Richard,
im sure a fronthoe will mount on your MX and it will work but not sure it is a wise or great long term solution.
as you mentioned a lot of moving the tractor around and it would be very difficult to see what you are doing.
I own an MX, a track loader and an excavator, they are all different machines and have their uses. A backhoe puts a lot of force back through a tractor, that’s why they come with a heavy chassis rear type mount. A skid loader has a lot of weight and a very solid mounting front plate, very different to a front end loader on a tractor . Skid loader also has better hydraulic flow and controls.
I would not consider putting a front mount backhoe onto my tractor front end loader, as you say they are designed for skid / track loaders, I’d be seriously concerned about the FEL managing the forces involved.
Either get a backhoe for your tractor or rent a mini excavator when you need to.
Well, I was all stoked to get a Titan Fronthoe with a 10" bucket and thumb at $2,080 to use with an LA805 loader until I read this. Now I'm worried. Here's the logic I was using:
1. Won't be used a lot, but when I want it, the rental availability of a mini ex is unlikely to be there in our market without significant wait times (think months, and when the contractors are not using them, you're probably not using them either if it's because of weather). It's not uncommon to see rental units that are rented from about 100 miles from here during the height of construction season.
2. Primary expected uses are for trenching (most of which I can probably try to do in a pinch with a middle buster instead of a hoe), light excavating around the root zone of a tree to enable removing the tree stump down into the roots without resorting to a stump grinding only down to ground level, picking up small to mid size landscaping boulders, picking up sawn logs (some are pretty big diameter oaks and even a 3' length at full diameter is pretty heavy), minor smoothing out of stock tank shorelines, small burial pits for prunings that don't go through the chipper, and burn pits if necessary. I can do most of the picking up of rocks and sawn logs with my pallet forks without having the hoe, but maybe a little less convenient. Can't do much digging with a standard front end loader bucket though.
3. I am well aware that this system is limited on a tractor because of: (a) low flow and low pressure hydraulics which don't even come close to something like a high flow ASV track loader even in their 50hp range, and (b) lack of efficient side to side dump capability. I would think the hydraulic pressure is a factor, but the flow rate is probably not that important in this scenario since you are not going for high speed production and the rotation rate of the bucket is therefore pretty insignificant. The lack of side to side swing means that you are basically limited to digging maybe something like half the length of the fronthoe's arm without moving the tractor and you are likely to be moving the tractor in reverse in about 3' increments to make a long trench, so it's going to be a slow process for sure, but it might be faster than waiting weeks or months for a mini ex to become available for rent.
4. As to not being able to see in front of you to see what you are doing. A track loader is much better for this. However, I was wondering if you couldn't mount a couple of mirrors on the system like they use on school buses to help the driver see where the front bumper is, or even get one of those wireless rear view cameras that you can buy to mount on your license plate bracket and just mount it on the front of the tractor. Seems like that would solve the problem.
One thing that concerns me is the mention in this thread of damage to the loader arms and the implication that twisting and/or side loads on the arms is one of the problems. If you are only using an 8"-12" wide bucket and digging in soil, not rocks, where is the twisting/side loading coming from?
I know you have a load cantilevered pretty far out away from the pivot on the loader arms and the pivot is not as far back as with a track loader, but as you curl the bucket, the force and torque load on the loader arm driveshaft should rotate through vertical and down toward horizontal and away from the tractor so that it's trying to pull the tractor by the end of the curl. Is the concern that this set of forces is going to exceed the lift capacity of the loader arms and that in fact torque is not being applied in the "lift" direction but in the "lower" direction when you start the curl? I would think the loader arm driveshaft would have equal orifice sizes on the lift direction hydraulics and the lower (i.e. push down) direction hydraulics, so the hydraulic system shouldn't care whether you are lifting up or pushing down.
Now I'm not going to buy one until I think this out some more, look for other digging alternatives, and hopefully see some more comments on this thread. However, I'm not going to put a full blown backhoe on the back of the tractor, just too much cost & hassle for what I want to do, so that option is out for now.
