Budget-Friendly but Efficient Must-Have Attachments
Just got yourself a mini excavator, but realised you need to do more than digging? On a tight budget? Worry no more!
Whether you’re in construction, landscaping, or just trying to look really cool while digging up your backyard (no judgment), there are plenty of attachments to maximise versatility with minimal cost. Let’s check them out.
1. Excavator Thumb
An excavator thumb can be used with a bucket as a more general alternative to other handling attachments, such as a log grab. They allow you to pick up logs or branches, rocks, concrete and debris on the site, making it easier to clean up a site or load materials onto trucks. This greatly increases your handling efficiency and versatility, making it a high ROI attachment for any projects where this has previously been done manually.
2. Ripper Tooth
A ripper tooth enhances versatility by allowing you to break through tough terrain that is difficult to excavate. With the tooth, you prep the ground by breaking through compacted soil, rock, frost and more before digging. If you have areas that are slow to excavate, damaging your buckets, or slightly too tough, then the ripper tooth greatly increases both efficiency and the range of projects you can work on.
Buckets can do more than dig! Let’s look at a couple of alternatives.
3. Grading or Tilt Grading Buckets
Also known as a dyking bucket, finishing bucket or ditching bucket. A grading bucket has a flat edge rather than teeth, which allows you to level ground, create smooth surfaces for landscaping, and backfill more easily. They are a very common secondary bucket to have in one’s collection, as many jobs require a clean finish. The wider, shallower profile also ensures easier usage in tight spaces and greater efficiency with fewer passes required to move dirt, gravel, and sand across a site.
If you are willing to spend a bit more, adding a tilting feature allows for greater precision in grading and shaping surfaces, especially for creating slopes, without needing to reposition the excavator as frequently.
4. Riddle Bucket (Skeleton/Shaker)
A riddle bucket, also known as a skeleton bucket or shaker bucket, features tines/ribs running through the middle, with gaps between them that allow dirt to fall through, while larger rocks, debris, and other materials are retained in the bucket. This allows you to strip the group of vegetation such as grass and small roots, as well as remove larger rocks or rubbish from the dirt, giving you a perfect topsoil for planting or turf installation. This is also great for preparing a stable base before building, such as laying foundations. They are also used to quickly separate reusable materials such as concrete and brick on demolition sites, or different types of waste, helping with recycling. They may come with teeth to help with ripping up vegetation and roots, or may be similar in shape to a grading bucket, to give a smooth finish.
5. Manual Quick Hitch
Now that you have multiple attachments, you need a way to switch between them! A manual quick hitch is a highly cost-effective way to significantly reduce the time required to switch between attachments and hence make the most of your attachments. With a manual quick hitch, you use the hook and safety pin rather than needing to align the attachment more closely, hammer both the top and bottom pins in and out, and use retaining clips/bolts. This means a quick hitch will often more than halve the change time required. You can read more about different quick hitch types here.
Overall
Mini diggers require attachments to reach their full potential of versatility and efficiency. However, that doesn’t mean you need to spend a lot of money to get a lot of performance. You would be surprised at how far £500 can take you, and these are just a few examples of attachments that will pay themselves off quickly through the time saved and functionality gained.