A long-reach excavator looks like a standard excavator with a boom and stick stretched far out. That extra reach is what makes it so useful around water, and it’s also why it isn’t the right machine for everything.
What makes a long reach different
The front, the boom and stick together, is much longer than standard. Ours is a Cat 324E with a 60-foot front and a 1-yard bucket. The machine sits on firm ground while the bucket reaches out across water, mud or a ditch.
The trade-off: a longer front means a smaller bucket and less lifting and digging force than the same machine with a standard boom.
When long reach is the right machine
- Cleaning out stock ponds and dugouts with water or soft silt in them. The machine stays on the bank or dam crest and digs without draining the pond or driving onto the bottom. See when and how to clean out a stock pond.
- Dredging the middle of a pond that a standard machine can’t reach from the edge.
- Ditches, creeks and channels dug from the top of the bank, without tearing up the banks getting down to them.
- Dam faces and spillways worked from the crest, where a machine can’t safely sit on the slope.
- Across a fence or a creek, next to culverts and bridges.
When a standard excavator or dozer does better
- Building a new dam. That’s mostly moving and compacting a lot of dirt, which standard excavators, dozers, haul trucks and compactors do faster.
- A pond that’s completely dry and firm. A dozer can push it out efficiently.
- Rock, heavy pipe and heavy lifting, where a standard boom’s strength matters more than reach.
Many pond jobs use both: the long reach digs the wet middle from the bank, and a dozer spreads and shapes the spoil.
Long reach, long arm, long stick
They’re the same idea. Long reach, long arm, long stick, long boom and long-reach trackhoe all describe an excavator with an extended front.
Black River Contracting runs a long-reach excavator out of Summerset, SD, for pond, dam, ditch and creek work across Western South Dakota and Northeast Wyoming, and supplies it with an operator to other contractors. See long reach excavation and long-reach excavator rental with operator, or request a quote.
