Well..........
I appear to have bought a backhoe attachment. $500 cash. I couldn't pass up a chance like that.
It's a fixer-upper for sure. New hoses for sure, and some rehab to do on the control levers for sure, and a missing tooth, and... whatever else I find along the way. The rod end of the boom lift cylinder seems like it has snapped off and been welded back on at some point. We'll have to see if it was done right. But it doesn't seem to have been beaten to death.
It is a D100, it definitely doesn't have outriggers. But that can be fixed.
The loader didn't have any trouble at all picking it up, even if my rigging did a poor job of keeping it upright.
But it's been raining the last 4 days solid, and the ground is saturated. So I couldn't get enough traction to drive. It's going to have to just sit where it is for a couple days until things dry up.
I even got my golf cart stuck trying to put away the trailer. And that silly golf cart generally has this unexplained SPOOKY good traction. But not today.
So since I already had the tractor out, I just picked up the back end and brought it out of the miry clay, so to speak.
Next I need to get my outriggers designed and get some cylinders ordered for them.
And I need to take a drive to a place about an hour away that has some good deals on steel. He has some 1"x3.5" bar stock that'll be the main structure of the subframe. And he has some 4" wide C channel that'll be the actual structure of the outriggers.
I still need to track down some 3/8 plate or something to build the structure that the outriggers will attach to. I'll see if he has anything I can use. His prices aren't scrap-level cheap. But he's about half what I'll pay retail.
QUESTION: On the factory LBH models, about how many inches of ground clearance at the point underneath the hoe's big vertical pin? I need a starting point to design the subframe....
Bob
"Never be afraid to try something new. How hard can it be?"