This slice of yellow brilliance was discovered by one our Elves on Flickr today, and – whilst we know it’s early in the year – for a model of this size this is going to take some beating!

Damian Z aka Thietmaier of Flickr is the builder behind this utterly brilliant Caterpillar 432E backhoe, which not only looks about a billion times bigger than it really is, it kinda functions too.

A huge variety of ingenious building techniques have been deployed to enable the Caterpillar’s buckets to be as positionable as those fitted to the real thing, and you can see all of the images at Damian’s Caterpillar 432E album by clicking here whilst we congratulate ourselves on making it the entire way through a post about hoeing without mentioning your Mom.

Damn.