I'm Ted, from EverthingAttachments.com. We're going to show you, from one end to the other, how to hook up an extreme-duty McMillen Hydraulic Auger Earth Drill. We're going to show you how to hook the couplers up, how to hook the 3-point up. Then we're going to use this used 24" tree bit, and a tree bit is a 2-stage bit. The first stage is going to be narrow to give your roots room to grow, and then it's going to go larger to give your ball room to fit in. We're going to hook it up, and then we're going to go drill a hole.
Pull into this hydraulic auger system; it hooks up just like any other standard universal skid-steer hitch. We're going to make sure we're under that bottom lip, then we're going to pull into it. As long as we catch that first lip and roll back, everything should come and fit perfectly. A little shake there always helps. Then to make sure the hydraulic couplers go on easy, I'm going to shut the machine off, I'm going to turn the key back on; that will let the hydraulics depressurize. I'm going to move the handle back and forth, make sure there's no pressure built up, and then I'm going to hook up the hydraulic lines and put down the ratchets that keep it from falling off. Then we're going to hook our hydraulic lines up. Everything's good there. I'm going to leave this right here for now, while we're hooking up to that used 24" bit. This is hex drive instead of round. It's the most
... it's the strongest, by far, way of doing it instead of a round hole, but we do offer both.
It's always nice if your auger has a stand or if it's half way in the ground, to keep it straight up. Right now, we're going to use my service manager, Kevin. All we have to do is put the pin in. The hex drive will do all of the turning power, and the pin is only going to keep the bit from falling off. We do have our hydraulic flow right. We're going to get it down to make sure our lines are okay. This has the cradle on it, which makes it really nice, where you can hold your bit straight out from you from transport without having to keep your bit all the way at the top.
With all the McMillen auger drives, this is a 1475, and it is a planetary drive not a chain drive. It's good for up to a 30" auger on this machine. Some of the nice features that this has that some of the others don't have, one's going to be that spring right there which holds your hydraulic hoses, so you're able to keep your hoses tight from there to the machine. If the machine, when you're tilting it over, needs more line, it'll simply just pull the spring but keep the tension out. Also, the cradle that helps you be able to extend the auger straight out from the machine allows you to carry it without dangling around, with it beating the machine back and forth and maybe even endangering yourself. That's one of the best benefits that I like of carrying the auger with this machine.
We're going to drill a 24" hole. This is a tree auger; it starts out with about a 12" bit, ends up with a 24". Works perfect for a tree because you've got a 2-stage hole. It gives your roots plenty of room to grow. One good thing about a skid-steer augur over a tractor augur is you do have down pressure and you can also reverse the auger if you get under a stump, root, or something like that.
We're just going to simply raise up the boom as far as we need to, to make sure we tilt it down. You want to make sure that you tilt your boom a little further than over center so you get away from your cradle. We're going to start the auger, and that's going to be the first stage. I don't even have any down pressure on it yet. I'm going to start giving it just a little bit of pressure, a little bit of RPM. We're down to our second stage and we're going to go on down with that, and that's where your root ball is going to be fitting. We're down to approximately 24 or 30 inches in here. Auger has an overall length of 48", and we're going to go all the way to the bottom in this case. We're going to clean the hole out, and we're going to do that by revving the engine all the way to the top and going up and down. Sometimes I like to just get a full load of auger, stop the bit, raise it all the way to the top, and then spin it fast to make the dirt go away. I like to do that one or two times if I'm really looking for a clean hole all the way to the bottom. You can reverse the auger if you were to get under something, if you need to. Then I'm going to go back to the cradle position and remove myself from the hole. I believe we've got the hole right. That beats the old-style post hole digger option. We're ready to go planting.
We're going to disconnect this hydraulic auger, McMillen 1475, from the front of this skid-steer. We're just going to lower our boom all the way to the bottom and we're going to cut the machine off. We're going to make sure that our hydraulic hose connections don't have any pressure left on them. That's going to make it a lot easier to unhook this, especially when you go back to hook it up next time. I want to make sure these stay out of the dirt, also. Without any pressure on it, it was pretty easy, and that'll make it easier to hook it up next time. Then just like any universal skid-
steer, you're just going to raise your two levers to remove the pins out of the bottom of the hitch and roll out of it. There we go.
