«Machine for making trenches» means four different things, and people searching for one have four different jobs in mind. Some need to bury an irrigation pipe along the driveway; some need to run a gate cable to the house; some want to open a row to plant a hedge or a vineyard; some want to prepare the soil in furrows for seeding. Before talking about machines, it's worth identifying which of these applies to you.
The narrow, deep trench: the trencher
For pipes and cables the trench needs to be narrow, with straight walls, and deep enough to stay out of reach of a spade or frost. The tool is the chain trencher: a chain with teeth running on a bar that digs a channel the width of the chain, throwing the soil to the side. You move slowly, in reverse, and the trench comes out clean, ready for the pipe. Digging by hand does the same job in ten times the time, with a wider trench than necessary that still needs to be backfilled.
What the trencher doesn't do: it doesn't work well in ground with large rocks, and it's not meant for opening a wide trench.
The wide, shallow trench: tiller and harrow
For planting a row or preparing for seeding you need broken-up soil, not a channel. The tiller works deep and breaks up hard ground; the rotary harrow refines what the tiller has broken and, with the roller, leaves the surface ready. The actual furrow for the plant row is then traced with a furrower or by hand on the already-worked soil, which is loose and light.
Using a tiller to dig a pipe channel gives you a strip of fine soil, not a trench: you still have to dig it out anyway.
Where the carrier machine matters
Trenchers, tillers, and harrows all exist as attachments for mini skid loaders and tracked multi-purpose machines. The difference between the two comes down to where you're working. The tracked multi-purpose machine fits through a pedestrian gate, climbs a ramp, works on a slope without tearing up the lawn, and the same undercarriage the next day hauls the spoil away with the skip. In a finished yard, with the lawn laid and the driveway done, that's what matters: you trench for the pipe without wrecking everything else.
In the Cormidi lineup, ground-working attachments mount on the plate of the CMF multi-purpose machines and the mini skid loader: trencher up to 80 cm deep, tiller, rotary harrow with or without roller, auger up to Ø 500 mm for posts. The same machine hauls the spoil away, with the skip or the bucket.
Three questions before you buy
How many feet of trench do you dig in a year: for twenty meters you rent, for a landscaping business you buy. What's the ground like: with large rocks the trencher struggles, and an excavator may be the better call. What does the machine do the rest of the week: if it also needs to haul, the tracked multi-purpose machine is worth the difference; if it only needs to dig, a dedicated trencher costs less.
Attachment-to-machine compatibility is listed in the multi-purpose machine spec sheets; the dealer can let you try the trencher on your own ground.
