Mark - Thanks! I was very impressed with the work D&E did. They make a lot of the OEM buckets for some of the biggest construction equipment names in the business, but of course those buckets don't have the D&E name on them.
I was just as impressed by the fact that they're willing to do custom work on what is to them relatively very small stuff. My EF-5 was about 1/5 the size of the next smallest piece of equipment that D&E worked on while we were there. There were some huge excavators, even some attachments that weighed more than my entire machine. It was an incredible experience just hanging around that place. Most amazing of all, they even told me I could come back if I had something else I needed them to do! /w3tcompact/icons/laugh.gif
As for the quality of the stuff, the pictures pretty much speak for themselves, but you really can't get a good sense of how solidly they build everything they do.
As for price, I felt I definitely got my money's worth. I paid $20 apiece for the chain dogs, which I thought was fair, since they had to draw them in CAD, then put that into their computer-controlled plasma cutter. I'm sure that if somebody in China made 10,000 of them, I could get them for $5 each, but that's not what happened. The custom work - light brackets, chain eyes, welding the chain dogs on, cup holder, etc. - cost me a little under $1k total for design, materials, fabrication, attaching them to the EF-5, everything. Again, a very fair price, I thought, considering the fact that it was all custom and very small quantity.
Where I think I really made out like a bandit was in the cost of the attachments themselves. I paid $5k for the high-capacity loader bucket, a custom quick-attach coupler for the backhoe, 18" and 24" backhoe buckets and ripper tooth designed to work with the quick-attach, a custom-designed backhoe thumb and the labor to attach it to the EF-5, and a quick-attach adapter to mate the McMillen auger head to the backhoe quick-attach. We're talking close to 2500 pounds of materials here, excellent workmanship, plus quite a bit of custom design work, so I think it was a steal. I'm sure I wouldn't have gotten that pricing if I hadn't also had the other stuff as part of the deal, but no matter, they treated me extremely well, I think. (I think I'd have paid admission just to see their operation, but don't tell them that!)
MarkC
