We're out with the Kubota K008 excavator. Mini, mini excavator or as my wife would say cute. Now we're going to take a quick walk around this machine here, take a look at it and see if it's something that might be right for your application. The application for this machine is quite obviously not to move mountains. This is a small excavator. It only has about a six foot dig depth. Its strengths and capacities and speeds feel very much like the backhoe in a Kubota BX series tractor loader backhoe machine. The guys that we tend to sell this to are really into two main applications.
One, you'll frequently find these at rental yards for small rental applications because they only weigh 2200 pounds. They can be put on a little 3,000 pound trailer and towed around by just about anybody with small chores to do in their backyard. It's weight and size makes it very appealing as a do all tool. The second application tends to be interior demolition actually. This thing with its tracks pulled the whole way in is able to drive through a 28 inch door and equipped with a hammer down here on the end, it can be used for all kinds of interior concrete demolition or heavy duty tasks that will be really hard on an individual guy to do with say an air jack hammer or something like that.
Rental applications, interior demolition and an occasional pool contractor sometimes where electrical contractor where guys really only need to dig three-four feet to get below the frost line. This becomes a really portable nice package for those kinds of guys to use. Certainly not a horse. We're not digging foundations, we're not digging pools or something like this but there's a lot of small utility trenching applications where a small machine like this can be useful. Like I said, this is about a six foot digging depth machine and it's real sweet spot for working ranges is between four and five feet.
When you start to get down to some of the limits or some of these excavators, you're going to have a hard time working productively. The dipper the size of this, you're usually working in the four to five foot range. The buckets on this are good heavy buckets. If you look at the gauge of the steel, the replaceable teeth in chintz out here because this is a light machine. It's good heavy solid buckets. When we move across the bottom here, you'll see this machine does have a small push plate on the front. This is able to exceed about 2,000 pounds of pushing force in order to push fill with stuff back into trenches.
You can back fill with this blade although you're not going to do any kind of grading work or light grading like you could with a large excavator. You'll see here on the blade that the ends here, the wings are actually able to swing backwards and that's because as I mentioned before, these tracks are actually adjustable. The tracks will move in and out in order to get through some of the tight doorways but can come out again to give you the stability. Because you never want your blade to be more narrow than what your tracks are, you can swing the wings in here on the end in order to make sure that you maintain that tight distance across the machine.
We flip the seat up here, you'll notice the engine is contained right here underneath the seat. This has a little 10 horsepower is all it takes Kubota diesel D722. It's right about three quarters of a leader. You'll notice here as far as serviceability goes, all the bits and pieces that you need to get to are located right here at the top of the engine. Diesel fuel fills, air cleaner, radiator overflow, fuel filters, oil filters, if you even had to go so far as to replace an alternator, a starter or anything, everything is accessible right here at the top of the engine. A very, very easy machine as far as serviceability goes.
To me the most fun and unique feature on this thing is the adjustable tracks. In order to make those tracks go in and out, we're first going to start the machine up. Put our seat belt on because we are always concerned about safety. Safety is number one. Now we're going to take the blade here, lower the blade down and pick the front of the machine up in the air. Put your bucket down on the ground and use this end to take the rest of the machine up in the air. Now once the whole thing is raised up in the air, there's a lever down here on the floor that you can use to divert the function from the front blade to the track adjustment.
Now if that lever flips, I can reach up here and take the control that would have worked my blade and take my tracks and push my tracks out for added stability. Or if I'm going into a demolition scenario, I can now take this and pull my tracks back in again. There's also a handy set up too if you need to go and change your tracks for some reason. You can do this on all excavators obviously, the whole machine can pop right up in the air making it really easy to service if you have to replace a track for some reason. Does it dig? Obviously, we can give it a go here.
We can pick the RPMs of the machine here and raise them up so that we get some good speed out of the machine and then I very openly, I'm not a professional operator. If you ever watch somebody on an excavator that really knows what they're doing, you can have a very quick respect for what they do. The guys that really get to spend day in and day out of this kind of stuff, a lot of finesse and the speed and a precision that guys like myself who know how they are working can get in on and off periodically just never can develop. But you can see here from my clocky flight around with this thing, it very much can dig.
We in Pennsylvania tend to be able to go a couple of feet here before we're going to get down to some rocky Sheli tough stuff but I can throw this around pretty quickly. One thing that we're going to do a video on later as to how to position your blade when you're using an excavator. What I am doing now if you look at my push plate, I have my push plate behind me.
By using that blade behind me when I am pulling the dipper in, it keeps me from pushing the front of the machine up in the air while I'm digging down into the ground. You can get a lot of stability out of an excavator depending on exactly how you position your blade whether it's wedging yourself down so that you don't push up in the air when you dog or keeping yourself from tipping over backwards if you're going up on a trailer or going up a hill. If you've not run a backhoe or an excavator before, the bucket is always the part of the excavator that has the most strength. In this case, the breakout force of the bucket is about double that of the boom.
I use the boom to position the bucket where I want it and then curl the bucket in order to break loose the dirt and fill it with soil and then use the boom in order to crane up and out. The bucket being that it's the smaller pivot on the machine is quite a bit more powerful than what the boom is. Like I said, you can see how I'm going here. I am comfortably below the frost line now. If I was out trenching for electric or putting in pipes for a pole or doing light landscaping work bushes and that kind of stuff, a great machine for that easy to get around, productive enough to work with but still it has its limitations like any machine.
It's not a full size excavator but it's capacities, its weight, it's productivity make it a popular choice for a lot of applications. While you don't sell as many of these as what you do full size excavators and certainly their sales are quite a lot lower than say a 10-12,000 lb machine, they definitely have their niche.
That's Kubota K008-3 mini mini excavator. We can help you with a machine like this. If you happen to have an application that can demand one, give us a call at Messick's. We are available at 800-222-3373 or online at messicks.com
