I will be plowing my condos with skid steers this year. I have 2 major condos projects each with a total of 150 driveways. I plan on having a blade and a snowbucket for each skidsteer. These two condos as back to back, with a fire road between them, so i can send units through the road. I may use one of My F 650s to plow the condo's access road, but am not sure yet. This year i bought 4 863 bob cats for a major utility project that is still underway. I also had to buy a 436 IC Cat back hoe and a 914 loader. This euipment will be added to the snow removal force. All 4 skid steers have the new G series cab, with heat ac, and am. They also have two speed travel which will allow me to drop them off before the snow and pick them up after. If you are buying a bob cat, go with the G series cab. Geoff
Good Job Geoff! I guess you picked the right market to be in. Those new bobcats are sure nice, they've been putting foldout brochures of the interiors of them in them equipment mags i get. I was driving an older (1994 or so) 743 bobcat around my friends shop. I personally like Case backhoes, but that's just me. What type of blades are you going to be putting on them? <p><center> <img src="http://albums.photopoint.com/j/View?u=993086&a=7299918&p=25693700"></center> Bryan
NEW BOBCATS ARE GREAT!! Geoff, you ain't kidding about those new bobcats man!! We got the first of 5 new 863's we bought last month. Its great, we got the code start and the ac and all that, its great!! We have every attatchment melroe makes for them, plus some aftermarket ones. The only one we haven't got was the ice scraper, didn't see that it could do anything I can't do with a bucket. I want to give you one suggestion before you buy a backhoe attatchment for your bobcat. I don't know if you've ever run them and I don't know how true this is, but I hear the new ones don't have as good visablility as the old ones do where you sit on a seperate seat up higher on the attatchment. From what I understand the newer models you sit in the bobcat cab, I can't see being able to se much of what your doing. We use a Bobcat mini excavator a lot lately, especially after we bought the dumper attatchment for the bobcat loader. The excavator works great!! And with the loader it makes a great team!! I hate to sound like a bobcat commercial but I'm very happy with their product. I'm so glad the Air Forces is still buying them constently!! I have a couple pretty good pics on my web site of one of our old bobcats I got stuck in a creek last week at work. I seemed to have grew these huge nads after I put the loggering tracks on it, and decided I could make it though no problem!! You'll laugh hard if you see it!! Go check them out. If you have any questions about the Bobcat products that your dealer can't answer or you don't want to ask him, let me know, we have an AWESOME Gov't sales rep I go through and he always responds quickly!! So just ask. I also have a bunch of hours on all the attatchments, so let me know if I could help with anything. Good Luck with your new machines!!
I didn't use them for digging, i had a gat 307 for all the digging. I used them to move sand, pipe, and did use the trencher attachment for some work. I took delievery in june of these models, did make a post to i herd what the guys had to say. Snow that case back hoes are way to big for condo drives. I plan to either buy the bob cat blade. Becuase the blade must be able to withstand the down pressure of the machine. Geoff
Check out used snow plow blades we use them for our skid steers, we just made brackets for them with a mounting plate much cheaper than buying a plow from bobcat. Also we use snow pushers from Pro-Tech, they work better with the 2 speed option on our New Hollands. All we do is condos and apartments find that we cut down our time plowing parking spaces from 4 hrs with a truck to 1 hr with two skid steers.
Believe my i am sold on snow pushers. I will add 2 more 16' models this yeat to my big loaders. However the pushers wouldn't work in these condo drives be cars are often present and the drive leads right streight to the garage with a small turn around. In this condo project there are 3 small lots the biggest 30X 40. I think the blades will work fine. I thought about useing the 9' Diamond blades of my F 350s when i trade them in. Only i decided to keep my 95s one more year because they are in good shape. The problem i have heard and found with useing a regular snowplow blade on a skidsteer is the down pressure applied. Now my Kubota 540 Loader runs a 97, 9' diamond blade ( I leased an F 250 HD in 97, when the lease ran out i owned the plow. ) with now problem, because the entire weight of the unit isn't place on the blade, like it would be with a skid steer. I tried to run an old fisher blade on a skid steer and found that the down pressure applied by the skid steer was too much, because of the fact that a lot of the weight of the skid steer was applied to the blade. The blade had to be welded too many times, and in the end i bought the bob cat blade for my old 753 8 years ago, and have had no problems. Geoff
