Neil from Messsicks here out to do a little bit of backyard work with you today. One of the fun things is when you have a tractor-based YouTube channel is that all the projects that you need to get done at home become videos. If you come along with me here today we're going to do a little bit of work. I've got an area here that someday I'm hoping to have as part of my backyard. 

Unfortunately there's a couple of springs and stuff in here that feed this area that make it really wet and mushy and breed a lot of bugs. I'm going to take some time here today with this Kubota BX, we're going to put in a French drain in through some of these areas and try to drain out some of these mushy spring areas. We're going to go through and use the tractor in order to dig a trench, carry some stone over to fill it, put my pipe in and then go over the top of it again. 

Come along with me here today and we'll see how much work we can get done. 

I could have picked any number of pieces of equipment to come out here and do this with but I picked a BX. Some things are actually really well suited for this kind of work. We will sell these periodically to guys who are plumbing contractors, electrical contractors and that kind of stuff who have light, shallow trenching work to do. You'd be surprised, you could actually do these tests quite well with a 12-inch bucket with a shallow two-foot, three-foot trench, a BX is a great tool for. 

We have a rental fleet full of equipment, I could have brought any number of bigger tractors or excavators or whatever out here and to be honest, I brought this partly because it was available but there's no reason not to use it. This is a task where big or small with the exception of having to re-position more often and this thing being it's a little slower to dig with than what a bigger machine would be, I can do the job just fine. 

Part of why the water accumulates in here though is you've got probably about 8, 10 inches of topsoil on the top and then you immediately get into a lot of clay that's keeping all this from draining out. For even a small Backhoe like a BX here I can rip right through all that with no trouble. Same goes for the tree roots and stuff that I'm going to find in here. If you're going to go dig a stump out or something like that, that's a different story, it's a lot more work but just to go through and rip out a root for the trench that I need to dig here, no problem at all. 

I am not a operator. You'll find a lot of guys who will say, professionals and excavators and that kind of stuff they can run this kind of equipment much better than I can. I am very competent obviously, but also quick to point out that when it comes to doing things like digging a good flat trench, there's a lot of guys who are going to do those things much better than I am. There's about our four feet or so, so we're going to bring this guy up and position the tractor forward just a little bit more and keep on going. 

One thing I do really appreciate on the bigger tractor loader with a Backhoe series machines, that'd be the L47 and the M62, several other ones before that, is their ability to re-position without you having to get on and off the seat. With this machine every time I need to move I've got to get up, spin the seat, get back on again and that does add significantly to the amount of time that it takes me to work. 

Generally if we're talking to customers who are commercial guys, that are going to be doing these kinds of jobs on the clock usually we are encouraging them to look at that TLB series where you have a creep. Basically a control down on your left hand side to be able to drive the tractor forward while you're facing backwards. This is one thing I might be a little interested to hear from you guys on if anybody knows more about this than me. 

One thing that I've been surprised about when I've been out here working at this, is I've got all this standing water out here but when I go dig this trench it doesn't immediately start to run into it. Part of me felt like I should be getting out here and doing this work and digging in here and immediately seeing this rush of wave from on the standing water that's out here immediately filling the trench. 

You can see some of it coming in, but there's some other areas out here where I've been doing this work and even having standing water two feet away from the trenches it just doesn't run into it and fill it up. One of the other places where I've been working on this here, I have gotten a little bit more work and I started to see some of the value from it draining the area out. I've been surprised how unwilling the ground has been to dry out. 

I got several videos on excavator digging technique. Just in summary, if you're coming to our channel here for the first time, this is really easy dirt to dig in so it's hardly even worth talking about. You get all your power from an excavator or a Backhoe in your smallest pivot point, which would be your bucket. If you're in a hard ground and you want to get in here, what you want to do is use your boom in order to place the bucket where you want and then curl the bucket shut in order to fill it with spoils. 

If you're digging a flat trench and you're really good, you're going to do this right here and use multiple functions to bring it back flat towards the machine to fill it up and then use the boom to clean it up and then deposit your spoils where you want them. You don't generally want to be digging with the boom, the boom the difference is being that they're long like lifting with your arms, don't have the same amount of digging force as what just the bucket does. 

What we're doing today is not rocket science. The basic parts of a French drain are simply a shallow trench, a little bit of stone, some corrugated pipe to help carry the water away with a layer of stone on top and then finally, a layer of dirt. You can see here after a little bit of digging I've got myself my shallow trench. We're going to run out here and pick up a couple bucketfuls of stone and lay a thin layer down the bottom. 

Unfortunately, one of the more common places that we see tractors get damaged is where material comes over the back of the bucket and dumps them onto the tractor. You can see after coming up through this pile I've got my bucket rolled to a point that if I continue to come up, the bucket's going to continue to pivot back towards the machine and ultimately dump some of that rock back onto the hood. 

Anytime you come out of a pile like this it's always usually good to resettle some of that material towards the front of the bucket and shake out the excess. You never want to be traveling with a load say, that high up where a little bit of jostling can cause you to come back over the bucket and onto the machine and onto you. 

[engine roaring] 

Once we've got our trench dug and our first layer of stone down, bring in our corrugated pipe. This is a stock thing for the local box store right down the road from us here so nothing more than a four inch corrugated pipe with his paper or fabric sock on the outside of it. The sock wasn't actually any extra charge in the case of this and my guessing is going to help keep the loose material and that kind of stuff from washing in the corrugated pipe and hopefully keep the thing open and clear. Now that we've got our first layer of stone down, we've got our pipe laid in, I'm bringing a little bit more stone to get this guy covered up. 

As we follow along the steps here of our project we have dug in our trench, brought in a small layer of stone, laid our pipe down the middle, brought in this thicker layer stone over the top and now to complete this we need to finish this thing over. On the left and the right hand side here I've got some mounds of spoils where I had dug this trench out. We're going to use the loader to push some of this dirt back over the and probably even use the Backhoe to reach the other side of the trench and pull some of this back in again and try to make it look like we've never been here. 

I am just wired to talk about tractors specifications and those kinds of things. It's just how my brain works on this kind of stuff. You'll notice here as I reach across my trench I can't go quite as far as what I want to. Something to keep in mind when you talk about Backhoes and dig-depth. Backhoes are generally specified in how deep they're going to dig. A lot of guys will look at these things and say, "I don't need to dig six feet, seven feet, eight feet, nine feet deep." 

You need to keep in mind that also that depth number tells you how much reach you're going to have away from the machine. I wouldn't mind at this point that this little BX can reach a little bit further across this trench. We're on that right now, another two feet will go a long way to me being able to reach out and grab more of this pile and pull it back over top of my trench again but with the limited reach that I have, I just can't quite get as far as what I want to. Some of this I'm going to have to find a different way to approach and a bigger Backhoe would have made this job just a little bit more easier. 

As you get more flow, doing multiple functions there at the same time like that becomes a lot easier. When you get into real construction equipment and machines like the truck loader Backhoe series, you'll have multiple pumps feeding the circuits of a Backhoe so that your two, your left and your right stick isn't fighting for flow with each other. In the case of this single pump machine, all of your small tractors are single pump, you are going to be fighting for flow, but they do a nice job of keeping these things tuned in a way that you can still get some of that multifunction. 

You'll find every once in a while it won't want to do both at the same time, but you definitely can get both fairly easily. This motion right here taking the Backhoe and trying to push dirt away from the machine is actually fairly challenging for the Backhoe to do. When we talk through the different areas where a Backhoe has strength and where it doesn't. Curling the bucket in has power where this pushing function of using the dipper to push the machine and push the dirt away from the machine doesn't have all that much force. 

Say if you can get into something and curl the bucket like this, buckets curl very easily, they break out, they dig into that dirt really, really easy, right? But if I want to take this pile and push it away from the machine, I'm having to do that using the dipper and you just don't have as much force going that direction. Not to say that you can't do it. I can break this up here and try to make this approach here. I'm going to try to drive through here in a minute. A lot easier. 

But if I was able to curl the bucket and then deposit the spoils where I wanted them to, I'd be able to do it with a lot more power than having to try to use the teeth to slowly work in through the dirt. 

You can be surprised when guys get into digging with a Backhoe like this, the little BX tractor looks like a toy compared to a lot of machines. I obviously could have picked from a number of other tractors to bring out here today. But you'd be surprised what you could get done with one of these things. It's been a lot more capable than what anybody expects it to be. 

I've got more work to do. Ultimately, I plan on putting in about four or five of these basically 50 foot long french drains to try to just get some of the slop out of this area, so happy with the BX. I mean, obviously I could have picked a lot of different pieces of equipment to bring out here today. This one is really perfectly adequate for this kind of work, really capable of doing these shallow trenches. Easy to get around, I'd come out here with a big excavator before and while obviously I was able to work a lot faster, definitely did a lot more turf damage sunk down in these soft conditions a lot more than what the BX did. 

Every piece of equipment has its place. I always tell guys, it's oftentimes when you have jobs to do it's not that one piece of equipment is going to do something that another one won't. It's just how quickly do you get it done and how efficient are you doing it. If you're going through the buying process for a piece of equipment and we can help give us a call at Messicks. We're available at 800-222-3373 or online at messicks.com