3 Jobs You Didn’t Know You Could Do with Your Compact Excavator

Compact excavators are great at what they’re built for — digging in confined spaces. But you may not know they perform a wide variety of tasks beyond excavation. Paired with the right attachments and a coupler system that allows for quick and easy exchanges, here are three jobs that demonstrate how you can do more than dig with compact excavators:

1. Grading — An excavator with its backfill blade is transformed into a rough or finish grader, as well as a backfilling and leveling machine. The angle blade is essential for backfilling and grading quickly — without forming windrows of dirt. A grading bucket can complement your effort with its ability to cut, fill and grade. Combined with tilt swing accessories, buckets can gain significant range of motion to easily create swales and shape contours.
2. Breaking concrete — Excavators are perfectly suited to demolition work. Armed with a concrete breaker, you can tear out concrete and asphalt driveways, sidewalks, trails, paths and swimming pools. This powerful combination can reduce vertical structures, such as old buildings and retaining walls, into manageable chunks.
3. Clearing/loading — In areas targeted for development, compact excavators can improve properties with their ability to level dead or fallen trees and remove underbrush. Versatile attachments — such as midsize buckets with teeth, clamps and three-tined grapples — can grab, pull and drag saplings and rooted undergrowth, as well as sort and load material. Teamed with a flail mower, the compact excavator excels at clearing brush, sapplings and grass. For longer reaches into the woods or truck beds, excavators configured with extendable arms can provide an additional 30 inches beyond the standard arm length.

When attachment changes are easy, you’re more likely to use the proper attachment for the job. Many compact excavators come standard with an attachment mounting system, which makes it quick and easy to switch between attachments. Optional hydraulic powered quick tach systems provide even faster, effortless attachment changes.

Bobcat® compact excavators are built to handle as much versatility on the jobsite as you can throw at them with more standard equipment, including the quick-tach system, hoses and couplers, controls, and clamp mounts. For other manufacturers, those are add-on features. See the advantage our compact excavators give you over the competition in our Attachment Readiness video.