welcome back to Berm Peak I'm Seth and today we're going to be doing something a little
different but kind of the same I have sitting beside me the biggest game changer on Berm Peak
since we got the gator and this little rc excavator is holding the key to it
this is our brand new mini excavator
so yes we bought a mini excavator and for a while we were renting one that was going really great
and we could afford to do that however we could not afford to let it sit there and
unfortunately the weather is not good always sometimes we're working on something else
sometimes we're editing whereas this one sits there doesn't accumulate hours and holds value
probably holds value better than cash which uh I hope that's an exaggeration
so yes this is a CAT 302 it's very slightly wider than our rental machine
and it's significantly heavier it's also a lot more powerful anything we point this at grab at
pull out push at it's just gonna do it and that's a little bit scary and so we're gonna have to be
kind of careful with this machine but with that extra size and weight
and power comes something else even more important and that is the tilt coupler
it allows us to not only tilt the bucket forwards and backwards but also left to right so that we
can cut and pack angles so before we go further and I show you all the little details about
this machine I want to demonstrate how the tilt bucket works so this section right here on the
gravel road is not backsloped and you can see how this kind of hangs off the side eventually
stuff crumbles and falls down that's why we don't leave it like this but in this case we did and so
I'm going to show you how we can cut this nicely with the blade in one swoop no hand work okay so
if I were to try to cut this with a normal blade in a normal machine as you can see it would just
kind of like cut away from the top but like I said we have a tilt coupler so now I can cut an angle
perfect back slope so we've now created a mess because we already had a gravel road here but
when we're roughing out a trail in the first place we can have all this shaping done this is going to
minimize the amount of hand work we have to do and just really increase the usefulness of the
machine but why did I choose an excavator in the first place there are many different types of dirt
moving machines and front loaders and things that we could have bought well I'm going to show you
the main reason that we bought an excavator is you can put it wherever you want skid steers
front loaders they have tracks you can drive them up pretty much anything but eventually it gets
too steep or too abrupt for it to just climb up I mean look at this rc excavator which has all the
same functions of a real one we're going over here and yeah see it it doesn't want to go up that but
you can move the excavator around so let's say if instead of just trying to drive straight up it
we move this excavator over here we move the arm out and then we put it down up here now we
have the weight over the front I can now lower the arm and actually help drag the machine up the hill
and even though this is a very cheap amazon toy I'm able to actually execute this so with a real
excavator especially a really powerful one like we got we can put this anywhere on Berm Peak we
want no matter how steep no matter how janky it is and that makes it useful in more places
so I wasn't going to show this in the video but what the hell this machine has a feature that
allows you to move the tracks in and out so you can fit down a really narrow pathway like let
me show you how it works so the first thing I have to do is get this machine on flat ground
and I have to actually rotate it sitting backwards so now I need to actually lift the entire machine
up in the air now how am I going to do that what I'm going to do with the blade and the boom so
first I'm going to put my blade down and I'm going to lift the back of the machine up in the air
okay so now it's off the ground now I'm gonna lift up the front
okay so now the machine is completely up in the air I can actually make the machine way
narrower now it's not going to be as stable like this I don't think we're going to ever use it on
the trails like this but Berm Peak is not the only place we're going to be using this machine
we want to help out in the community we want to help out on other people's projects but for now
we need to prepare for a future project by getting this machine up into Moonshangle thickets and it's
not going to be easy might be a bit of a learning experience in itself so let's start moving it inch
by inch so what I'm going to do here is position the machine over here I'm going to position the
boom down this way so that there's no way the machine can flip backwards and I'm actually
going to use the arm to push the machine up on here so now I'm up on the ledge or almost
again always a learning experience oh this is not good
uh are not ready to go beyond Berm Peak
oh yeah and we are up here that was uh it's kind of harrowing I got to get better at this
so I'm driving the machine up behind the big berm that we built now luckily we did a pretty
good job building it and so I don't think it's going to damage it that much and I get
to fix it with that tilt bucket does not want to turn maybe Kubota doesn't do that
the stick is in the track I know if it gets in between the track it's not going to be good
okay so far so good so just driving up the berm itself is just going to leave some track marks
not a big deal i've got to put the machine right down there which is pretty harrowing
so how do we do this I say we start by
putting the boom down to keep us from flipping over so now we want to try and set her down
i think I'm over made it over the berm and so this is where we're gonna start bench cutting
next time we work on thumb bucket but for now
I think I'm gonna try and fix the berm from here because I put some pretty serious track marks in
it maybe this would be an opportunity for me to test out the tilt coupler
all right little learning curve that didn't quite save us from having to do hand work but I got to
put in another thousand hours with this thing to really get the hang of that tilt coupler and so
we're really excited to integrate this new machine into our workflow we're gonna have to name it
maybe uncle terry I don't know let me know what you think we should name the machine the comments
and thanks for riding with me today i'll see you next time I think these are dry
thing literally can't pick up okay perfect
here we'll just drop it off right here