Funny Names for Equipment & Implements

I spent a little bit of time with our sales staff talking to them about some of the funny things, some of the funny names that many of you will call equipment. We can tell those of you that do, say, a lot of research and reading on the Internet because when you come into our stores, you tend to talk in a slightly different way than those that have been in this industry for decades. So we're going to walk you around here a little bit and laugh a little bit about some of the funny names that have been used for some of the equipment that we sell.

FEL

So we're going to start with the tractor's front-end loader. Now I have had many customers come into the store and call this a FEL. It often is abbreviated on the Internet. If you're reading Facebook groups and that kind of thing, rather than going and typing out front-end loader, sometimes it'll be abbreviated as FEL. And on the Internet, that's fine, right? We abbreviate things like that sometimes. But you sound a little silly when you walk into the store and call this a FEL. Nobody has ever called it that before, but it is simply an Internet abbreviation. Every once in a while, too, you'll hear it called a scoop or a bucket. Those things can often be confusing to us, confusing to a salesperson, because there's buckets on a lot of different equipment, right? This isn't a bucket to us. A bucket can be on an excavator, or a backhoe, or a skid steer or whatever. That's the front end of the loader. But this is usually going to be called a front-end loader or a loader anytime that you're shopping for a piece of equipment.

MMM

Below me here is a mid-mount mower, a mid-mount mower deck, that mower deck underneath the belly of your tractor. Now in the Internet, these often get abbreviated as MNM. That's a lot easier to type on your keyboard than mid-mount mower. But we often will have people come in and actually use that abbreviation and spell it out. "I would like an MMM for my tractor." Or if you walk up through our parts counter and ask for parts for your MMM, they might be a little bit confused. They could use the model number off of your deck, or the fact that it's a mid-mount mower on your tractor, they'll get you to the right place much more quickly.

ROPES

Any of your bigger, heavier equipment is going to be equipped with a roll bar or a rollover protective structure, ROPS. Have had several people, though, come into the store, look at that abbreviation ROPS, and refer to this as the ropes. Anybody here in the store is going to pronounce this as rops, if we're saying that abbreviation, which does happen. There's no E in that word. It's not a rope. It's a rops. 

Boom Digger

And most everyone would know this as a backhoe, but every once in a while we get a creative name for this as well. It's been called many times an excavator, which you can see why, right? It's something that is used to excavate the dirt. But an excavator is, to us, a compact excavator with tracks and loaded on the back of a trailer and driving around, right? This is not an excavator. So if you ask for an excavator for your tractor, you might get a surprisingly expensive price quote for a whole new machine. My favorite person, though, was the guy that came into the store one time and called this the boom digger, which is what it is, right? It's a boom and it digs. But he invented his own name for the thing, which was just fantastic, made us all chuckle. So the humble backhoe is what you see on the back of this tractor.

Roller

There are regional names for certain pieces of equipment. We would always call this a round baler here in the Northeast. However, certain parts of the country are going to refer to this as a roller. A roller, right? Because what's it do? It makes round bales of hay and rolls them on the inside of the machine. It kind of makes sense. You can kind of see why somebody would call it that, but there's a lot of other equipment out there that's a roller. If you're talking to a salesman, they might think that you're looking for, say, something to roll your lawn or your field in order to get it smooth, not a round baler.

Slasher / Shredder / Bush Hog

The proper name for the implement before you here is a rotary cutter. However, you're going to find it called a number of different names. There's a bunch of regional dialects out there, regional names for this attachment. Shredder or slasher is very common, particularly in Australia and some other companies. I think they're going to refer to this as a slasher. We hear a lot here in the US the name Bush Hog thrown around a lot. Bush Hog is the manufacturer's trade name for a popular line of rotary cutters that we do also sell in addition to this Woods. But if you're going to refer to this by its proper name, it's a rotary cutter. 

Pincher

Our next implement is a grapple. Very simply, grapples are going to grab brush material, whatever, for you to be able to manipulate it and move it. We do hear it called, though, from time to time a pincher, right? A pincher like you're pinching out and grabbing things with your machine. Funny name for it, kind of cute. However, we see that same name also used for the thumb on a backhoe where you're pinching things between that. So if you ask your salesman that you'd like a pincher for your tractor, there might be a little bit of confusion whether you need the pincher for the front or the pincher for the back.

Bobcat

Before you here is a skid steer loader made by the company Bobcat. Just like that rotary cutter that we were talking about earlier, Bush Hog was a early innovator in the rotary cutter space, Bobcat was an early innovator in the skid steer loader space. You will hear many people out there refer to these skid steer loader has a Bobcat. But to us, that can be highly confusing, right? You call into this store and say, "Hey, I'd like a price on the Bobcat." Are you talking about this used one that we have in stock or are you shopping for a new skid steer loader by one of the other companies that we support?

Mower

Our receptionist frequently get confused when you call in here and ask for a mower. "I am shopping for a mower." To you that might seem very simple, right? I need something to mow my grass to take care of my lawn, but there's a huge range of what is a mower in an equipment dealership like this. We're going to support mowers to say, take care of mowing your grass, that little push mower. We sell a wide range of many different companies, Zero Turn mowers. But you start getting in the hay equipment, though, there's a whole nother subset of mowers. So there's the disk mower conditioner. There's this self-propelled windrower. There's the Krone BiG M. There's a definition of mowers around here that can go from about $300 to $350,000 and just depending on exactly what kind of mowing equipment that you may be buying. So taking that extra step to tell us I need a mower to take care of a particular task or that particular type of implement, goes a long way to ending up in the right department with the right person.