Not the wild animals with teeth, but the mini bulldozers, of which Bobcat seems to be the most common brand name.
From my desk, I’ve got a great view of a demolition project. The old Emporium department store and its outlaying warehouses are being removed in order to build a new shopping center anchored by Bloomingdales.
They’ve had numerous Bobcats zipping around knocking over walls and scooping up debris. They look like they’d be a lot of fun to drive - they can go pretty fast and they bounce around on rubber tires. Like Weebils, they wobble but they don’t fall down.
Today, I watched them bring one into the 8th floor of one of the buildings. They’d knocked out the windows on that floor, revealing what appear to have been offices. Bobcats are small, but they don’t fit through office doors. Once they got the crane platform to the window opening, someone climbed on and drove the Bobcat off the platform and into the building. They didn’t stop at the door. It was like watching a cartoon - it just drove right through and left a Bobcat-shaped hole in the wall and disappeared.
They are a lot of fun. One of my uncles had one for cleaning out the cow barn. If you monkey around with the controls correctly you can actuall balance on the front wheels, even drive it about on the just the front wheels.
They “official name” for them is skid-loader or skid-steer since they turn by running each side at a different speed or stopping one side altogether.
Oh, yeah. Amazing little beasties. The first time I saw Bobcats® was at the Indiana State Fair, in the machinery field. I was a kid, and I saw these pint-sized front-loaders working. One or two of them had dug a hole the size of a classroom. Clyde and I stood there in openmouthed awe.
Never ran a Bobcat, but one time I rented a TerraMyte (miniature full function backhoe) to do a big landscaping project in my yard. It was a blast. The bad part was that it was the earliest of spring, and when I locked it up in the front yard for the equipment rental company to pick up, it started raining, and it rained every day for 6 weeks. I had turned my back yard into a mud pit… :smack:
Never ran a Bobcat, but one time I rented a TerraMyte (miniature full function backhoe) to do a big landscaping project in my yard. It was a blast. The bad part was that it was the earliest of spring, and when I locked it up in the front yard for the equipment rental company to pick up, it started raining, and it rained every day for 6 weeks. I had turned my back yard into a mud pit… :smack: