My Frankenstein tractor | Installing a BH76 Backhoe on a LX3310

Neil from Messick's here today to talk about my tractor. I recently did something unique, some things that many of you might find a little interesting. I did a lot of things here on the back of my own machine that are considered incompatible or sometimes impossible because they go off the rails a little bit from the manufacturer's clear recommendations of specific accessory kits for your machine or implements that may or may not fit. Today, we're going to spend some time talking about my backhoe that doesn't fit my tractor and the mounting subframe that also does not belong on this machine.
Now, the first thing to point out here is that I'm using a BH76 backhoe on an LX3310 tractor. These are two things that, according to Kubota's configuration guides, don't go together. Generally, our tractor companies are concerned about configurations for new equipment that they're going to sell you today, but they're may be a little less concerned about the weird things that we run into on a regular basis here, maybe the trying to take that older used backhoe and adapt it to a newer machine that can be really challenging to do. We know though from experience, that when they go through and they make changes to backhoes or really anything on your tractor, they generally don't break the mold and start all of that engineering over again. They're going to keep a lot of the pieces in place, particularly where they interface to other kits and stuff that make all of this work to minimize the amount of engineering rework that they need to do. In the case of this backhoe, I knew enough from seeing how things have evolved over the years and doing a little bit of looking at the parts catalogs and comparing today's model versus this one to be able to check and see whether those major assemblies and connection points have remained the same. By verifying the parts diagrams between the current BH77 backhoe and this older BH76, I could be reasonably confident that my mounting points here were going to be the same.
I did one more thing here that was a little different yet too. I used a different subframe that mounts between the tractor and the backhoe than what is typically used in this application. Now, years ago, backhoes were built on 3.0 hitches, where you use your traditional 3.0 implement linkage to pin up that backhoe. As the years have gone by, and backhoes have gotten a lot more capable and started eventually doing damage to the back of the tractors that they were mounted on, subframes now have become the preferred way of mounting a backhoe. That creates a mounting frame that goes from the base of your loader, through your axle housing, and then back to the backhoe itself with a rack that that backhoe sits on. Now, I've done some different things here with my subframe as well. Years ago, there weren't so many options for subframes, but today for the LX series tractor, there's more variants of the machine now, cabs are a lot more common, and so we have options now. For the subframe, the cab version of this tractor has a subframe with a separate seat behind it, while the open station version of the tractor usually uses a swivel seat where this seat will spin 180 degrees and you use your operator seat facing backwards to operate the backhoe. Now, there are pros and cons to each one of these styles. Usually, we're going to use the swivel seat style because it keeps the backhoe really tight to the back of the machine, shortens up the footprint. If you're going up and down a trailer, it's better on your departure angle. There's many reasons to want to use the swivel seat.
My used backhoe here already had a seat with it, and so I used the cab version subframe that has a separate seat back behind the machine. By using the cab version now, I can have a double seat backhoe with a separate seat back here. I didn't have to buy quite so many parts because the seat was already included here with my used backhoe. I have a hybrid configuration here that doesn't actually exist today. It is a open station tractor with the second seat behind the machine. The lesson to learn here is that by going through and looking at the parts diagrams and how some of this stuff was configured, sometimes you can come up with configurations that might work for you that might suit your preferences a little bit better if you'd rather have another seat behind the machine versus the swivel seat style.
You can do some of this stuff, but it takes a level of investigation, it takes a knowledgeable dealer who understands these things, and a little bit of time spent in the parts catalogs to check and see how things are going to go together. I do have one part of my equation here that did not work out exactly as planned, and it's this adapter piece right here. Normally, again, I'm using the cab subframe on an open station tractor. Normally, in this configuration, you're going to put this bracket in here that's going to shift the backhoe back a couple of inches in order to make room for this separate seat..In the case of this older BH76 backhoe, it doesn't have these holes drilled in the backhoe for this adapter spacer to be able to fit in here and shift that backhoe back.
I was able to work around that by going and flip this seat forward and make room behind here for this one to go back kind of configuration it. It can be done.and we're able to work around it, but you might run into this kind of stuff where you go off the rails far enough that not everything bolts right together.
When I sit here and look at my own tractor, it's becoming a bit of a mutant. Hydraulic kits and accumulators and after market work like kits and now a backhoe that doesn't belong. This shows you a little bit of some of the flexibility that you can find in your machine. These things are more adaptable than what you might expect sometimes, but it does take that knowledge to be able to go through and put these pieces together in these unique ways. The times that this works specifically with the backhoe are extremely limited, but the point that I wanted to get to today was if you're trying to accommodate these unusual situations, the parts catalogs can be an enormous help. If you go to messicks.com, you can look up the different catalogs for your different implements and check and see what those differences are, and they can explain a lot of these things very frequently by checking if the part numbers had changed, or you can often look at the wireframe diagrams there and be able to tell how things are shaped and if they are going to go together in the same way. Parts diagrams can answer a lot of those questions very, very quickly.
I'm really proud of the tools that we've built out there on our website and their ability to show some of that kind of stuff. I've got a couple of features that I'd like to bake in there yet to make these things a little bit easier. If you're shopping for a piece of equipment and we can help, if you got parts or service needs for a machine you've already got, give us a call at Messick's. We're available at 800-222-3373 or online at messicks.com.