DrJim
Well-Known Member
- Joined
- Feb 19, 2011
- Messages
- 172
- Location
- Oak Ridge TN
- Occupation
- General Dentist, including Implant Restorations
I know you're gonna ask, so I'll answer this first: I found HEF while Googling for tips on servicing my Bobcat's spool valves, and was blessed to find HEF and Atco's very well done documentation of the steps required.
I'm a dentist, practicing in Oak Ridge TN for some 30 years now. I've always had some enginneering inclination--Dad was an electrical enginneer who thought he knew most everything. From the time I was walking I was working with Dad, repairing the furnance at the church, "doing brakes" on the family's 1957 Pontiac (always in the gravel driveway, outside in the cold and dark), or trying to make some gadget work that wasn't designed good enough to work.
My excavation days started when I was 3 or 4. I had a metal Tonka high-lift (when did we start calling them "track loaders"?), and I made elaborate systems of roads in the gravel driveway. Only one problem: Dad would come home at quitting time and park the old '57 Pontiac (it was _lavender_, it you can imagine), and ruin my roads. I would throw a fit, and he would just shrug it off and say, "You can build 'em again tomorrow."
In my high school years, I got a job on highway construction--Pellissippi Parkway--working on grade work. After seeing a jack snap on a back dump and watching the truck flip over on its side, I quit begging for that job, and stuck to my job as a shovel operator--the "pine handle" kind, though really probably ash or hickory.
Other jobs included commercial construction, with a couple of summers working with Knoxville's Johnson & Galyon, a class act in the large commercial realm. That's when I had the chance to jump on a Bobcat, maybe an old 741 or equivalent. It took be only a few minutes to find out what happens when you raise the bucket, filled with gravel, up while the machine is situated nose-down onto a slope. It took me a little longer to learn how to "drop" the bucket to get the rear wheel out of the sky.
While in dental school at the University of Kentucky College of Dentistry, I worked as an "inspector" for a civil enginnering firm, overseeing gradework, utility and drainage culvert installation. When I questioned my boss, "I'm not sure I know enough. . ." he replied, "Well, you'll have to learn then, won't you?!"
Fast forward to 2002 or so. My son, whose first words were, "Eee--dirt!", was then 13 or 14. We were active with groups promoting a cleaner East Tennessee, and quickly found that volunteers with trash bags couldn't very well clean up the biggest piles of trash that had been dumped for years in the rural areas of our county. I got the idea that I would find a used skid-steer to buy and use in conjunction with our clubs' cleanup efforts. For months, we found nothing but machines to work on, not with. We finally got a tip from a friend in Corbin, KY, and went off in a near blizzard to the suburbs of Gildler, KY (try to find it), and found a new-new Bobcat 773 Turbo, 2001 model, with only 166 hours on it. Nothing to fix, just buy it and work.
Our friend in Corbin volunteered his trailer, and grapple bucket. I had never used a grapple bucket, and would not have thought to consider one. We brough the 773 and the grapple back to Tennessee and went to work cleaning up dump sites--for sport. ( I know what you're thinking--this guy ain't right. . . .) We organized "techincal" cleanups, requiring cables, snatch blocks, etc. to pull heavy equipment tires, refrigerators, even discarded boats up from the embankments where they had been dumped.
We found that dumps full of glass, or roofing materials full of nails, were most difficult to clean up. Jennifer Parks of Bobcat of Knoxville let us try a 4-in-1 bucket, and that turned out to be the trick for scraping up that kind of trash.
In late 2005, my wife and I bought the farm (no, we didn't die, we purchased a farm). We quickly found that the skid-steer with grapple and 4-in-1 is an extraordinarily versatile tool. (You would know it--the 50 acres turned out to have a 2 acre garbage dump from the 1940's, a major cleanup project for us. As they say, no good deed goes unpunished.) The farm required some major clearing. We hired an owner-operator with a Cat track loader and backhoe to do the heavy stuff. The Bobcat with grapple served as our log skidder--grab the end of a log and go (backwards).
Today, our fleet includes the 2001 773 Turbo (G series), grapple bucket, 4-in-1 bucket, tooth bucket, 36" trencher, Eliminator rake, Bobcat auger, and home-built hay spear for large round bales. We also have a John Deere 5425 65hp farm tractor, 5' Woods BrushBull, Woods BW180 batwing mower, and other attachements. (We had hay equipment but circumstances have caused us to recently sell of the hay equipment. Ditto for a speciality piece, a Wheatheart High & Heavy Hitter post-pounder w/ self-contained hydraulics and pilot auger--a cool piece but now somebody else's prize.) Invaluable for the farm and for our trash cleanup projects: a Dandy Dump dump trailer. We haul the Bobcat on a Contrail 16' , 12,000 lb GVWR trailer.
My son is now 21; he has been able to operate all of the equipment, and does much of the maintenance and repair. Currently he attends Roane State Community College.
What else? We have Honda ATV's, and when the trails are too narrow for that, ride KTM 4-stroke off-road motorcycles. At work, I have a special interest in and 19 years experience in planning and completing dental implant restorations. While we use 3/4 drive sockets on the big equipment, the titanium dental implant components torque to a whopping 30NCm, with hex drivers measureing 1.25mm.
We fix our own stuff. In 30 years of dental practice, I have never once had a dental equipment service call. (I'm not sure I can keep that up. . . .)
That's enough. . . more than you wanted to know. Thanks to all of you who have worked to make HEF a reality, a valuable site for folks like me.
I'm a dentist, practicing in Oak Ridge TN for some 30 years now. I've always had some enginneering inclination--Dad was an electrical enginneer who thought he knew most everything. From the time I was walking I was working with Dad, repairing the furnance at the church, "doing brakes" on the family's 1957 Pontiac (always in the gravel driveway, outside in the cold and dark), or trying to make some gadget work that wasn't designed good enough to work.
My excavation days started when I was 3 or 4. I had a metal Tonka high-lift (when did we start calling them "track loaders"?), and I made elaborate systems of roads in the gravel driveway. Only one problem: Dad would come home at quitting time and park the old '57 Pontiac (it was _lavender_, it you can imagine), and ruin my roads. I would throw a fit, and he would just shrug it off and say, "You can build 'em again tomorrow."
In my high school years, I got a job on highway construction--Pellissippi Parkway--working on grade work. After seeing a jack snap on a back dump and watching the truck flip over on its side, I quit begging for that job, and stuck to my job as a shovel operator--the "pine handle" kind, though really probably ash or hickory.
Other jobs included commercial construction, with a couple of summers working with Knoxville's Johnson & Galyon, a class act in the large commercial realm. That's when I had the chance to jump on a Bobcat, maybe an old 741 or equivalent. It took be only a few minutes to find out what happens when you raise the bucket, filled with gravel, up while the machine is situated nose-down onto a slope. It took me a little longer to learn how to "drop" the bucket to get the rear wheel out of the sky.
While in dental school at the University of Kentucky College of Dentistry, I worked as an "inspector" for a civil enginnering firm, overseeing gradework, utility and drainage culvert installation. When I questioned my boss, "I'm not sure I know enough. . ." he replied, "Well, you'll have to learn then, won't you?!"
Fast forward to 2002 or so. My son, whose first words were, "Eee--dirt!", was then 13 or 14. We were active with groups promoting a cleaner East Tennessee, and quickly found that volunteers with trash bags couldn't very well clean up the biggest piles of trash that had been dumped for years in the rural areas of our county. I got the idea that I would find a used skid-steer to buy and use in conjunction with our clubs' cleanup efforts. For months, we found nothing but machines to work on, not with. We finally got a tip from a friend in Corbin, KY, and went off in a near blizzard to the suburbs of Gildler, KY (try to find it), and found a new-new Bobcat 773 Turbo, 2001 model, with only 166 hours on it. Nothing to fix, just buy it and work.
Our friend in Corbin volunteered his trailer, and grapple bucket. I had never used a grapple bucket, and would not have thought to consider one. We brough the 773 and the grapple back to Tennessee and went to work cleaning up dump sites--for sport. ( I know what you're thinking--this guy ain't right. . . .) We organized "techincal" cleanups, requiring cables, snatch blocks, etc. to pull heavy equipment tires, refrigerators, even discarded boats up from the embankments where they had been dumped.
We found that dumps full of glass, or roofing materials full of nails, were most difficult to clean up. Jennifer Parks of Bobcat of Knoxville let us try a 4-in-1 bucket, and that turned out to be the trick for scraping up that kind of trash.
In late 2005, my wife and I bought the farm (no, we didn't die, we purchased a farm). We quickly found that the skid-steer with grapple and 4-in-1 is an extraordinarily versatile tool. (You would know it--the 50 acres turned out to have a 2 acre garbage dump from the 1940's, a major cleanup project for us. As they say, no good deed goes unpunished.) The farm required some major clearing. We hired an owner-operator with a Cat track loader and backhoe to do the heavy stuff. The Bobcat with grapple served as our log skidder--grab the end of a log and go (backwards).
Today, our fleet includes the 2001 773 Turbo (G series), grapple bucket, 4-in-1 bucket, tooth bucket, 36" trencher, Eliminator rake, Bobcat auger, and home-built hay spear for large round bales. We also have a John Deere 5425 65hp farm tractor, 5' Woods BrushBull, Woods BW180 batwing mower, and other attachements. (We had hay equipment but circumstances have caused us to recently sell of the hay equipment. Ditto for a speciality piece, a Wheatheart High & Heavy Hitter post-pounder w/ self-contained hydraulics and pilot auger--a cool piece but now somebody else's prize.) Invaluable for the farm and for our trash cleanup projects: a Dandy Dump dump trailer. We haul the Bobcat on a Contrail 16' , 12,000 lb GVWR trailer.
My son is now 21; he has been able to operate all of the equipment, and does much of the maintenance and repair. Currently he attends Roane State Community College.
What else? We have Honda ATV's, and when the trails are too narrow for that, ride KTM 4-stroke off-road motorcycles. At work, I have a special interest in and 19 years experience in planning and completing dental implant restorations. While we use 3/4 drive sockets on the big equipment, the titanium dental implant components torque to a whopping 30NCm, with hex drivers measureing 1.25mm.
We fix our own stuff. In 30 years of dental practice, I have never once had a dental equipment service call. (I'm not sure I can keep that up. . . .)
That's enough. . . more than you wanted to know. Thanks to all of you who have worked to make HEF a reality, a valuable site for folks like me.
