Harcore digging - mini diggers, breaker packs & skips

End of the day, it seemed fitting to have dinner where I'd been sitting for last 8 hours

Try as a might, it was hard to raise a smile for this picture, absolutely shagged out as I was

Now that's a morning's work! 8 tons of rubble through my mus-cles

It's hard to believe that's an improvement on what was there, but it is, and once the turf is down it'll be looking super duper

Track lines all over the soil - driving back and forth over it is essential to compact it down. Otherwise, it'll just subside over time and go all bumpy again. And with a deck going where the digger is sleeping, subsiding is not what I want once it's down

Think that's enough controls? From the middle two, tracks forward and back independently. To the left, boom in and out and turret swivel. To the left again, throttle. Left again, the red knob is the hydraulic lock. On the left pedal, momentary breaker on/off . Back to the centre and off to the right, boom up and down, and bucket scoop and empty. Directly below on the floor, switch between the stabilising blade and the track expansion & contraction. To the right on the side, activate whichever you just selected (always the front stabilizing blade unless you're moving in and out of a doorway). Right and on the floor, skews the boom left and right independant of the turret.

The mondo stick of 'crete we managed to rip up in one piece, a good hundred kilos or more

Proud ass John conquering his 'crete stick

The hydraulic compressor for the breaker - JCB Beaver pack. If you have anything over three inches of 'crete to break, get the hydraulic option, it destroys electric toys

The breaker comes with three steels (blades). A big flat spade bit, a pointy spade bit and a needle like chisel. To change them, you flick that catch down near the bottom, pull out the foot and half long 2" tool steel rod, slap another in and flick the catch back. Seconds and no tools needed. The steels don't wear down at all quickly. There breaker has a safety feature on it's handles. First of all, they bend up and down a few inches on springs. When the breaker is running, that prevents all the vibration going through to your skeleton, as it's allowed to bounce on the springyness of the grips. You shouldn't lean into the breaker too much and squash the grips all the way down, the vibration flows right through you. Also, it doesn't really help. The breaker isn't used to chip away 'crete, letting it freely bounce in the cut creates impact fractures and the steel is strong enough you can then lever up the broken chunk.

For thicker bits, it's best to score a line over the surface with the flat spade, which'll concentrate the stress along the line; a standard stone mason trick, which also works for glass, metal, wood and every other material.

Another safety mechanism is a catch on the grip, so unless you actually have your hands wrapped around them, the grips won't go down. And it's depressing the grips that activates the breaker.

Despite all the noise, which does mean you'll need some ear muffs, breakers aren't all that dangerous. I would only recommend some goggles (or preferably a face shield) to keep the occasion face bound chip out of your face and some steel boots. It's not a problem when you're actually breaking with it, but it weighs a lot, and when you pick it up and throw it back down, you certainly don't want all that weight on your tippy toes. Or the big loose bits of 'crete toppling on them as you wander round with it.

This is a nice clear picture of the 'crete slab that remained, for a few hours that morning. You quickly pick up a knack of telling when the breaker will and won't go through something based on your current positioning. If it's a high pitched rattle and not going anywhere, there's not much point going on. When it's going through, you'll hear the tone changing to a deeper clunking and thudding. It always helps if you can somehow undermine the backing of the 'crete. With thick pieces, jamming a pick underneath at an edge and lifting it slightly will put a lot of stress on the piece, and 'crete is terribly weak under stress loads; it's only strong in compression.

The hoses are steel reinforced, so they're real tough

Ahhh, spade work. Man I hate digging clay. But lucky for me, that's Alex doing it. He's bigger than my, so that's his fault. And I did try, well, almost force him, to have a go on the digger, but he gimped out

Max, in the bucket, meow. "I'm outta here suckas!!!"

George Major are about the cheapest on the Wirral. They also have an excellent service. This was dropped off an hour after I ordered it. They also sift and recycle all of the junk that goes in themselves, check out their site for some neat videos of a Willy Wonker style rubbish sorting operation

Oooooo, will it fit... nah, it won't.... :P

Mum, working her gentle womanly approach on the trim of the PVC window

8.30am and the mini digger arrives (grabandshift.co.uk), at the same time as the skip (majorskiphire.com) and just after I picked up the JCB hydraulic breaker pack (brandontoolhire.co.uk).

After a half hour introduction to using the digger and not killing myself or unintentionally breaking anything, it was time to drive it through to the back.

"All the doors are 750mm right?"
"Erm.... yea!"
"That door will need to come off"

Off comes the firedoor between the utility room and garage.

"You're sure the PVC door is 750?"
"I think it's 730mm"
"It's not going to fit."

8^O

After a few minutes thinking, given the cost of the other things that had just arrived and need for the digger, we decided to go for it and hang onto the 3/4 ton Kubota mini digger. Within minutes I had my team of experts, Alex and Mum, attacking the PVC door frame. I could see my mum going into a spiral of "What the f**k is happening!?" as the newly fitted door was taken apart.

It didn't come out as easily as the lift off door, but I was seriously impressed by how carefully and quickly the two of us managed to remove the trim, the glass window, unscrew the frame and pull it. But for the sake of one screw, the glass window pane and trim could have stayed in place.

That done, I was able to just get it through, inching forward at a snails pace with perhaps a half inch of clearance on the tracks. Not a single mark on the framing. I was proud for the first time on it.

Boy-o-boy is it scary being on one of these for the first half hour - 3hp angle grinders are nothing compared to 25-30hp of hydraulics, attached to a stupidly heavy, not super stable frame. At first, the controls are like writing backwards in a mirror, upside down, but they're under control after a few hours.

I quickly learned that, with lots of steep gradients and deep holes around the place, where you plan on parking the digger and where you plan on moving things to aren't always the same as reality. It's a gradual progress of scooping, running over the dumped dirt (carefully!) to squash it down, moving the digger, digging some more - repeat.

First order of the day, scraping all the clinker and rubble off the foundations. What would have taken days by hand and been-back breaking work was done in about half an hour. We fired up the JCB breaker pack and broke up the remaining concrete foundations - with alex wheeling it out to the skip.

The thickness and strength varied from pathetic to almost bullet proof. I could pick myself up on the breaker and barely dint some of it. Having the digger to hand was excellent, because I could wedge the bucket underneath and apply stress to the tougher pieces, making them fracture more easily, just being very careful that the digger wasn't also balanced and likely to slip when the concrete went.

The digger came with three buckets, one for trenching (about 12" across), one for grading (or establishing gradients and moving big soft scoops, about two foot across) and another with teeth for going into harder material (around the same size as the grad' bucket). Despite the soil being mainly clay, we weren't using it to dig much rock, so the toothed bucket was only used for gripping under bits of 'crete and ripping them out. Changing the buckets isn't too hard. There are two inch thick pins that go through the fixing on each, and recesses in the head of the boom where they sit. A slide covers those recesses while the bucket is locked in place. You open and close that slide with a socket set.

By lunchtime (or 'tea time' as some scummers call it), all the 'crete was in the skip - I'd estimate around 7-8 metric tons.

I then set about filling the two or three foot deep trench the process had created by dragging excess soil down the garden.

From there I rough leveled most of the garden with the grad' bucket. It reminds me a lot of rendering or plastering, watching the surface for imperfections and then removing them.

The sloping was quite ambitious for a first attempt. The garden needs to slope both away from the house and down to the corner. To make things more interesting, the garden turns 90 degrees as it goes round the kitchen, meaning I would need to create a perpendicular slope that flowed into the first.

In the picture of Alex and I standing beside the digger, there is a gigantic piece of 'crete perhaps a foot deep by four foot in length wedged under the bucket, you can see it more clearly in another picture. It was so funny to see it ripping up I thought it deserved a special photo all to it's self.

The digger is a strange beast to operate. It's tracks collapse to fit through doors. When moving it outside and digging, you expand them. There's also a blade at the front that can be raised and lowered to push dirt around and to stabilise it when parked and using the boom.

The two central levers run the tracks independantly, like a tank, so it can do donuts on the spot - which is fun when standing up on it and honking the horn.

It's incredibly quiet, a lot more so than any other combustion based tool I've seen or used. The engine is a disel three cylinder. Just about the entire digger is made in Japan, and so mechanically excellent. The ignition works better than most cars, starts instantly and smoothly with a flick. I asked the guy from Grab & Shift why he chose Kobuta and he explained the quality and pull out power compared to JCB and Bobcat is always better - he was very adamant and confident in that opinion.

It's hard to appreciate how bumpy and how much thinking needs doing on one of these until you try driving one. It's nothing like a car. The boom is easily strong enough to pull the digger over. Assuming you don't get crushed when it rolls and the digger isn't totalled, getting it upright again can be a joke.

When doing heavy digging and pulling things up, almost all the time you can find youself having to back off the boom and modify your scooping to avoid it going over. It'll suddenly jerk and rock as if it's on it's way, then level out again.

At first I thought the £105 a day rental was a lot, but damn! This thing has done weeks worth of disheartening spade work in a day. A*

By the by, if you need a spade, I've snapped more than I can count. There's a brand of tools called Roughneck (B&Q sell them quite cheap, amazingly). They have bright yellow shafts, so they're easy to see, and more importantly, a lifetime guarantee. They're also smartly designed so the kick points on the back of the blade face in, not out, so it won't jam on things as you throw it in. Pay the £18.

Max the kitty decided to check out the digger bucket after I threw him in there. He's a chicken in disguise - like transformers, but I haven't seen him change into anything else, yet...