This past Summer, my daughter bought herself a mini excavator. It’s cute. It has the same Briggs engine my sawmill has – and, having spent 15 years at South Dakota State University, I have a special place for Briggs & Stratton. The engines started there. I knew Hilton Briggs – the university’s former president and the library’s namesake. I feel a bit more connected with Briggs power plans.
Her little excavator looks like this:
Her Terror X was used, and did not have a thumb. Still, unlike the old backhoes I learned on, you can see that the Terror was built to have a thumb attached. So I started looking for one – and the internet showed where I could order a new thumb for my daughter.
I guess that, with the thumb attached, the little excavator becomes a Terror XI – this is what it looks like on the factory website:
The great thing about the thumb is that you can pick up things with the bucket that once took human muscles – get off the seat, roll a rock or stump into the bucket, then gingerly balancing the load, drive the unit to the spot where you want to load it. The thumb lets you do the whole job from the seat.
The thumb was available on Amazon – it cost $156, and Prime covered the shipping – which was a good thing. It was too heavy for me to install, so Jed took the difficult part of the task while I supervised. When we had the job completed, Sam came out and practiced with the thumb.
I still haven’t used the thumb – but there is a lot of fun to be had making your daughter’s toys more versatile. There’s more fun watching her play with the improved toy. The fun increases again as I watch a grandson totally impressed with his mother’s dirt moving toy.
And until I started looking for attachments, I never realized that you can buy excavators from Walmart.
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