The machine arrives on a truck. You have a day of urgent questions, a manual that is often thin, and a dealer who may be five hundred miles away. Here is the order to take them in.
Your manufacturer’s manual prevails. This page gives the order of the steps and the common traps; every figure — maximum gradient, capacities, break-in duration, track tension — must be read in your own manual, because it changes from one model to the next.
1. On delivery, before you sign
This is the least-read step and the only one you cannot go back on: a delivery note signed without reservations closes off your recourse.
- Walk around the machine before you sign. Dents in the bonnet, a scored ram, a cracked window, bent bucket teeth: anything visible gets written down.
- Check the data plate is present and legible. It carries the serial number — without it no parts order goes through, and no clean resale happens.
- Count the attachments you were promised: buckets, quick hitch, keys, manuals. A missing bucket is claimed the same day, not three weeks later.
- Ask for the engine manual. It is a separate document, it is the one that carries the break-in schedule, and it is the one people forget to request.
- Photograph what you find, with the truck in frame.
If in doubt, write the reservation on the note before signing. “Subject to unpacking” protects nothing: a reservation has to describe what you can see.
2. Unloading
This is the most dangerous moment of the day, and the one where machines get damaged before they have an hour on the clock.
- Unload on firm, level ground, never across a slope.
- Ramps rated for the weight, clean — no grease, no mud, no ice — and properly secured to the bed rather than simply laid against it.
- Never correct your line while on the ramps. If you are off, drive all the way back down, line up, and go again.
- Attachment tucked in and low: arm folded, bucket close to the ground.
- Slow down at the joint between ramp and bed. That is where the centre of gravity tips over all at once — the machine lurches forward when you least expect it.
- Once loaded: chock the tracks and lash the machine down.
Never jack the machine up on its boom to get on or off the bed. The trick does the rounds in videos; manufacturers’ manuals forbid it outright.
3. Before the first start
- Check every fluid level yourself: engine, hydraulic, coolant. A machine can travel with the bare minimum, and a level takes two minutes to read.
- Machine on level ground to read them, otherwise you read them wrong.
- Find the battery isolator and the safety lever — the one that neutralises the joysticks — before you need them.
- Find the grease points before everything is covered in soil.
- Check track tension: machines often travel with them slack.
4. First start
- In short bursts. A starter motor is not held down: you crank for a few seconds, wait, and crank again. Insisting flattens the battery and eventually burns the starter out.
- In cold weather, use the glow plug pre-heat as intended — a few seconds, no more, or you drain the battery.
- ⛔ Never ether, never a starting aid spray. On a glow-plug engine the risk is explosion. Manuals say so in exactly those terms.
- Let it run about five minutes at idle before touching the joysticks. This is not superstition: cold hydraulic oil makes the machine soft and imprecise, and that is how you break a ram or clip a wall.
- While it warms: warning lights out, exhaust a normal colour, no odd noises, no leaks under the machine.
- First try in open space: check the movements match the control decal in the cab. Machines ship in ISO or SAE pattern, and they do not move the same way. If the decal does not match what you are doing, stop — that is an accident in the making.
Fasten the seat belt. In a cab it gets forgotten, because you feel protected. The structure only protects you if you stay inside it.
5. Break-in
A new machine is treated gently. Manufacturers agree on the principle and on the order of magnitude: for the first fifty hours, avoid full revs and full loads.
And above all: the first oil change comes well before the normal interval. New parts shed metal particles that the oil carries away; leaving them turning for a thousand hours wears the machine out before its time.
Break-in is in the engine manual, not the machine’s. On many mini excavators — Chinese ones included — the machine builder prescribes nothing itself and refers you explicitly to the engine maker. That is where the exact duration and the first oil change are written.
6. What actually tips these machines over
- Reaching out to the side lifts a track. Arm extended sideways, on a slope, with a full bucket: that is the configuration that rolls a machine.
- A freshly dug trench is not solid ground. The edge collapses under the weight and the machine goes in with it.
- The counterweight swings behind you, well beyond the tracks. It is the counterweight that crushes people against walls — the risk is not in front of you, it is behind.
7. If you work professionally
Rules below are French. In France a machine of this size falls under CACES R482 category A (compact plant up to 6 tonnes), and the certificate itself does not authorise anyone to operate: what does is the authorisation to operate issued by the employer, after a medical check and verification of knowledge. Wherever you are, check your own national rules — the principle travels, the paperwork does not.
Before opening a trench on ground you do not know, a utility search is not paperwork: a severed service costs incomparably more than a search.
Next
Once the machine is running, what makes it last is elsewhere: regular greasing, track tension, and service intervals kept.