Use your 3 point hitch to dig post holes with your tractor. We offer the top rated American made post hole diggers that will stand up to the abuse of difficult ground over many years. Our tractor augers feature structural tubing for hoops and booms, and come with the heaviest duty bits we could find. We have decades of experience selling and using post hole diggers, and put that to use when designing our line of post hole diggers that spans every size of tractor available. We have a full time staff ready to help you pick the best 3 point auger for your size tractor and ground condition.
If you are looking to dig post holes to put up new fencing, we have the right 3 point post hole digger for your tractor. We also carry a wide variety of post hole digger auger bits as well. If you own a tractor, and need an affordable PTO post hole digger for your tractor, you owe it to yourself to order an Everything Attachments Tractor Post Hole Digger today.
We have a very informative video series explaining the shipping method, packaging, post hole digger assembly, and an easy to follow "How to Dig Post Holes" video to have you putting up your fence in no time. Massive Free Shipping Zone for Post Hole Diggers!
Hi, I'm Ted from Everything Attachments, and we're here today to show you our full line of post hole diggers and the different sized units we have, all the different augers, and why you would use a certain auger for a certain size or shape post and just try to educate you and give you some safety tips as much as we can through the whole line.
Post hole diggers are one of the more dangerous things to be using. So safety needs to be one of the first concerns that you have. If this were to come apart and be able to sling this drive shaft, or if the auger does something, Danuser recommends you be 25 feet away. That's certainly safe. That's a long way to be. I think as long as you're 15 feet or more away, where nothing can get to you, that's pretty safe.
Definitely don't try hooking these up while the tractor is running in any way, shape, or form or anything. Okay. We'll put Peanut on here in just a minute, and we'll let him run them for us. We're going to start with our Compact Junior.
We first started out our videos about six years ago or so, when we started Everything Attachments, and the post hole diggers we were using then . . . It was really before we got into our own manufacturing. What we were using was made by the Leinbach Company in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. They started in 1942 and unfortunately, this year, they went totally out of business, had an auction, sold all their machinery, tooling, everything, and they're gone.
So as things started changing about four years ago, we couldn't get enough product to get it to our customers in a reasonable amount of time. We started with our first bender. This was the very first product we ever made, before we even had a factory to make it in. We bought a bender where we could bend the pipe and everything like we wanted it, and we started making the things that we couldn't get.
As it got worse, we ended up with our own manufacturing facility, and just we make almost everything now. We make it in-house, and we make it the American way as much as we can. This is called a compact, and it's for two reasons. Now, this is on a class-one tractor. A compact is what is considered to be . . . It could be a subcompact, which means it's smaller than what used to be considered a compact. Then you have class one, two, three, four.
This is a class one. A subcompact, these will work on. Everything will hook up, and that's why the arch is actually narrower than the regular post hole digger, which is 33 inches. This is . . What is this? 26, Peanut? I think it's 26 wide. So what it also is . . . It's 26 to the end of the pins. But what it also is . . . It has a taller hoop on it here. So the smaller tractors . . . The shorter the boom and the taller the hoop is, the more it'll lift up out of the ground for these really short stance tractors.
As the tractors get bigger, the hoop is not quite as long, and they're wider. They're the standard category-one width. Now, tractors are changing, just like everything else. The horsepowers are going up on everybody's tractor. The frames are getting smaller. The weights are getting smaller. So the exact design that Leinbach used for 40 years, which worked 99% of the time without any problem, doesn't always work anymore.
We've got tractors that are teeny tiny, that have 32 horsepower. We've got tractors that have 90 horsepower that are still small, and then you still have to care for the people that have the tractors that were made in the '70s and '80s, which are gigantic heavy tractors that don't have a lot of horsepower.
The best thing for you to do is to give us a call at Everything Attachments, and we will help you size the auger right for your tractor. So you get the right frame. You're getting the right bit for what you're doing. One bit doesn't fit all for everything. You can kind of go with one bit, but I'm going to give you some different scenarios.
One: If you're putting in round post, that's real easy to figure. If you're putting in squares, say four-by-four, remember that it, diagonally, corner to corner, it's going to be almost six inches. If you're putting it in cement, if you're tamping the dirt in, you want a tight whole where you can tamp the dirt in. The pole is not real loose.
If you're going to use cement on a four-by-four, which is almost six inches across, you want to use a nine-inch bit, even though it's a four-by-four, because with cement, if you don't, it's going to crack in the corners. So there's all kinds of different things.
If you use an 18-inch bit with a four-by-four, and you're going to tamp the dirt in, this pole isn't going to be solid enough for you to put up the rest of your fence for another six months, after it's rained and solid it up some, and then it's probably going to sink down a little bit around it. So don't use too big a bit.
Now, if you're doing shrubbery, things like that, usually bigger bits are what you want to let the roots get out. Give it some loose ground around it. They do also make especially for skid steers, and you could use a small tree auger on the biggest one if you've got a big tractor, which is a two-stage auger, up to about 30 inches you could do with this one and plant a pretty good size small tree. But we're going to go through each one of them.
This has the PHD 26 box. Now, the difference between these units here . . . The gear ratio is different in each size of gear box. Sometimes bigger is not always better. For instance, on this gear box, regardless of the tractor, even if the tractor had 50 horsepower, which this is only 22 . . . If you were doing six-inch holes, and you had a lot of holes to do, then the smaller gear box or the regular heavy duty gear box . . . The gear ratios . . . This drive shaft has to turn 2.9 times for every time the auger turns once. So this is the fastest box, as far as the auger speed.
So if you're using a small auger, you're going to be able to do your holes a lot faster. A small auger is not going to require near as much torque as a large auger, which needs to turn slower. The bigger diameter they get, the more surface they're covering, the more they need to be geared down. So this is fine up to a 12-inch auger, the small gearbox.
It is sheer-bolt protected. It has an ungraded bolt right here. Now, just because we buy in volumes, we don't want to stock . . . We sell thousands of post hole diggers a year, but we don't want to save the $4 or $6 on a drive shaft to go to a class two. Drive shafts come in classes also.
Most people use a class-two drive shaft on anything smaller than this big unit you see here. The problem with that is, for me, I can just buy a class-four. It weighs almost twice as much. It's not but about $6 or $8 more, and I don't have to stock but one grade of it, and it's good enough for all of them. So even if you get the little one, you're going to get the heavy duty drive shaft.
The sheer bolt here . . . You don't want to . . . If you're sheering bolts because you're hitting rocks and stuff, that's a prime example of why not to put a harder bolt in there if you're sheering them, because that's what protects your tractor. It also protects the gearbox and the auger in general and everything.
So an ungraded bolt is what you want, where the head is slick. We sell them in packs of five on our website. You can do whatever. You can get whatever you need.
Now, there's a lot of ways to make post hole diggers. One thing we don't do . . . Ted usually will go around the corner way before he cuts it, and all of my employees will tell you that. This auger here uses . . . You know, we buy this pipe by the foot, but this auger design simply uses more pipe than anyone else's design, but it's a better design. You know?
The bar is the length it is, and we just looked . . . We had a company that didn't take a lot of orders. Believe it or not, even the Rhino . . . It's a totally made . . . The pipe and everything is made in China. They rejected an offer from one of their suppliers, and we had the chance to buy hundreds of these. They were all Rhino orange.
The whole thing is coming from China, where we do this in America. Their boom is much shorter. Their piping is a very short hoop, comes underneath here, where it could interfere with the auger. It's just a cheaper design to make because it doesn't use as much pipe.
Also, when you push from the bottom side of the pipe, you're creating a kink point. Their bracket is only about three inches long where their hoop hooks, and it only hooks to one place. We have many holes on here, on the top of this right here, and that does two things.
The further you go in, the further it'll lift for certain tractors. The further you go out, the more power you have to lift it out of the hole. Now, if you get an auger stuck up under a root or a rock or something, and your tractor won't pick it up, the thing you don't want to do is start rocking your tractor, because that's the number-one thing that'll bend a bit.
Your tractor is stronger than that bit is, if you're down in the hole pretty far, and you start rocking it. You simply need to unhook it, find you a long bar, unscrew it a little bit, and get it to where you can pull it out. You can always start by moving this bolt to the back hole to see if you can pull it out, because that's where you're going to have your most leverage.
On the compact auger though, it's been made for a long time. This is probably our most popular one then. So we had a whole different one on our website that we're removing. It was called a hybrid, and it was basically built for a tractor that was a little bit smaller than this. It didn't need the junior. It needed the standard, but the tractors have kind of gotten smaller.
So what we did . . . We went from no calls for 40 years, selling the Leinbach, to as the tractors were changing, started getting more and more calls that, "My auger just won't lift up out of the ground." So we ended up shipping hoops back and forth. What we would do is we would make a hoop that was two inches longer or so, so they could get it up out of the ground further.
So what we've done is . . . We've never had the complaint that it wouldn't drop down in the ground far enough. So we simply just added two and a half inches to all of our designs, through the whole thing. Even the little one, we've added two and a half more inches. That way, you can get it up. You can get in and out of the field. You can go through ravines safely.
You do need to be careful because if you hit something and get this swinging good, it's going to bend this shield in. It isn't going to hurt anything. It's on tabs. You can bend it back. But here's what we don't want to do. We can buy a plastic, rubberish type shield for all of these gearboxes, for here, and they're legal, and they work, and I just simply buy them in stacks of 100, bolted on. It's really simple. Right?
The only problem is at Everything Attachments, we really want to go for a lifetime implement. This steel may rust, but it's not going . . . The UV sun is not going to crack it. It's not going to fall off. 10, 20 years from now, this shield may not be pretty, but it'll still be there. Those plastic shields are going to be long gone.
So we go to the trouble to cut this out with a laser, put it in the brake press, weld the tabs on them, and make them right. Same way with the bottom shield. That way, you just don't have an unsafe implement for later, whether your kids inherit it or whatever. You want all of these shields to be in place.
There's decals all over a post hole digger. If you pull of a shield, there's a decal to tell you there's a shield missing. Read your owner's manual. Give us a call. We'll send you a new owner's manual if you need it. But understand all the safety things of these before you use them.
It wasn't long ago. I was headed out of town. I wasn't far from home. I know the farmer where this was. He had a big tractor and a post hole digger. He was down in the field by himself. He had left his tractor with the brakes probably on. His auger tips the cutting bits, which are replaceable on our augers. So are the tips. They're all replaceable. They were probably worn out.
He was actually doing the number-one thing you don't want to do. He was back on the back, hanging on it, trying to get it to go in the ground. If your auger won't dig, there's something wrong, or you're on a rock or something like that. As long as you're in dirt, your auger should dig, and you should never, never, never get back here and try to hang on this or be anywhere around it.
So another thing, when you get this drive shaft, it's a little different than most. The front input shaft of this gearbox is smooth. It takes a bolt that goes through it, and that's the sheer bolt, but then the end of the shaft has a groove cut in it. So there is a set screw you screw down into that groove. So if it sheers the bolt, then the set screw rides in that groove and keeps it from coming off.
If you don't have your set screw set right, and you sheer that bolt, and this whole shaft comes off, then it's going to be slinging around. It's going to probably tear up your shaft and maybe something else. So you don't want to do that. Okay.
So that's the compact. It uses the standard PHD 26 box with a 2.9 ratio. This is the standard 6900. If I had that size tractor, and I was only going to be doing a couple of hundred holes ever that I know of, and I wasn't doing anything over 12 inches, then I have no real reason to go away from this.
If I knew I was only going to do 12-inch holes, I might would go ahead and go with the heavy-duty gearbox because it's got a lower gear ratio. It'll make it easier on the smaller tractors. Other than that, you can get this. This is the same . . . These are both the same. The only difference is which gearbox you choose. It has the smaller gearbox or the bigger gearbox with a little bit of gear ratio difference.
Now, on the 7500, this is a huge . . . This can go on an 80-ish horsepower tractor. You know? If it's an older tractor, it has a lifting capacity of 5000-plus pounds. So we put a three-inch schedule-40 pipe on this. Now, I've never had one bent yet, and usually when I say that, tomorrow I'll come in, and I'll have one bent.
It has a category-two top link ball in it. So it is bigger. Then it goes in here. If you order the 7500, a standard category-one is three-quarters of an inch, and a category-two is . . . What, Peanut? An inch? Inch is the top, I think. But it will only . . . It also comes with the category-two bottom pins, which are an inch-and-an-eighth.
It has a nice hook here. This is how we paint them, how we hook them. If you had the auger on it, it actually lifts pretty good. That's one thing bad about an auger. Once you completely put it together, and you try to take it off, it's kind of like a snake. They do make some different types of holders, and they look really good in them. But by the time you get it in there, you're going to wonder why you bought it.
I do probably what's not the best thing in the world, but it works real good. I drill it in about halfway and just unhook it and leave it. It does rust the bit a little bit, but it's sure an easy way to do it. The other way to do it is to back it up to a barn pole, a light pole, something that you've got. If you've got a big pole, you can back this up to it, put a strap around it, and make it easy to unhook.
Because a post hole digger is so long, you shouldn't ever have to cut the shaft on a post hole digger. It'll telescope all the way into here, and it'll telescope out to get to your PTO shaft. You shouldn't ever have to cut the shaft on a post hole digger.
On our standard bits that go out, this is a six-inch. You see it has the cast iron screw tip. It has two of the replaceable cutting edges. The shaft on the six and the nine is actually a little smaller than this double thick collar that's on the top, because it still needs enough flighting here to get the dirt up out of the hole.
We do make a four-inch also. I didn't bring it with me today. It's a little weird-looking auger because the shaft in the middle is very small, because with a four-inch hole, if you don't have the center small, you don't have any room for flighting. So that's one auger that you definitely need to pay some attention to when you're going forwards and backwards, simply because the pipe is smaller. It's easier to bend. Make sure that you always put both bolts in your output shaft of your gearbox. Okay.
So on the 18-inch, this is still meant for an agriculture auger. We're going to go to a couple augers here that are meant for skid steers but will work on a tractor. This is an 18-inch auger. If you'll notice the pitch of the teeth, they're not quite as aggressive. That gives you where it doesn't bog your tractor down and really take a lot of horsepower to turn it, and the flighting is short.
It's short because if this flighting is all the way to the top, like a skid steer auger is, and especially the bigger you get, with an 18-inch hole, and you fill it to the top with dirt without keeping your hole clean, unless you got a really big tractor, you're not even going to be able to get it out of the hole.
So if you have flighting to here or here, make sure that every eight or 10 inches you go down, sometimes six, sometimes a foot, just depending on your ground, make sure that you keep going in and out to clear the dirt out. You don't want to just see how fast you can get to the bottom, because you might see how slow you can't get it out of the hole. So keep your hole clear.
As the tractor . . . With a shorter boom like this, it's going to make . . . The other post hole diggers and brands . . . Regardless of the brand you may know, and I can name some major brands, they're all built usually by someone else. This is the same gearbox that's on a Bush Hog PHD 2001 or 2002. This is the same gearbox that's on a lot of the smaller ones. This monster gearbox . . . I'm not even sure what it's on. We just were able to obtain it, but it'll do up to a 24-inch full-size auger with no problem.
We recommend no bigger than a 12 on that box and up to an 18 on that one. Then when you get to the skid steer augers, the point is different. Instead of the corkscrew, it has what's called a fishtail. That's forged. They're on more angle. They're more aggressive. If I were going . . . You can see how much bigger the tube is in the center. In fact, they have to size it down instead of up to get it to the two-inch size hole.
You can just see the flight. This is heavy. But the flighting is really thick. The teeth are very aggressive. It's an expensive auger. But if you're going to be doing thousands and thousands of holes, it may be a good investment for you. That's when you would want the bigger gearboxes, just because you're going to be doing that much repetition.
So you can see. If you don't keep the dirt cleared out of this 24, just simply how much weight you've got there. So keep it cleared out. If that's what you need, you're drilling a lot of holes. You've got a big tractor, and you want to put that big gearbox on it. That gearbox is going to slow it down, and it's going to give you time to get it dug.
This gearbox . . . The drive shaft turns four times. That was 2.9. This is 4.0. So your drive shaft is going to turn four times to every one time the shaft turns. On this gearbox, your drive shaft is going to turn 3.18 times to every time the auger turns. So you can kind of see there's reasons why you gear down for bigger augers.
When you extend the boom out . . . This is a 6900 because the boom is 69 inches. That's a 7500 because the boom is 75 inches on the biggest one. The longer the boom, the bigger the tractor you need to lift it, and the less it will . . . As you let it down, it's going to go backwards. So you may pull your . . . If you really got a hole that's got to be perfectly square with the ground, you want a level pole, you may pull your tractor forward just a little bit as you go down. Just be careful doing it. Practice a little bit before you do it.
So let's put Peanut on a tractor. We'll start with the littlest one. This ground here . . . I moved all this ground from up here about nine years ago. This is hard red clay, but it shouldn't have any rocks in it, and it shouldn't have any roots in it, because I don't think we'll get deep enough.
Red clay, after it's been moved and settled, after seven years, they will let you build a building on it, just like it's original earth, never been moved. So this is about nine years old. So this is going to be as hard as any red clay is normally going to be.
The one thing you want to remember is always get your point down on the ground before you start. That way, it just eliminates all the problems. Another thing you don't want to do is drill a small hole and then try to drill a bigger hole in the same hole, because it doesn't have the pallet anymore, and it's going to make it want to wobble.
Now, this gearbox here does have the slot . . . I don't know if you can see it. Can you see this thing? It does have a place for a pipe to go right here, and that was called a guide bar. So the guide bar was really either meant to be used from back here, which today it'd be really kind of considered unsafe, and then also you could put it where it came up through here, where the operator could hold the bit straight, but that was for when tractors didn't have live lift on them, like an 8N Ford.
When you let out the clutch, it starts the transmission and the PTO and the lift at the same time. So on an 8N tractor, if you try using a post hole digger, that's about the only tractor you need a guide bar on. The reason is you're going to have to put the tractor in neutral, and you're going to have to start the bit before you can even start lowering it or anything. So I don't recommend the guide bar unless you have a non-live lift tractor, which is not many of them.
So go ahead and give it a try, Peanut. We'll see how it does. He'll clear the hole about every 10 inches or foot to make sure he doesn't get in there too deep. Actually the turf is one of the harder things to go through. You'll see he stopped that bit when he pulled it up out of the ground. He should go . . . That wire grass is really tough on that first little bit, especially when you've only got 22 horsepower and on that smaller tractor like that.
This dirt is hard. Really I'm going to slow him down where it doesn't jerk it out of the ground so much. All right. Let it down, and then I'm going to brake you. Hang on. All right. All right. So what I did was I just turned the valve under the seat to slow the lift down. There's probably some rocks. There could be some stumps in here.
Now, lift it up just a little bit, Peanut. So that's all you really need to do is keep going, keep lifting it up to where you're not . . . If it does come up out of the hole, you need to stop it as soon as possible like that. So you're not getting the bit crazy out here on the end at a higher RPM. You can see it's taking quite a bit of horsepower in this red clay.
When it starts loading the engine like that, that's when you see Peanut pulling up on it, because he doesn't want to get it stuck in this hole. So we've got a nice . . . It looks to me like a good three and a half, four foot. These are a full four-foot bit, and you can go all the way down to here. That's what he's got. It's a nice, clean hole. We'll show you a picture of it when we get done. We're going to use the other tractor.
You'll see. This auger was moving pretty fast. If it were . . . You can . . . If you ask for it, you can get the bigger gearbox, even on the junior. That's going to slow it down. It's going to give your tractor a little more power and allow you to do that 12-inch bit even easier if you got that small of a tractor.
Okay. So just to kind of show you a little bit about the holes. This is on a bigger tractor. We've moved this forwards. If you were looking on the little one, it was on the second hole from the back, and that's so it's got the power to pull it up. This red clay is really tough compared to like a dark, [inaudible:00:29:19] sandy ground. That's what makes it stick that auger in that ground with that corkscrew pulling in so hard.
He's got a foot underneath. So he doesn't need to change this just to be able to lift it higher. If he was doing a bigger bit, he might move it back to the back to help it just be able to lift it. That's something you could change in the field if you had to, to be able to lift it up high to get back to the house and then move it back to have more power while you were out in the field.
Okay. So his bit is pretty straight. He's ready to go. Now, this has an independent PTO on it, and we're just now getting used to this tractor. So everything should be good. The auger is actually turning a little bit slower if it had the same RPM than it would have been with the smaller one because of the gear ratio.
You should shut that off before you put it back in the ground. You need to shut that off before you put it back in the ground. That's why I said. This ground is actually a lot harder than I thought it would be, since I know it was field dirt, even though it was nine years ago.
Always make sure you hook your chains and so forth onto your PTO shields. So you're not turning that shield too. Sometimes they'll chatter a little bit in the hole before they get to the bottom. It isn't going to hurt a thing. Okay. So that's got you almost. Let's go one more time, all the way down. All right. That's good. Clear your auger. All right. Go forwards.
So a couple of things to remember. If you were doing a fence line, and the ground is level like this, it isn't really going to matter. All right? If you were doing a fence line on the side of this bank here . . . This is where it starts the incline. If you needed, for whatever reason, to do a fence here, you would do a lot better to keep your tractor on the bottom side or the top side and keep your tractor left-to-right straight.
If you try to run this in line with your tractor on the side, then you're going to have to do some major adjusting on the back to get your auger back straight. You can do it, but as the ground varies, if it varies any, you're going to have to be adjusting in between holes. So you always want to be forwards or backwards to an incline and not run it long-ways, unless it's just something you've got to do because there's something in your way, and you may end up adjusting your links to the side to get your auger back flat.
Here at Everything Attachments, some of the things that we do . . . Now, if you go to your local dealer, and you spend twice the price for an auger, I'm sure he'll even put it on for you. It definitely should come with the gear oil in the gear box. For all the companies that ship them out, we make this. So it's not the same thing as what you're getting from a lot of manufacturers.
We know this is an American pipe. We know we spend an extra couple of feet of pipe to make this in the design that we make it in. When we put this long brace here and weld it on the top instead of a little one from underneath, we create a lot of support there instead of kinking it where all the lift is on the tractor. So we never have any problems here.
It's just all . . . You know, everything that we ship out that doesn't have oil in it, even though in the owner's manual it says you've got to do it, and there's a sticker on it, and there's a sticker on this one that says, "Check oil." But just certain people don't do it.
So when we fill these with grease before they go out, it eliminates you from having to go to the store, spend $20 or $30 or $40 on that big one of gear oil and have to put it in and all that. It's already done for you. So that's just another convenience where we spend the money to do it for you and insure that you don't have a gearbox problem as soon as you get it.
So at Everything Attachments, give us a call. Give us whatever, an email. We'll be happy to help you with sizing the right auger and the complete unit for your tractor for the use that you're using.
