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Mini digger, advice, suggestions, tips, hidesight, etc

 
pollinator
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Hi.
I was talking with my husband and I tend to be hypothetical, think about things for ages, overthink them, do research, look for ideas etc.  So I was saying I think we should look into getting a mini digger. We live in southern Mexico and I haven't seen any around here and the big diggers are fairly expensive to rent especially as they charge you all the time and diesel the machine uses while it drives out to your site (not transported on trailers) and our site is a 90-minute drive in a regular car from the nearest rental machines, so that's probably two hours there and back at least for the machine. and a mini digger would be able to get into smaller places than the big ones, and if we owned it we could also rent it out some of the time to recover a little bit of the cost.
So he's rather more impulsive than me and apparently, his phone was listening on our conversation, or maybe he googled some to see what I was talking about, and then when an Alibaba ad for a surprisingly affordable mini digger came up he bought it!!!
It's now on its way across the ocean. I'm scrambling to learn about getting an industrial machine through Mexican customers as a private citizen Which I'm not expecting anyone on permies to be able to help with, but what I hope you can help us with is making the most of the machine.

We are both university professors Monday-Friday and work restoring his family's very degraded farmland on the weekends. We are in a semi-arid very mountainous region! and enrolled in a government reforestation program which dictates how fast we have to plant trees, so there are already 3000 plants in the ground that should have been properly terraced first, but there are plenty of other areas to work on and do earth works first on those.
Tips?
Advice?
Blogs?/Videos?/books?
Instructions?
 
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Location: Austin, Texas
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Micah Toll (writer for Electrek) has ordered electric vehicles through Alibaba and written about the importing process here. I don't know of any Mexico specific examples.

The Heavy Metal Learning channel on YouTube has good tutorials on operating heavy machinery. Here's there skid steer 101 video:


Be sure to keep us updated. I kicked around the the idea of ordering an electric mini front wheel loader from Alibaba but never did it.
 
Melissa Ferrin
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Aaron thank you so much!
That channel is gold, exactly what I needed.
We have hired a customs broker, but the whole system assumes the importer is a business, not just a guy with a little too much spending money! The company in China has been great, sending us videos of loading the machine into the crate and loading the crate into a container and then onto the ship. Unfortunately, they aren't able to ship to our nearest Pacific port so there will also be land transport time of about a week added to it's journey.
 
Melissa Ferrin
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I wanted to pop back in to say I also found this youtube playlist from a British man in France. He ordered the same machine as us!
But we ordered a Kubota engine, just the trench bucket, plus the auger and also a jack hammer attachment as we have light limestone to break.
This channel also has a one-year on video which is great.
 
Melissa Ferrin
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IT'S HERE!

Our machine finally arrived today!
The customs was more costly than we would have hoped and then we had to have it shipped since they'd only come into one port all the way across Mexico.
It took us about 30 minutes to figure out how to start it, now we need to work on getting it off the trailer!

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They sent us this second bucket either for free or by mistake.
 
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I just ordered this for our homestead and put a down payment down. I should have it in a couple weeks.

 
I'm not dead! I feel happy! I'd like to go for a walk! I'll even read a tiny ad:
turnkey permaculture paradise for zero monies
https://permies.com/t/267198/turnkey-permaculture-paradise-monies
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