2 things:

1. WOW Germany is hard up for some mind-numbing entertainment
2. HOW can that announcer have THAT much to say while a backhoe scales a tower for 9 minutes?
3. NOW That IS impressive actually. Can't believe that announcer guy was underneath it. Or that guy inside it.

Moving this video to bleedingsnowman's personal queue. It failed to receive enough votes to get sifted up to the front page within 2 days.

That's not a backhoe, that's track hoe.

Left side of screen looks like a rubber tire loader.

Right side is a bull dozer.

Most distance item looks like it might be another rubber tire loader.

Machine at 1:26 is a track loader.


Hard to tell if they have track or tires with it being so dark and pretty much always being far camera shots. Day time building scenes are easiest to see.

But the thing climbing the tower is a track hoe. Track hoes can spin all the way around on their tracks, so they can dig a hole and load the dirt to a truck behind them.

A back hoe can only move it's digging arm in roughly a 180 degree arc, basically it's 90 degrees off center in either direction, so they can only load a truck that's sitting beside them. I have run backhoe (often), and a very small version of a track hoe (week or so). Backhoes are called backhoes because basically they used to be tractors with a loading bucket on the front and a hoe attachment on the back. They eventually morphed into what you see today, loading bucket or skid loader attachment on front and hoe (digging arm) on back....never seen them on tracks if it's even an option... typically rubber tires with stabilizer legs they can let down on the digging arm end of the machine. So the front bucket and the 2 stabilizer legs make it so the machine is pretty solid on the ground. Digging without the legs down is a good way to throw up your lunch especially if the ground is really hard, the tires just constantly bounce from the force the arm can add and relieve in a blink of an eye.


Bobcats and backhoes are what most people own as they can do a lot of jobs with the right attachments/buckets/etc. I would say that backhoes are the safer of the two, while bobcats have more utility due to attachments. Bobcats will let you dump whatever you load in the front bucket right on top of the machine (where you're sitting) and aren't typically covered in the front....and their ability to spin in a circle is a good way to break things or hurt someone really bad.

It looks like a Liebherr 312, which they classify as Crawler Excavator. If you noted from the video it's a 1997 production. I didn't see a 312 in their lineup but there was it's obvious descendant a 313.

Excavator.


A track hoe is wut you pick up after winning big on the horses.

I'll take crawler excavator as a more apt description of it, at least you'd know it came on tracks. Not sure what you'd call that attachment on it, looks like it was special made since it has all the swirl marks on the contact side of it.

All I know is I wouldn't want to work on the crew that referred to everything that digs as an excavator, most of em have multiple on site. Rubber tires so they can get up on the street, tracked for when it doesn't matter if the terrain is tore up. And if you want to be really anal about it, anything that doesn't have a digging implement attached to it shouldn't be called an excavator and "backhoe" describes the direction the bucket travels to pickup dirt (toward the machine). A "shovel" bucket works just like a shovel...so away from the machine.

So technically what I called a "backhoe" in my first post should be rephrased to say "Backhoe loader". This machine in the video while listed as an excavator on the companies website, technically can not excavate anything with it's current attachments. So I guess we can refer to it as a crawler tractor with a boom since that describes it more accurately.

Being super anal is tiresome. It's definitely not a backhoe though, it's other descriptions aside from a Liebherr 312 are very debatable apparently.

This is in Vienna, Austria. Not Germany.

Custom attachment?? Yeah the whole thing was just for this climbing. Did you notice the attachment had hydraulic pins on the side that locked into the tower. Also did you catch the massive hook that was used to lock the body into the tower.