Shelby Howland, Village Carpentry and Landscaping

Being new to the equipment wasn’t an issue, it took about half an hour for him to be comfortable with the EC206. “I did get a little time playing with it at a demo day… but then when I got it new, it was so intuitive to me…it just made sense,” he recalled. When Howland finished that job he asked if there was more work and the answer was ‘No.’ He’d done it all.

If he has any issue with the engcon, Howland said, it’s that he, “gets the jobs done faster and so I end up spending more time finding jobs and less time doing. It’s great for the profit but I don’t love the estimating part of the job as much as running the excavators.”

Before Howland started his excavation business, Village Carpentry and Landscaping based in Southampton, Massachusetts, he’d had several careers and many coworkers. He’s been a computer programmer, an arborist, a farmer, a carpenter, a tool salesman, and a manager for his mother’s construction company. At 33, his latest career as an excavator, with only his engcon for a partner, is his favorite so far. When Howland worked construction and excavation in the past, he was sometimes irked by the pace of the work.

“It frustrates me when things are done inefficiently,” he said taking a break on a summer job in the Massachusetts Hilltowns where he was appropriately digging out the side of a hill. Recalling former jobs he said: “The old school method of excavation, you need someone standing around a lot…and I hate standing around.”

Howland likes muddy boots and dirty hands, that’s why he stopped administrating his mom’s 13-employee company and turned the business over to his brother. Now he has a few people he hires when necessary for his own jobs, including his mother who often does his carpentry.

Working alone suits him, and the engcon 206 he invested in a few year back let him do that. It gave him ”the ability to just show-up on a job, and do it all … more or less by myself.” He describes the 206 as an intuitive tool but added that he also enjoys watching videos of others using them and that he learns from those videos.

The day we visited he was working with his EC206 on a Kubota compact Kx040-4, enlarging a driveway that was too small for easy access and turning around. He was digging out a hillside to add space and then adding a retaining wall.

Every owner of the house has probably “always wanted to fix it,” Howland said, “but to fix it with any kind other kind of machine would be almost impossible because you couldn’t work in this kind of a tight space efficiently.” Looking over the job site and his engcon in the late afternoon light, he added, “But I can.” Howland estimated that it would have taken three people, and twice as long, to do the job without an engcon EC206. “When you’re working on a hillside like this, the dirt always wants to slide downhill. And the fact that I can continuously put the dirt back up the hill means that my dirt isn’t always migrating, I’m always able to control the dirt by being able to get at it from all the different angles.”

Before starting on the driveway, he’d fixed the problem of wet backyard at the same house, “I did a drywall for his sump pump, regraded the whole backyard…removed piers, demo’d a porch, laid down fabric with crushed stone, and reseeded and put down straw on the whole thing.” It took him a day. He would also be ripping up the old driveway, and demolition is another area where engcon excels.

“I demo’d a 50 foot by 120 foot horse barn with just me and a helper in one day,” he said, noting that the engcon lets a smaller machine function like a much larger one. “With this machine we filled five 30-yard containers.”

The engcon versatility also helps keep costs down on projects, especially those related to watering or flooding issues.

A lot of these jobs are are difficult, even annoying Howland said. “But the thing is that I’m doing jobs that people would not even have asked someone to do before because it was either going to be prohibitively expensive or it was just not going to be feasible.”

And he anticipates that things will only get better when he takes delivery of his new engcon EC206B with EC Oil top and bottom that’s due in September. He’ll match it with the Volvo ECR58 he recently bought.

Howland is a big enthusiast of the programmability of engcon. When his new EC 206B is installed on the new Volvo, it will have its blade control connected to one of the rollers on the joystick. He’s amazed at just how many different ways there are to marry any function on the excavator to any control on the engcon joystick. engcon “puts a computer in the system (the DC2 control system) that has the ability to run electronic controls for basically any hydraulic function on the excavator.” That means the excavator can be controlled—steering, speed, raising and lowering the bucket, even operating the quick-coupler—through the buttons, rollers and joystick, after engcon installs the kit for that function. After that, said, “I can make it feel the way I want,” in terms of sensitivity and speed, he said.

For example, he said, “I’ve got two speeds on one of the buttons on my joystick and when I’m driving around and I want to slow down or speed up I don’t have to take my hand off the joystick because I’ve got these extras buttons.” He also has stick steering, “The two bottom rollers (on the joystick) drive the machine,” he said. “I don’t have to use my feet to drive.”

“To me,” Howland said, “the tilt-rotator is a package… it’s not just a tilt-rotator. It’s the ability to add things to all these extra buttons and to change and mess around with all this stuff.”

Looking to the future, Howland said his aspirations are different from many small businesses. He’s not looking to get bigger or to hire more people, “Actually, I’m really looking forward to getting smaller.”

“I’m a workaholic by nature,” he said “and I’ve been trying to get myself to work less. My goal is actually to have the tilt-rotator create so much economic efficiency that can I relax bit.”

Relaxing means more time to do the other things he loves, like playing the fiddle and guitar, and blacksmithing and carpentry. “With the engcon” he said, “That’s possible. There are days where I show up on a job that’s supposed to get done in one day and I’ll bust it out in four hours.”

That means Shelby Howland’s relationship with engcon not only allows him to do better quality work, it’s allowing him to have a better quality of life.