From three tonnes up you no longer tow your machine behind a car, you no longer push it out of a garden by hand, and the cab changes how you perceive what is happening around you. This is the size at which a private owner’s tool becomes a site machine — without anything on the spec sheet saying so.
Your manufacturer’s manual prevails. This page gives the order of the steps and the traps specific to this size; every figure — maximum gradient, capacities, break-in duration, track tension — must be read in your own manual.
1. On delivery, before you sign
A delivery note signed without reservations closes off your recourse.
- Full walk-around before signing: bonnet, rams, cab glazing, teeth and blade, hoses.
- Data plate present and legible: no serial number, no parts, no clean resale.
- Attachments counted: buckets, quick hitch, keys, manuals — and the engine manual, which is a separate document people forget to request.
- Photographs, truck in frame.
At this size, add something the smaller machines do not have: check the glazing and the cab structure. A window cracked in transit can be replaced; a distorted pillar cannot be repaired and compromises the protection it exists for.
2. Unloading
The most dangerous moment of the day. At this mass, a mistake cannot be caught by hand.
A four-tonne machine arrives on a plant trailer, not on a private trailer. The driver often unloads it — but you are the one who will live with the consequences, so watch:
- Firm level ground, clear of the road edge and of any bank.
- Ramps rated for the weight, clean and secured to the bed.
- No correcting your line on the ramps. If the machine is off, come back down, line up, go again.
- Attachment tucked in and low, arm folded.
- Slow at the joint between ramp and bed: the centre of gravity tips over all at once.
- Engage the slew lock before driving on or off: an unintended slew on a slope puts the machine across the ramps.
Never jack the machine up on its boom to load or unload. Manuals forbid it outright, including on machines that seem to allow it.
3. Before the first start
- Every fluid level, machine on level ground: engine, hydraulic, coolant.
- Find the battery isolator, the safety lever (the one that neutralises the joysticks) and the cab’s emergency exit — the rear window on most models. Asking the question the day it matters is too late.
- Find the grease points before everything is covered in soil. At this size there are more of them, and some sit under the slew ring.
- Check track tension: they sometimes travel slack.
4. First start
- In short bursts: a few seconds, a pause, crank again. Insisting flattens the battery and burns the starter out.
- In cold weather, pre-heat as intended — a few seconds only.
- ⛔ Never ether, never a starting aid spray: risk of explosion.
- About five minutes at idle before touching the joysticks. Cold hydraulics respond soft and late, and that is how you clip something.
- While it warms: warning lights out, exhaust a normal colour, no odd noises, no leaks on the ground.
- 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
Manufacturers agree: for the first fifty hours, avoid full revs and full loads. The first oil change comes well before the normal interval, because new parts shed metal particles.
Break-in is in the engine manual. Many machine builders prescribe none themselves and refer you to the engine maker.
6. What really changes at this size
- You no longer see everything. The cab, the glass, the dust: blind spots become real. Look behind you before you slew, not during.
- Slewing sweeps a volume, and the rear counterweight swings well beyond the tracks. It is the counterweight that crushes people against walls — the risk is not in front of you, it is behind.
- Reaching out to the side is still what rolls the machine. Arm extended sideways, on a slope, bucket full.
- A fresh trench is not load-bearing ground. The edge gives way under four tonnes far faster than under one.
7. Professional use
Rules below are French. Up to six tonnes an excavator falls under CACES R482 category A (compact plant). The certificate 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. Check your own national rules.
Before opening a trench on ground you do not know, a utility search is not paperwork: a severed service costs incomparably more.
Next
What makes a machine this size last: greasing kept up, track tension watched, and service intervals respected.