Too Many Skid-Steer Attachments? There's No Such Thing.

Skid-steer loader attachments are a way of life for Rick Miene, who uses his Bobcats almost nonstop for jobs ranging from septic installations to site development.
Too Many Skid-Steer Attachments? There's No Such Thing.
One of Miene's Bobcat T770s is visible to the right of the larger E85 excavator at this installation job site. The Bobcat equipment and accessories have allowed him to greatly expand the scope of his business.

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Rick Miene gets teased about all the attachments he has for his skid-steers. But no one’s laughing when he’s got the right tool for a tough job. Miene, who owns Miene Septic Service in Robins, Iowa, says he owns a great number of attachments for his Bobcat. “The neat thing about Bobcat is there’s so many skid-loader attachments out there.”

He and his team of 11 actually use four Bobcat skid-steers — one wheeled S300 and three tracked T770s. He also has a larger E85 excavator. Some of his attachments include graders, post-hole diggers, forestry heads, Harley rake, land plane, snow blade, numerous material buckets, bush hogs, laser box blades, roller compactor and grapples. “There are things we use that people typically wouldn’t think about,” he says.

Miene loves having the right tool for the job, and if he doesn’t have what he needs for a task, he’ll probably buy it. That, in turn, has enabled him to expand his service offerings well beyond the scope of installing septic systems, and now he does land clearing and site development as well.


Making use of one of its numerous material bucket attachments, Miene's Bobcat T770 is getting dirty at a septic installation job.


“We’ll typically carry four to six attachments with the skid-loader to hopefully accommodate whatever need we have on that job site,” he says. Quick couplers make changeouts fairly easy.

He says one of the coolest attachments is a Harley rake — a hydraulically driven drum with carbide teeth that pulverizes soil, leaving an inch or two of loose dirt. Another of his favorites is the Loftness Timber Ax — a device that can chip a 40-foot tree to the ground in about 30 seconds. “We use it nonstop for our land clearing, or just to go into somebody’s yard to put in a new septic system where their backyard is all wood.”

Skid-steers are at the heart of Miene’s operation. “They are huge to everything we do,” he says.

Read more about Miene Septic Service in this month’s issue of Pumper magazine.



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