Money-Making Ideas for Your Compact Excavator

1. Hardscaping/landscaping with a mini excavator — 

Creating an outdoor environment, building an elaborate hardscape or constructing retaining walls?

Compact excavators with a three-tine grapple paired with a hydraulic clamp provide the grasp and precision you need to load, unload and sort material, or move vegetation.

Or combine the Pro Clamp™ system with a three-tine grapple for a perfect solution to handle landscape boulders, timbers or other dimensional lumber in the construction of waterfalls and ponds.

2. Using your compact excavator for park and recreation construction — 

The same machines and attachments you use to perform construction tasks for residential or commercial properties are also needed to create parks and recreational facilities.

Buckets and grapples assist with site prep; cleaning and clearing land; and building campsites, shelter houses and marinas.

Clamps can help move broken concrete, brush, logs, tree stumps, boulders and other odd-shaped objects — even old playground equipment.

A compact excavator’s large footprint also provides strong grading capabilities. Augers replace manually digging new holes for playground equipment, performing the work much faster. 

Grading blades assist with rough or finish grading, backfilling and leveling in boat ramp and beach construction and reclamation, while grading buckets and tilt accessories can complement your efforts with their ability to cut swales and shape contours.

3. Trail development with a compact excavator —

Constructing and maintaining asphalt walking/biking trail systems and golf cart paths is tough to do with most machines but is easier with a compact excavator equipped with a trenching bucket and grading blade.

With a ripper attachment, these machines can penetrate and scarify frost or hard-packed ground.

Mini excavators are also ideal for clearing, grading and applying fill material to prep pathways with minimal disruption. They provide the precision to chisel and sculpt sloped land and the versatility to cut, grade and compact fill material.

Flail mowers paired with compact excavators are an ideal solution for maintaining areas along finished trails.

4. Using a compact excavator for retaining wall construction and maintenance — 

With a growing emphasis on climate change and wet-weather patterns, many urban and rural areas are seeing increased stress on dike and levee walls.

Mini excavators can help reshape levee walls and shelves using a grading bucket and an extendable arm (available on some compact excavators). The soil can then be rolled downhill and sloped with a tilt accessory for improved mowing and spraying.

Likewise, these same features allow contractors to groom land prior to constructing large stone retaining walls along freeways and metropolitan interstate roadways.

On a smaller scale, homeowners are enhancing their properties with stone retaining walls. Building these walls and placing the stones is much easier with help from a compact excavator.

A Bobcat compact excavator offers versatility to the many projects you throw at it thanks to more standard features, including the quick-tach system, hoses and couplers, controls, and clamp mounts.

Figuring out what a mini excavator can do can help you expand the services your business offers.

Now that you know what a compact excavator can do, figure out what size of excavator is best for your jobsite.