Skill Builder Guides & reviews for building and construction
Roger Bisby tries out the Muck Truck, a pedestrian operated motorised power barrow which is designed to carry three times that of a normal wheelbarrow and will shift loads of up to one quarter of a ton.
It is a while now since I tested a Muck-Truck. Last time it was a battery powered machine that surprised me by taking full loads up a very steep pile and tipping ready for the grab truck. The drawback of that machine was simply that you had to manually tip the bucket and retrieve it which could be a bit of a nuisance if you couldn’t stand by the side of the machine.
It beats having to run wheel barrows up a scaffold board
The Muck-Truck I am looking at here is the Max Hydraulic petrol powered model with the super reliable Honda GXV 160. This has a hydraulic ram on the bucket to you can tip and return the bucket to the loaded position with one lever. This is not, however, a skip loader, the bucket pivots on the front but the ram doesn’t raise it up. If you want to load skips you can do so by running the barrow up a purpose made Muck-Truck ramp or you could, as I think most builder would, fix up a pair of ramps held together for stability. Either way it beats having to run wheel barrows up a scaffold board.
The 4X4 traction on this Muck-Truck is more than capable of taking it up a steep ramp and holding it there but before tipping you can flick the handbrake up into the locked position to make certain that the truck stays where it is while you tip.
As well as the bucket you can purchase other attachments for the front of the Muck-Truck and use the auxiliary power to work items such as wet and dry vacuum cleaners or a pump. You can even attach a tow ball to allow you to move trailers around a yard for example.
The steering on these trucks is simply a matter of lifting the back wheels off the ground slightly rather than halting any wheels as you would with a skid steer loader. That might appear difficult but the majority of the load is over the front wheels so the rear wheels are more about stability.
It will take you ten minutes to get used to using this truck and provided you follow the rules and keep it out of the hands of idiots you will be okay.
It will take you ten minutes to get used to using this truck and provided you follow the rules and keep it out of the hands of idiots you will be okay.
The Muck-Truck, in all its different guises, is manufactured in Cornwall and is a good bit of engineering but I have seen a cheap Chinese copy pretending to be a Muck-Truck. It doesn’t have a Honda engine but in many other respects you could be fooled until you go to use it. The build quality is way off the mark and it just won’t stand up to site use. You will also have the devil’s own job getting spares for it whereas every single component of the genuine Muck-Truck is available as a spare.
