SCUT, CUT and utility tractors..... Multipurpose tractors. TLB's easy off FEL's and BH's and with PTO's and 3ph's. This being a Kubota owners forum then it seems to reason to me that the definition provided by the manufacturer Kubota would be the definition we use here and not what someone has decided they mean in their minds because that's what they've always called them. This is what Kubota defines their TLB's to be.
You are so much fun to debate. I love ya, but gotta play oppositional advocate here. These terms had a meaning before Kubota ever made or sold tractors. So on whose authority does Kubota get to change the meaning? I'm going to draw an analogy to cars.
Back in the old days, it was pretty easy to distinguish between a sedan and a pickup truck. Then along came panel vans, jeeps, full sized vans, and station wagons. Now pickups had separate cabs and beds, until Ford decided the '61-'63 F100 should have a unibody design. Then someone decided that pickups could be built on car frames and we got the Chevy El Camino, Ford Ranchero, Cadillac Mirage, and the VW Rabbit PU, all unibody designs. Were those things cars or trucks? Does a car make a bad truck; does a truck make a bad car? What if you're talking about one of those four vehicles? Now along come the minivan and SUV. What's a minivan; is it a little van or a big station wagon? What is an SUV: a car, a truck, a station wagon? Well, it's built on a truck frame, so for EPA mileage, it qualifies as a truck. Uh, oh, now we get the crossover, a SUV built on a car frame, so what is that? Oops, that's not enough, now we need to cross the SUV with a pickup, so we get the unibody Sport Utility Pickup in the form of the Honda Ridgeline, Cadillac Escalade, and Chevy Avalanche. Oh, we can't let the crossover be outdone by the SUP, so we need a crossover Sport Utility Pickup: the Subaru Baja. What is this thing in the pic below, what are the right terms? Is it a car, pickup, SUV, crossover, SUP, crossover SUP, all of the above, none of the above, or what?
I think there was a time when the terms TLB and Utility Tractor had distinctly different meanings, just like you could tell a sedan from a pickup and there wasn't a lot of in between stuff to muddy the water. The meanings of words change. Middle English is hard enough to understand, and Old English is unreadable to everyone except linguists who specialize in it. Heck, when I was a kid, the word gay just meant somebody was happy, and to say that someone or something "sucked" was an incredibly vile slur. My father would have slapped my teeth out of my head if he had ever heard me say that someone sucked. Before WWII, the word plastic was an adjective, a synonym for flexible; now it is a noun for a synthetic material.
I think that in the realm of big agribusiness and large scale commercial construction, TLB and Utility Tractor probably mean pretty much what they did in the post WWII years; in those days, family farmers used a utility tractor, never a TLB. In the realm of those of us who need
Estate Tractors so we can pretend we are Mr. Douglas on
Green Acres (tee, hee, hee), the waters have become muddied. I would agree with you though in this, makers of these smaller tractors have mixed and matched so many features on these little things that they almost have to apply terminology in a broader sense. You say you once taught at the college level. I would assume therefore that you have some knowledge of the field of etymology, the study of the origin of words and the evolution of their meaning over time. The meanings of words change. The place I am going to disagree with you is in who gets to decide what words mean (other than Bill Clinton). It seems that you imply that individuals do not get to decide what words mean, while Kubota does. I would posit that Kubota has never built a single piece of truly big commercial Ag or construction equipment, not the kind of stuff Caterpillar builds. I do not think it is inappropriate for Kubota to borrow the term TLB to describe a
BX25, however I think my statement that a
BX25 is not a true TLB is closer to being correct in the original context of the term.
So where does that leave us? I think we need to ask the OP to be more specific about his original question (which he has now done). Is he talking about a big Case TLB used to lay water mains in paved roads? If so, I would reply that this tractor is not a good choice to use as a utility tractor due to the time it takes to change implements (as well as the mass and size). On the other hand, if he is asking whether a
BX25 is more difficult than a
BX2360 when it comes to changing implements, the answer is that there is no difference. So, with all the kazillion options and sizes in today's market, rather than the original question, "Do TLBs make bad (utility) tractors," it is better to ask what most people here ask when they say, "Here are the specific tasks I need to do, on this much property, in this amount of time. What tractors come the closest to meeting my needs?"
