Bobcat's Concrete Mixer Attachment: Small-Pour Jobs Without Renting a Mixer Truck

6 hours ago

6 min read

Not every concrete pour justifies a ready-mix truck showing up with its minimum-load charge and its narrow delivery window. Fence post footings, a small equipment pad, a sidewalk section, a handful of pier footings spread across a site, these are jobs where hand-mixing bag concrete with a wheelbarrow and a hoe is the usual fallback, and it's slow, physically brutal work for a crew that has better things to do. Bobcat's skid steer-mounted concrete mixer attachment is built for exactly that gap between hand-mixing and a full truck order.

Bobcat's Concrete Mixer: The Published Numbers

Bobcat's concrete mixer attachment has an operating weight of 440 lb, light enough to mount on a genuinely wide range of Bobcat's own skid-steer and compact track loader lineup: the T590, T770, and T870 track loaders, and the S570 through S770 skid-steer range. That broad compatibility matters in practice, since it means a contractor doesn't need to own a dedicated carrier just for this attachment, it mounts on whatever skid steer is already working the site that day.

Worth flagging honestly: Bobcat's own published materials carry two different capacity figures for this attachment depending on which part of the spec sheet you read. The Features section of Bobcat's product page lists a 270 L capacity, while the Specifications section lists 6.9 cubic feet, which converts to roughly 195 L, a real discrepancy between two numbers that should match on the same product page. We're not going to pick one and present it as the confirmed figure. If exact batch capacity matters for planning a specific pour, that's a number worth confirming directly with a Bobcat dealer rather than trusting either published figure at face value.

Where CAT's Lineup Stands on This One

Here's an honest finding rather than a forced comparison: CAT does not currently appear to offer a directly comparable skid steer-mounted concrete mixer or mixing-bucket attachment in its public attachment lineup. We checked CAT's own buckets and attachment pages directly, and found no product listing, model name, or description referencing a mixing bucket or concrete mixer attachment anywhere in CAT's current skid steer and compact track loader attachment catalog. That's a genuine gap in CAT's attachment lineup relative to Bobcat's, worth noting plainly rather than inventing a CAT product to compare against. A CAT-platform contractor who wants this specific capability would be looking at a third-party attachment manufacturer rather than a factory CAT-branded option, which is a different conversation, and a different financing conversation, than a factory-matched attachment.

What This Attachment Actually Replaces

The honest comparison isn't CAT versus Bobcat here, it's this attachment versus two other ways of getting concrete onto a small job: hand-mixing bag concrete, and ordering a ready-mix truck. Hand-mixing is cheap in equipment cost but expensive in labor hours and physically hard on a crew doing it repeatedly across a week of footing work. A ready-mix truck is fast and consistent but comes with a minimum-load charge that makes it a poor fit for anything under a few yards, plus a scheduling window that doesn't always match a crew's actual pour-readiness on a given day. A skid steer-mounted mixer splits the difference: it batches bag or bulk-delivered material mechanically, on the crew's own schedule, in quantities that make sense for a small pour, without the per-trip minimum a truck order carries.

Who Actually Uses This Attachment

Fencing contractors setting post footings across a long fence line, where dozens of small footings add up to a lot of concrete but never in one place at one time; general contractors and remodelers pouring small pads, steps, or footings on residential and light commercial jobs; and site-utility contractors backfilling and encasing smaller structures, meter boxes, thrust blocks, and similar items, where a full truck order would be wasteful overkill for the volume actually needed. Any of these operations currently paying a crew to hand-mix bag concrete regularly is the direct audience for this attachment.

Loading, Discharge, and the Detail Worth Asking About

A mixer attachment like this typically loads material, either bagged concrete mix or a bulk sand-cement-aggregate combination with water added on site, through a hopper or opening at the top, then rotates the drum hydraulically off the carrier's auxiliary circuit to blend it before discharging through a chute at the bottom, positioned by tilting the attachment forward. The practical question worth asking a dealer before buying is discharge height and chute reach relative to your typical form or footing depth, since an attachment that can't comfortably reach into a deep or narrow footing form from the carrier's working position isn't actually saving the labor it's meant to save, it just moves the hand-shoveling to the discharge end instead of the mixing end.

Mix Consistency and Why Batch Timing Matters

A mechanically mixed batch has a real quality advantage over hand-mixing that's easy to overlook: consistency. A crew hand-mixing concrete in a wheelbarrow tends to produce batch-to-batch variation in water content and mixing time, especially late in a hot day when the incentive is to finish the batch faster rather than mix it thoroughly, and that variation shows up later as inconsistent cure strength and surface finish across a pour. A mechanical drum mixer running a fixed rotation time produces a more uniform batch, pour after pour, which matters more than it sounds like it should on anything that needs to meet a structural footing spec rather than just fill a hole.

Batch timing discipline still matters with a mechanical mixer, though. Concrete begins its set process the moment water hits cement, and a batch that sits too long in the drum before discharge, whether because the crew got pulled onto another task or because the pour site wasn't actually ready yet, loses workability and can compromise the pour just as badly as a poorly hand-mixed batch would. Having the mixer attachment on site doesn't eliminate the need to sequence the work, form-and-rebar prep finished before the batch goes in the drum, it just removes the physical mixing labor from that sequence.

Rent-vs-Own on a Small-Batch Attachment

A concrete mixer attachment is a genuinely specialized item at most general rental yards, nowhere near as commonly stocked as a bucket or a set of pallet forks, which tilts the rent-vs-own math toward owning for any contractor who pours small footings or pads on a recurring basis rather than as a rare one-off. Chasing down a rental unit for a job that comes up every few weeks costs real time and uncertainty that owning the attachment removes entirely.

Financing the mixer alongside the skid steer or track loader it mounts to, or adding it onto an already-financed carrier, turns a recurring small-pour workflow into a predictable equipment cost instead of a rental-availability gamble every time a footing job comes up. We'd rather talk through your actual pour frequency and typical batch size than quote a flat payment figure that doesn't reflect how that work actually comes in. Down payment requirements on an attachment addition to an existing carrier loan tend to run lighter than financing a full machine, since there's less principal at stake, but the exact structure depends on your credit profile and how the deal is put together.

Cleanout Discipline: The Difference Between a Long-Lived Attachment and a Short One

Concrete that's allowed to cure inside the drum between uses is the single fastest way to shorten this attachment's working life, and it's a mistake crews make surprisingly often when the day's last pour wraps up late and everyone's ready to head home. Hardened concrete buildup inside the drum reduces effective capacity batch after batch, adds weight the hydraulics have to turn, and eventually requires a labor-intensive chipping-out process that a five-minute water rinse at the end of each shift would have prevented entirely. Building a simple end-of-day cleanout step into the crew's routine, rinse the drum and chute before the mix sets, is one of the cheapest maintenance habits available on any concrete-handling equipment, mixer trucks included, and it's worth making a non-negotiable part of how the attachment gets used rather than an afterthought left to whoever remembers.

The Bottom Line

A skid steer-mounted concrete mixer fills a real gap between hand-mixing bag concrete and ordering a full ready-mix truck for jobs that don't justify either extreme. Bobcat's attachment gives you a real, if imperfectly documented, published weight and a wide carrier compatibility range across its skid-steer and track loader lineup. CAT, for now, doesn't have a direct factory answer to this specific attachment, a genuine gap in its lineup worth knowing about if a mixer is part of your equipment plans. If small-batch concrete work is a recurring line item on your jobs, this is an attachment worth owning rather than working around.

See how we think about financing compaction attachments for backfill work that often follows a small pour, or see our comparison of Bobcat's tiller and CAT's LT114/LT118 for ground-prep work, or browse our full skid steer financing options.