[Closed] hiring a digger?

Ring your local tool hire/ plant hire company.

Call all the local ones you can find and see who's got the best rates including delivery, if you don't want it for long the delivery can be as much as the hire costs.

hmmmm. will have words around my circle of mates to see if we have a digger in our midsts 🙂

the delivery can be as much as the hire costs.

Shouldn't be. £20 each way is about right. And believe me, I've hired some plant in my time! 🙂

Given you're out in the sticks - have a chat with a local farmer. They usually have an ancient backhoe floating around somewhere, or something that can be bodged onto a tractor.

good point. i asked the landownder and he has a forklift thingy but its no good for what i want

What size digger you after Tony?

bigger than a mini digger makes it easier

Unless you can drive it (making no judgements) you might want to hire it with an operator. You might already be intending to. A good driver is worth the extra cost (IMO) as quality of work and production rate is far better than some punter waggling the levers (no offence).

When we've hired them before a 2 tonne (ish) machine plus operator, fuel, delivery etc has been £180 all in. Usually get a 10 hour day out of the guy (although that's 8 hours on site, an hour each end loading and travelling).

Consider how big a machine you want. No point paying over the odds for a 5 tonne or bigger if you're just scrapping and mounding soil. A 2 tonne with the right buckets will achieve the same and probably be less £.

Also consider the access. JCB 3CX type stuff (typical building site kit, front loading shovel, backactor, looks like your standard big rear, small front wheeled tractor) isn't usually all that versatile for trail building (IMO). A small, rubber or steel tracked machine that can rotate through 360 degrees is much more useful / versatile.

Remember also if you need to move any real volume of material they're both pretty average. A 360 can only cast double the reach of his boom, say 5 or 6 m (I'm starting to guess badly now 😉 ) and certainly won't be able to carry all that much. Plus they're slow if they have to track back and forth over any (vaguely) significant distances. All lost digging time tracking between different work spots.

Some form of mini-dumper, self loading skip barrow or the like can be good for this. Either to carry muck between borrow pit and construction site or to pick up surfacing and take to trail. Self loaders save you having to get the machine to come back again and load (shovelling it yourself is a bugger). We've hired self loading, tracked dumpers for £80/day before and driven them ourselves. Driven is a misnomer though, they go all of about 2mph ;-(

Dunno if that'll help or hinder 😎

Bit of professional experience at work, bit of volunteer experience trail building. Other's opinions may vary. For some mechanized, plaqnt is an even bigger penis-extension than the proverbial sports car 😉

I can confirm that there were a gaggle of girls following Knacker around on the Self loader (or was that just his lovely wife, Libby?) 😉

i want to drive it 🙂

Hey make sure you get a tilt head, you can do berms in one pass so save hrs of moving the digger about to get the bucket angle right, also you can be creative with hips and jumps too, will send some photos!

After a day in the driving seat you would have got the hang of it. Not a skillful pro but good enough dig some holes and generally make a mess 🙂 just be very aware of your swing radius especially of you are near any buildings.

I drove diggers and Bobcats as part of my job in whistler and those had controls you change to work the opposite way. I assume this will be the same over here so work out which one suits you.

I would have thought a mini digger would be less than £80 a day delivered but it won't have much grunt, especially of you want to move big rocks or take out tree stumps.

They're not that hard to use, bit of co-ordination, steady hands,smooth not jerky use of the controls and common sense (like not going across banks at silly angles and rolling it) and you'll be fine 🙂