Heavy Equipment Will Improve Your Life

the first piece of equipment I owned in my life was a tractor that I bought to support the sawmill that I built when I was 22 years old the tractor was a 1958 model International I nine and I needed it primarily for lifting and setting the logs up onto the deck of my sawmill and then moving the lumber the slabs and sawdust away from the mill I bought that tractor when I was 27 I knew when I bought it that the engine was seized up and I was pretty proud of myself once I got it running by the way that's my daughter and my video producer standing behind me in this photo I did a little bit of dirt work with that old tractor it was old enough that it always drove me crazy when I just had to find parts but even though I often fantasized about a newer nicer bigger faster stronger smarter machine I was always extremely grateful to have this old boy I bought it for 200 bucks from a local irrigation district in Powell Wyoming and ended up selling it after I moved it and the sawmill back to Oregon in 1993 the next portion of my career was pretty much exclusively carpentry and when you're building and remodeling there's just not a lot of ways for equipment to help sure occasionally a forklift or crane shows up but primarily it's just you and your bare hands now in this picture we're using a backhoe and a forklift to get these trusses up onto the posts and this is me climbing around and I think because of my childhood growing up around logging I really understood the benefit that heavy equipment could provide on any jobsite in fact I think I was a little more tuned in with that than some of the other carpenters that I worked with this is the first house that I built for my family really the first spec house that I built and there was no heavy equipment on site for this or many of the other houses that I've built over the years but I'm showing you this picture so you can see that this truck right here parked in front of this project it's one of the forefathers of my tool tank as you can see in the picture I had already identified a flatbed as being the way to go and the locations of these two toolboxes exist on my work rig just about exactly like this to this day and when I moved back from Oregon to Las Vegas I went into business with my dad logging he already owned a couple of log trucks so the first machine we bought together was a cat [Music] the first one we had with the d4 which we later upgraded to this d6 see after the four it was a night and day difference to climb up onto that six now yes a d6 is still considered a small cat but boy it felt like almost unlimited power and it would pull in just about as many second growth fir logs as we could choke into the turn and it wasn't that much harder to maintain or to fuel for that matter now early on we had already converted one of the log trucks to a log loader which increased production and allowed us to make more money with less labor and if you're interested in logging you might take a look at a podcast we did recently talking about a lot of the basics of this industry the basics at least as I know them and experience them as someone who grew up in this area and has been around it most of my life so there's a video of this podcast on our second channel if you want to check it out and at the end of the day they would know how much would they put on the ground and thus how much money they made and they made a ton of money but they usually work six hours because you would exhaust yourself and once you got tired you'd get killed and frankly they usually made about two days wages in six hours Wow this cat belongs to my friend Bill Martineau whom you might remember from a few years ago when we did a video on cutting down some of these white oak trees on his place the d6 we had was almost identical to this one and if I needed a cat today I'd go out and buy another one just about like it now even though this machine is 43 years old parts are readily available it's easy to work on and it can really climb it really pulls and it really pushes [Music] sy has a very similar cat but quite a bit newer and he uses it primarily for dirt work it set up a little differently with these rippers on the back instead of a winch and his is not a caterpillar at all it's a dresser 15 II that he has owned and used for 15 years [Music] I was able to use the d6 for a couple of jobs while I was transitioning from logging back into construction and they were fun it was helpful on this job which was entirely dirt work to have the cat and to also rent this excavator we had a great time in fact that should be mentioned in this discussion it is seriously big fun to operate heavy equipment on this job I used the cat to help drag a bridge a railroad flat car actually across a creek it was a fun and challenging rigging and mechanical advantage puzzle to get this job done with just the cat only accessible from the near side of the creek I'll try to find some more pictures and someday show you what we did this is a case backhoe that I owned for several years I bought this machine from an equipment rental yard and it helped me with a lot of jobs that I was doing mostly foundations and big flat work when I bought it I imagined that I would sort of transition a lot of my work to dirt work and site prep types of things but I was never really able to make that happen in order to fully utilize a machine like this you got to have a dump truck and I just never got around to finding and buying and jumping into life as a dump truck owner plus my contracting business was extremely diverse pretty much every single job required a fresh take but the backhoe was so versatile these things can be used for pulling and lifting and loading for grading and trenching they're just great arguably the most versatile piece of heavy equipment you can buy this is another bridge job this time helping sy replace a bridge into a field near his house he's had that little back hole in the background of this picture for a good long time just finishing up cutting off of route AJT my lovely wife here supervising and getting ready to take care of her bees pretty good shape this is the Kubota that you've seen several times that I've owned with my dad for the last 10 years or so it's a really terrific all-around sort of multi tool platform it's small enough that I can haul it on my dump trailer with my work truck but it's just barely big enough that I can move material drill post holes plow the garden mow the field move pallets and even dig with tobacco attachment that I have for it now this would be considered a tractor and tractors are famously versatile in the work they can get done and if I was going to upgrade this I might get just a little bigger machine the newer ones have a hydrostatic drive that's easier to operate but may be harder to maintain I don't know but it doesn't matter because I really doubt that I will ever replace this little guy you've probably seen us using it at the spec house and you are certainly going to see us use it a lot more once we get to the landscaping phase of that project this little Kubota it's pretty much a toy but sometimes the toy is all you need so we're just thankful to own it speaking of tractors and backhoes we did some videos a couple of years ago about a project in Arizona that Nate built he has a friend Mitchell who helped with the dirt work who had a much larger tractor than our Kubota that got a serious amount of work done grading moving material loading trucks lifting light poles all sorts of things and it's just another example of how incredibly versatile of wheel tractor with a bucket can be that machine in particular a John Deere 210 Mitchell informed us is almost legendary for its bang for the buck ability to get work done it also helps that Mitchell is a great operator now there were some comments in one of these videos criticizing him for driving around with the bucket up but if you've ever driven a tractor and tried to do precision detailed work like what they were doing with that driveway using the front of the bucket and the back of the bucket with that ganon box you would know that sometimes you just have to have that bucket out of the way or you just can't see what you're doing one more point while we're talking about Nate's storage yard project a tool that he bought that could almost be considered a machine is this post hole digger this is a good example of a time when buying the machine is the only correct option that post hole digger cost him nine hundred dollars from Home Depot because they were retiring it out of their rent pay now are we drilling two holes here or why I think Nate and his guys ended up drilling well over 300 holes on that job spread out over the course of three months now renting that machine would have been two hundred and eighty bucks a day so the opportunity to purchase one at that price was a gift now I have never owned an excavator but I'd like to someday and you got a good look at this machine on our retaining wall when you watch Dexter stack those boulders now his machine has a thumb on it which really increases the versatility of an excavator exponentially actually and it should be mentioned also that having the right size tool for the job is just as important with heavy equipment as it is with the hammer size you pick this big excavator is incredibly powerful and can get a tremendous amount of work done but when it was time to trench the utilities right up to the house this mini excavator was a thousand times better suited to the job [Music] Bryan Reynolds who owns the excavator the Dexter was operating that day also has a really neat skid steer that he used on the job a lot skid steers are the alternative platform to a tractor that a lot of people choose they're extremely versatile relatively inexpensive and overall a machine that punches above its weight the ones with tracks instead of tires are especially useful they stick flat to the ground you never have to fix a flat tire and you always have great traction [Music] [Applause] [Music] the reason we wanted to make this video now that we're basically at the end of it was to both introduce you to the most recent piece of equipment I've bought and at the same time the most recent piece of equipment I've sold this Terrax lift Nate and I bought it right around the time the framing started on our spec house and we used it all summer long every day we bought it from River Bend equipment in Bend Oregon and those guys treated us right it unloaded trucks it moved gravel with a handy bucket attachment it lifted beams it set material on the second floor it lifted our garage header it tilted up walls and then back stopped them from tipping over it even stalked roofing clear up to the top of the roof and when push came to shove it lifted up the back of my work truck when the rear end went out during the siding we had the man basket on and it helped get the siders up closer to the work it just did dozens of things for us and every time I hopped in the seat it put a smile on my face the fact is I could not have done this job without it and we live in a small town and a friend of mine kind of out of the blue offered to buy the machine at a fair price and since we were about 95% of the way done with it and he needed it right away we shook hands and I sent him home with it I really wish I could have kept it a little longer even just a couple weeks longer because there are a few more items at the house it would have helped with a lot and next summer I could have used it to help put a new roof on my shop but like I said I live in a small town and I don't know how many people in Roseburg are actively shopping for a ten thousand pound capacity telehandler the point is that machines can get a lot of work done for you and they hold their value really well so if you buy smart and that's important if you buy smart you should have no trouble selling the machine to somebody else who needs it I'm gonna really miss our telehandler and maybe someday I'll get a chance to own one again I would encourage everybody watching this video to try to think of the ways in which heavy equipment could improve your life and help you be more productive now I know that many of you already get this 100% but if you haven't been around equipment a lot in your life or worked around it it's easy to sort of think of work entirely as sweat and physical labor if you have not been around equipment a lot earth you're just not used to incorporating it into your workflow you might be missing out there's almost certainly a machine that will increase the productivity of your work and if you are patient frugal and creative you will find a way to buy what you need there are trenchers of every size and shape there are miniature skid steers that fit inside of a 36 inch opening like this one there are wood splitters of all kinds and varieties there our floor scrapers or our stump grinders or our cranes and compactors and lifts and just about everything under the Sun so I hope you dig in thanks for watching essential craftsman and keep up the good work [Music]

Channel: Essential Craftsman

Views: 263,949

Rating: 4.9712458 out of 5

Keywords: anvil, forge, blacksmith, forging, craftsman, mentor, trades, tradesman, career, smith, carpetner, builder, wisdom, workbench, fabricate, tools, tool, tips, trick, hacks, protip, heavy equipment, excavators, tractors, back hoe, post hole driller, cement mixer, dump truck, crane operator, flatbed truck, log trucks, logging, D4 Cat, D6 Cat, log loaders, Dresser 15E, Excavator, Case Backhoe, Kubota Tractor, mini excavator, Skid Steer, Telehandler, trenchers, mini Skid Steer, Wood Splitters, Log Loader

Id: N4UKahuBUVQ

Length: 16min 47sec (1007 seconds)

Published: Sat May 23 2020