Years ago we brought our cub scouts to a friends construction site. My friend, the site supervisor told me to take the boys in the excavator and let them move the bucket around.
I had run Bobcats before but never real heavy equipment
“Uh Brad. You want to show me how to run it first?”
I had more fun the the six year olds did.
There was a story a few years ago about a gravel quarry in Germany where the owner had his 9-year-old grandson running a front-end loader, one of the fairly large ones. Some busybodies were getting upset about it, and the owner told them it was private property and the kid was a better operator than most of the other employees.
I’ve always thought a popular adult amusement park idea (and I don’t mean pornographic!) would be to have a raw land site where regular people could rent an excavator and run it (or try to) and dig ditches or otherwise shove piles of dirt around with bulldozers, etc. Most boy kids (there I go) are pretty fascinated by this kind of gear and watching people use them. I’m sure plenty of guys would like to do this and probably some womyn. But the liability would be huge and those machines have to be making pretty serious money to justify their upkeep and maintenance. Would some random guy pay $250 an hour to run an excavator around?
I myself have never operated any such gear, but I’m modestly interested in it. The guys who are good can perform frickin open heart surgery or flick the top off a bee bottle. That of course requires tremendous experience. There are lots of YouTube videos with guys running this type of gear. As fun/interesting as it looks, much of the work in the real world is clawing up a bucket of dirt, turning to the side and dumping it, then repeating that fifty or 100 or more times.