Kubota L47

The most useful account here comes from an owner four years in, and his conclusion is blunt: this machine shines with the backhoe on, and with a mower fitted instead it is just a very expensive L-series that cannot lift as much as it should. If he bought again he would skip the mower entirely and pay someone to cut the grass once a year, leaving the hoe on permanently. He also corrects the widespread belief that a dedicated loader-backhoe is welded together - the backhoe comes off with two pins and nothing else, about thirty minutes to change over to the mower, and bucket swaps take one pin. What makes the hoe genuinely better than a three-point attachment, in his telling, is not size but control: the crawl function, the sideways-facing controls and the thumb. Mechanically he reports four years without a single fault beyond things he caused himself, like knocking a taillight off on blackberry bushes.

Where owners are consistent, and worth listening to before spending this much, is that a four-ton machine is not an excavator and they keep buying one anyway. An owner with two of these calls them tanks for their weight class and says in the same breath that he bought a mini excavator for digging. Another warns that for paid trenching a mini excavator makes more sense, because although this is manoeuvrable you reposition constantly where a tracked machine would simply pivot and keep going. A third went from a B26 to an L39 and an L47 and is now, in his words, on the excavator path. The counterpoint is reach and stability: owners moving big rocks and trees say the extra weight and much longer dipper over a B26 is a substantial help, and one who had experience of an L47 says it lifted far more than he expected.

The practical ownership notes cluster around traction and the options list. These come on R4 tires that owners describe as notoriously poor on ice, and the fix owners agree on is chains plus wheel spacers, which one says made a world of difference pushing a 6-foot blade up and down a very steep paved driveway - though real chains tear up asphalt badly, so he switched to rubber chains and found the traction loss negligible. On options, the recommendations are a third function for the loader, triple three-point remotes, extendable rear links and a hydraulic thumb, plus Kubota's quick-attach setup that lets mini-excavator buckets fit the backhoe and broaden what you can dig with. The regret one owner names is skipping the hydraulic quick-attach latches, which he thinks about every time he swaps bucket to forks for the fourth or fifth time in a day.