you can do quite a bit and if you're ditching like cutting in waterline things like that and clearing out brush and stuff you can do quite a bit with a little simple machine like this you know years ago I bought a uh three-point bco smaller backo unit than this but it fit on my tractor it had a little uh PTO driven pump that thing was about $4,500 and it was way smaller and this thing can drive under its own power it's going track system and engine so I think the value is definitely in this now that's pretty much uh full reach there and uh that's a pretty good size Rock the salt here this look be a 15-in bucket so this is rocks like 16 by probably 18 by probably 16 that way it's Mucky it's spring I got to definitely wash this thing off don't want to keep it this way too long but it is an excavator going to be getting used going to be getting used in the rain or shine uh simple adjustment Jam nut adjustment uh Rod just put a wrench in there after you Loos out the jam nut and to back the track off you turn this and thread that out tension the track make sure that jam nut's released hey Sasha there's nothing special in there and then you tighten that up until the track is fairly tensioned so I want to make this clear I paid 100% out of pocket for this machine I'm not paid to make this video in any way shape or form as you know if you're familiar with my channel if I find something that offers good value I'll make a video or review on it and I ordered out of a place in Texas Texas I think it's a kazana they actually sell food trucks some equipment and some uh Furniture of all things they've been in business for many years I originally found this machine online looking over a bunch of machines doing a bunch of research for about a month before I ordered it and uh when I found this machine I was kind of on the fence about it cuz it was about $5 $600 more maybe $800 more than other machines but this one had a hydraulic thumb and a few other options like the pins and the lines going in the Boom the other machines had manual thumbs and some stuff like that just didn't quite have everything I was looking for but I still consider one of those manual thumb machines uh I think AGM or AMG or something like that there's q12 h12 a bunch of different machines and finally decided like overnight they went up like $500 on eBay and it made this one only like $300 to $400 more with a bunch of different op itions and hydraulic thumbs so instead of going through eBay I've tracked down their website in Texas and found a bunch more information emailed back and forth they were super helpful answer a lot of questions for me and so I decided to go through them they also have different attachments and stuff buckets available for these machines so I'll put a link down below to their website like I said uh I have no problem sending people their way they seem to be super nice to deal with but I do not get paid any commission by any means I want to make that clear with everybody on YouTube because everybody thinks you got a YouTube channel you're just getting free stuff given to you left and right it's not the case here definitely looking to get this thing undercover here like my tractor is over there but right now this is just a simple motorcycle cover from Amazon it covers the main housing of this thing uh boom and everything's out in the rain but uh probably this spring I'll build a little out Building and park it in but yeah I picked up a lot of logs and rocks and this is pretty sturdy I have not had a problem I've seen some issues with these uh thumbs on different built machines from different companies where they don't have a spreader bar in the center here it's not built as strong and that people just fet them in the first hour of use and I got like 10 on this thing been picking up pretty good size logs no issues nothing's bent like that I have flared out the bucket of hair over here and on this side because of these large side Digger teeth um clamping down on rocks and logs bucket's pretty thin but I don't think if it bends out a little bit it's going to be issue I can always gusset it up got some plans and making some different attachments for this thing buckets augers there's all kinds of different stuff but the buckets are pretty cheap for these machines the company I got them from sells Digger buckets or trencher buckets which are much skinnier and wider gravel buckets they get tilting buckets also so yeah pretty good little system hope you enjoyed the video if you did give it a Thumbs Up YouTube does a very poor job of promoting my channel anymore so uh they don't even really tell my subscribers got new videos out so if you feel like you hit the Bell icon or not doesn't really matter all right until next time take care oh I'll have some update videos on this machine in the future all right goodbye

Channel: Mike festiva

Views: 64,028

Keywords: mini excavator, diy, excavator, excavating, landscaping, buying a excavator, cheap excavator, Cat, caterpiller, mini rippa Excavator, compact excavator, bobcat, buying a mini excavator, mini excavator review, hydraulic crawler, mini digger, Chinese digger, H12, Qh12, ff12, Groundhog, Rippa, 319, AGT, Chinese excavator, Kubota, Yanmar

Id: cs6T7Ok_eZU

Length: 27min 17sec (1637 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 12 2024