JCB became the first to launch a compact track loader with a telescopic boom, calling it the “Teleskid.”
On this episode of The Dirt, host and professional operator Bryan Furnace went to JCB headquarters in Savannah, Georgia, to test out and review the 3TS-8T, the largest Teleskid in the company’s lineup.
The result, he says, is a “pretty stinking fun machine to ride on.”
So how does it stack up to a traditional CTL?
Bryan says he found many things to like about the Teleskid in comparison to the standard compact loader. The first obvious difference is the mono-boom, which can reach out 8 feet and to a height of over 13 feet. Concerns about balance and stability were quickly dispelled. And he found a lot of other benefits to the unique design.
Here are a few quick specs:
- Operating capacity: 3,695 lbs. retracted/1,600 lbs. extended
- Operating weight: 12,615 lbs.
- Engine: 74 hp
Putting the 3TS through its paces in dirt and muck with bucket and mower, Bryan came away with the conclusion that it’s “a really great machine.”
So to find out what it’s like to operate JCB’s largest Teleskid and watch it in action, check out the latest episode of The Dirt.
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In This Episode:
- 00:00 – JCB 3TS-8T Teleskid Review
- 00:43 – Exterior: Mono-Boom
- 01:09 – Exterior: Visibility
- 02:59 – Exterior: Grease Fittings
- 03:16 – Exterior: Track Design
- 04:08 – Interior: Cab Design
- 05:38 – Interior: User Profiles
- 06:23 – Interior: Right Window
- 07:01 – Operation: Stability
- 08:06 – Operation: Boom Arm Sturdiness
- 11:42 – Operation: Telescoping Possibilities
- 12:21 – Operation: Power Management System
- 13:48 – Operation: Ride Control
- 15:19 – Operation: Hydraulics
- 16:37 – Final Thoughts
00;00;00;12 - 00;00;14;19
Bryan Furnace
Hi everybody. Welcome back to Equipment World. You're watching the dirt. I'm your host, Bryan. And today we're here to talk about the JCB 380. If you're not familiar with the JCB nomenclature, that is their largest telescoping skid steer, and it can telescope out to a reach of eight feet, believe it or not. And it's a pretty stinking fun machine to ride in.
00;00;43;03 - 00;01;00;02
Bryan Furnace
So I spent about two hours in Savannah, Georgia, putting this machine through its paces. And as you walk up to the machine, one of the biggest things you'll see right off the rip is it only has a mono boom. There is no second boom section on the driver's side of the machine. It is a mono boom that has the ability to telescope.
00;01;00;02 - 00;01;09;01
Bryan Furnace
And that is I'm gonna I'm going to be honest with you, it's a little funky to walk up to you the first time.
00;01;09;03 - 00;01;30;00
Bryan Furnace
But as you continue to walk around the machine, the second thing that sticks out to you is the visibility from looking in the cab. You can see every aspect of the cab from the boom side of the machine. If you think about a traditional skid steer, you can't see that well into the cab from the sides of the machine because you have two giant boom arms, one on each side, and there's just no visibility.
00;01;30;02 - 00;01;54;06
Bryan Furnace
The mono boom on this machine sits low enough that when it's down and it's stored position, you can see perfectly clear through both sides of the machine. It's fantastic. The next thing you're going to notice is you get into the machine, is how stinking easy it is to get into the machine instead of giving yourself up over a bucket that's either covered in dirt or mud or quite possibly, you have an attachment on making it even more difficult to get into the machine.
00;01;54;09 - 00;02;19;18
Bryan Furnace
With the JCB three times you literally open the door, climb over the track and get into the cab. It's not that different from getting into a car. It's very simple. And then that's when the visibility for you as an operator really sets in, because you have perfect visibility all the way around the machine. The engine in the back is low enough, and you don't have a torsion bar that you've got phenomenal visibility out of your rearview mirror.
00;02;19;24 - 00;02;40;23
Bryan Furnace
I think I looked at the backup camera maybe three times during the entire time I was operating. It was easier for me to use the rearview mirror because the visibility is just that good out of the back of the machine. The one downside I can see to the man over from a visibility standpoint is I have to lean way over here to be able to see the right corner of my bucket.
00;02;40;25 - 00;02;58;22
Bryan Furnace
which, you know, 90% of the time that's not a big deal whatsoever. I can read, but the rest of the bucket. But if we were in tight gear house or something, and you really needed to know where that corner is, that model does make that a little difficult. But, you know, it's a skid steer. You're going to make sacrifices one way or another.
00;02;58;24 - 00;03;19;26
Bryan Furnace
Another fantastic aspect of this machine as an operator is the fact that you now have half the grease fittings. You used to have on a traditional skid steer. Now that you don't have to boom sections, you don't have to grease two booms. And so just by default, you now have fewer grease fittings on this machine. And they're all very accessible.
00;03;19;28 - 00;03;45;10
Bryan Furnace
Another feature I really liked on this machine is the design of the chassis around the tracks. There are so many skid steers right now where you only have maybe four inches between the back of the track as it comes up over the sprocket and the actual chassis itself, and as a result, a phenomenal amount of mud and dirt works its way and gets kicked up in that area, and then rolls more dirt and mud up onto the chassis and framework of the machine.
00;03;45;12 - 00;04;11;21
Bryan Furnace
JCB has left that area behind the track pretty stinking open, which means you're not going to have all that mud and debris rolling up like you would on other skid steers. That's just in my opinion, that's one of the small things that to us as operators, when you're going to trailer that machine and I have to spend two minutes shoveling tracks as opposed to ten on the other skid steer, that's a pretty big thing for me out in the field.
00;04;11;24 - 00;04;28;20
Bryan Furnace
I love the cab design in the sense that you have all of your functions, all of your stuff that you need to get to is right here. But instead of being a face level like it is and so many competitor machines, it's actually up a little bit. So it's at the corners of your field of view, but it's not intrusive to your view at all.
00;04;28;20 - 00;04;44;00
Bryan Furnace
So you still maintain that great visibility all the way around the machine, but at the same time, if while I'm running the skid steer, I need to reach up and adjust the air conditioning or choose something different on the radio, I can easily do that without taking my eyes off of the work being conducted in front of me.
00;04;44;02 - 00;05;10;15
Bryan Furnace
I hate it when you have things tucked around your sides that you're having to. No lift armrest to get down there and get to buttons. Everything in this machine is very accessible. You've also got fantastic ventilation in this machine because you don't have this giant doorway. You have to get out of out in front of you. JCB actually has a H vac bar running across the front of the machine with vents that are blowing around you, so you really get air all the way around you.
00;05;10;15 - 00;05;34;00
Bryan Furnace
In this cab you don't have any dead spots. The seat is air ride. It's a very comfortable seat. I could absolutely spend ten, 12, 14 hours a day in this machine and not get out of it. Sore and tired. You don't feel claustrophobic. That's another beautiful thing about all of the transparency of that glass around you. Without having the boom arms, you don't get that kind of claustrophobic, locked in feel that you feel in a skid steer.
00;05;34;03 - 00;06;05;18
Bryan Furnace
It really feels nice and wide open. You have a very spacious cab now, one of the other cool features that's really coming on. A lot more skid steers these days, but I always love seeing it is the ability to create profiles in the streets. You can create up to four user profiles or attachment profiles if you want. That was something I discussed with the JCB rep is this machine does have creep mode as well as a couple other functions that you might want to adjust based off of attachments you have in your inventory, rather than basing it off of individual users of the machine.
00;06;05;21 - 00;06;23;11
Bryan Furnace
You have the ability to go in program lots of parameters of the machine and then save it as a profile. And then the next time you get in the machine, you just pick which profile you want to be in, the sensitivity, the controls, the power management system. All of this is going to adjust itself based on whatever profile you picked in real time.
00;06;23;13 - 00;06;53;14
Bryan Furnace
Now, one thing that did stand out, that would be a quite large irritation over time is the fact that on the boom side of the machine. So the right-hand side of the operator, you do not have any sort of a sliding window to communicate with people on the job. Now, we were just running this machine in a demo area, and I had three separate occasions where I needed to talk to someone, but unfortunately, they had to walk all the way around the machine so that I could pop my door open or pop my window open so that we could have that conversation.
00;06;53;17 - 00;07;07;08
Bryan Furnace
If JCB would implement some sort of sliding window on this right-hand side, that would be fantastic, just for me to be able to communicate out the right side of the machine.
00;07;07;10 - 00;07;22;21
Bryan Furnace
Now as you start to run the machine, you kind of realize very quickly it runs just like a normal skid steer. I was afraid that I was going to have to worry about the weight of one side of the machine being off enough that you were really worried about being tippy in one direction or the other. That was not the case at all.
00;07;22;21 - 00;07;42;10
Bryan Furnace
I took several buckets of dirt all the way up at full reach, and it handles just like any other skid. What did that reach? It's a very stable working platform, and due to the fact that they have offset the cab to work with the mono boom, you actually have a pretty even footprint when it comes to ground pressure being distributed equally between the two tracks.
00;07;42;17 - 00;07;59;27
Bryan Furnace
This was a really stable platform, and I never once felt like I was going to get tippy, and that was including having a giant brush hog hanging off the front of it. As I tried to trim some trees on JCB’s property. This was a really, really stable machine and a great platform to work with, especially if you're going to be using any sort of brush hog attachment.
00;08;00;05 - 00;08;06;04
Bryan Furnace
This thing is phenomenal with a brush hog.
00;08;06;06 - 00;08;21;17
Bryan Furnace
Now, as I started using this machine, one of the things I thought I was going to encounter is a lot of play in the boom sections when they were telescoped out. If you think about it, you're putting a tremendous amount of stress on that joint, and now you don't have the rigidity of having that boom tucked into the main boom section.
00;10;22;23 - 00;10;40;21
Bryan Furnace
That was not the case at all. I got this sucker loaded up right at the tipping point. Right now, you can kind of see the hammer. We're getting pretty light in the rear. But that being said, this boom is still very rigid. This boom is really well constructed. There is not any flexing, in the joints whatsoever. There's no movement of the two boom sections.
00;10;40;21 - 00;11;01;21
Bryan Furnace
They stay nice and tight together. And by the way, this is grounding, engaging at any point along the telescoping path that this machine can do. In other words, it doesn't matter if I'm all the way sucked in halfway out, all the way out at any point in time, I can go in and ram into a pile of dirt, and this thing is built to take it.
00;11;01;24 - 00;11;23;25
Bryan Furnace
And that's where it really impressed me. I did go into this sticky, hard clay with that boom! All the way telescoped out and I was getting aggressive with it. And even there I didn't have any play in the boom. Now we all know that things where and to keep this boom play out of the picture. JCB has made Teflon wear pads that ride inside the main portion of the boom.
00;11;23;27 - 00;11;41;22
Bryan Furnace
Two sets of those wear pads are actually adjustable, and so over time you can take a wrench and you can really torque those down to specific torque settings so that that boom will remain rigid, and it won't get loose and start getting warm behind you.
00;11;41;24 - 00;12;03;17
Bryan Furnace
The fact that it can telescope out means that you can actually reach down about three feet below grade at full reach. So if you're doing any embankments or slopes where you can't really get the machine down the slope, you at least have the ability to reach below grade. Now, if you can get the machine over to the edge and then as you curl your bucket away from you, you can really get that thing down quite far and really mow those bangs.
00;12;03;20 - 00;12;24;01
Bryan Furnace
That's a really handy feature that's just not available in a traditional skid setup. Loading trucks I know that I find myself on quite a few job sites where we've got a load rattle train with a skid steer. This telescopic boom will get you right over the top of the center of that truck with no issue. Overall, I was very impressed with the three pts.
00;12;24;01 - 00;12;44;12
Bryan Furnace
I really liked how aggressive it got in the dirt, but at the same time with the power management system, it limited track spin like you would see in a dozer. So you're not wearing through your tracks, and yet it's still applied a lot of that power to the ground. One of my chief complaints about the traditional power management systems, whether it's dozers or skid steers, is as an operator.
00;12;44;12 - 00;13;06;00
Bryan Furnace
I feel like it cuts out a little too soon. You're not able to fully get the the umph out of the machine before it starts to dial the machine back. That was not my experience at all. Even when I had the power management settings dialed all the way up in this machine, I was impressed at the amount of work I was able to do, the amount of oomph I was able to apply to whatever I was trying to shove around.
00;13;06;06 - 00;13;29;29
Bryan Furnace
But at the same time, I wasn't getting track slip, which means it's saving me money as an operator or the owner of the machine. So I have power management turn all the way up, which I was just talking to our JCB rep nearly, and he was saying that the power management is essentially an anti-stall feature. And so with the way I've got the machine configured right now, the Anti-stall is dialed all the way up.
00;13;29;29 - 00;13;52;23
Bryan Furnace
And so as you can see, we're we're bogging, but my tracks are not slipping on the ground. So it's almost a traction control feature. And that's the other thing. This is a 74Hz motor. It's got a ton of power for a 74Hz motor with power management dialed all the way up. Now, smooth ride is another feature in this machine, as we've come to know it as ride control in the industry.
00;13;52;25 - 00;14;12;27
Bryan Furnace
Jacob's Smooth Ride system does a great job in this machine. I do have one little irk with that though. In order to engage the smooth ride system, you have to drop your boom all the way down to release the pressure. Then you hit your essential it's right control. You hit your smooth ride button, then you can raise the boom back up.
00;14;12;27 - 00;14;28;29
Bryan Furnace
And now you have the floatation in the boom that you can track across the job without bouncing yourself to pieces. When I'm typically digging on a jobsite, I'm going to be doing all of my great work. And then in the middle of that, my truck shows up. And so I'm going to go into my pile and I'm going to grab a pile of dirt back away from the pile, and I'm going to start driving to my truck.
00;14;29;02 - 00;14;47;05
Bryan Furnace
And so if I don't have a smooth ride, I normally this is where I hit it. Yeah, I want a smooth ride. Oh no, can't have it now. I got to drop it down. Push the button now. There we go. In my opinion, that needs to go away. That's going to be one of those things. It's just going to drive me nuts over time because I don't want to have to drop my boom.
00;14;47;05 - 00;15;12;02
Bryan Furnace
I just want to be able to click it on and go. But that being said, when Smooth Ride is on, it does a great job in this machine. I would argue it does a better job than competitive machines when it comes to the ride quality. When you have a full bucket of dirt, I don't know if it's a combination of the actual geometry of the machine with the mono boom, but man, that was a really smooth ride, even through some really rugged terrain with a full bucket of material.
00;15;12;06 - 00;15;18;10
Bryan Furnace
It was very smooth in the cab.
00;15;18;13 - 00;15;39;06
Bryan Furnace
Now, one of the other downsides to this machine is the high flow connections for attachments. Unfortunately, those don't go all the way out on the telescoping portion of the boom. Your hydraulics have two sections. Your high flow is going to be on the stationary part of the boom that stays up, tucked in tight to the machine, out on the telescopic part.
00;15;39;06 - 00;16;05;11
Bryan Furnace
You have your low flow connections. Now there isn't a pin connector out on the low flow side. The way JCB is getting around this is they are giving you an extension whip essentially that will extend your connectors back to the main hydraulic block on the stationary portion of the boom. Why did JCB make this decision? My initial knee jerk was that was kind of a poor choice, but now that I think about it, it was actually probably a pretty wise choice.
00;16;05;11 - 00;16;25;02
Bryan Furnace
Most of the time, the larger attachments you're going to be needing for high flow are going to be mulcher heads. You're going to be talking about cold planers. These are products that are extremely heavy when tucked up tight to the machine. This machine's not going to be stable enough to telescope that sort of a load out and really give you the stability you need to run that level of an attachment.
00;16;25;10 - 00;16;41;00
Bryan Furnace
And so it makes sense that you want these attachments tucked up tight to the machine, so that you're no longer having to worry about instability issues or interfering with the workings of the actual attachment.
00;16;41;02 - 00;16;51;10
Bryan Furnace
So thank you for JCB for having us out. I really appreciate it getting to run this machine. Overall, just a really great machine. I hope this helps you and your business. We'll catch you on the next episode of The Dirt.
