I'll give the example of this past Monday's work with the little excavator, and my jolly dually, and trailer. It had been several years since I really needed one.
Walking speed of this $235 a day excavator is 3 mph. My first job was using the weight of the 20" White Oak to pull the roots out from under the little bathroom house on our point. I pulled it down the hill on the trailer, dug around the tree base that was growing directly against the slab of the little house. I wanted to use the weight of the tree to pull any big roots out from under the house, without damaging the house.
When we first got this point, we had planned on tearing the building down, so I didn't worry about trees growing roots under it. Recently, plans have changed, and we're going to offer it as a Wedding venue, so the restroom house, from the 1960's, will be turned back into a restroom house.
I had already hired a crew with a loader, and dump truck(can be seen in the picture with them towards the end of the point)for cleaning up a lot of stuff off the point, and they took care of moving the stump. I didn't have enough work to hire someone else to come in with an excavator for this, and really wanted to do it like I wanted to anyway.
From there, it's only 300 yards up the hill to where I needed to dig the footings for a 24x40 addition onto the side of my mechanic, and metalworking building. That 300 yards might not have been too bad, walking it, but I didn't want to waste that time. It was quicker to use the trailer to move it, than to walk it. After I did that, I walked it another 100 feet behind that building to grade where I wanted the bottom of a swale to be beside where we're putting a shipping container for storage.
Once more the excavator was loaded on the trailer, and driven another 1/4 mile to where we bury animals. I like to keep graves dug for horses, and small animals, because it's so much simpler when the time comes. They can easily be filled by a loader. The holes, with ramps do deer can get out, fill in over time, so this was one of the convenient times to clean them out.
From there, the excavator was put on the trailer again, to move it to a Historic site nowhere near our place, to tear a rotting 20th Century garage off the side of an 1864 house. This site was only about ten minutes past where I needed to return the excavator, and the Foundation that owns it didn't trust anyone else to not damage the house, but me.
I felt like I got pretty good use out of the $235 for the excavator that day. I don't really use an excavator often enough to justify buying one, like John, but keeping up the Ponderosa, and making a living, the trailer comes in pretty handy sometimes. I'll leave it at that.
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