Another Newbie looking to buy a tractor

RjCorazza · Jan 27, 2025

Fine looking machine... Enjoy!

mike69440 · Jan 27, 2025

MaineBarn said:
Thanks Carl_NH

I'm not 100% sure I'll be requiring the hydraulic thumb outside of work near the lake. My house's soil has some rocks but nothing major. I don't think I'd be flipping between needing/not needing it a ton. More of an occasional use or if using the thumb, it would be consistently on.

That being said, any idea if Kioti makes a kit specifically? If not, pretty sure I'll have to do it down the road if it becomes necessary. The dealership said Kioti would void my FEL warranty if I had a bolt on tooth bar. Assuming if a hydraulic thumb didn't come from Kioti, they would not warranty the backhoe during that first year.

Read this thread and would like to offer my perspective as I have cut a 1000' elevated driveway thru a rocky tree wooden swap 18 years ago.
My tractor is a bit more suited for such a task than your tractor by a only little bit. It has gotten 20 years of good hard use and runs strong because I did not use it exclusively to build my drive. It is way too valuable a destroy a tractor doing such work.
Use heavy equipment for the real heavy lifting to clear and rough in your project.
If you're a cheap bastard like myself, you can use you machine to finish the drive.
What you spend on hiring out or renting heavy equipment you will save on wear tear, and deprecation on your tractor, saving your new tractor for all those fun smaller projects that would cost a fortune to hire out.
If you have some time to kill, for either inspiration or discouragement, see this long thread of mine.

Busy Wife This Weekend

She and our little Kubota B7200 built this terraced garden plot. All I did to help was bucket out 5 loads of clay, a bit of BH work to set the larger stones and mix up some manure and soil with the L39. My time was less than 3 hours. She did the rest, leaving me to focus on road building...

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