A Bubble In Your Butt To Operate Equipment?

If you spend any time at all on heavy equipment operator forums, you’ll see someone mention that “you need a bubble in your butt” to be a successful operator of machines like excavators, backhoes, and anything that is used on uneven sites. What are they talking about?

The Ability To Know You Are Level

One of the basic tools in most toolboxes is a level. These essential tools are useful for anything that needs to be accurately level, and before there were apps, these levels used a bubble of air in a colored liquid inside a tube of glass with lines on it. You lined up the bubble with the lines by moving the thing you were leveling. Since the bubble doesn’t actually move because it’s a bubble of air and stays on top of the water, it acts as a focal point to orient things around.

Levels with bubbles are used to park RVs level so the refrigerator runs right, and to make sure concrete is level so the building isn’t crooked. You will see levels with bubbles used in a lot of different industries because it’s a simple, accurate way to ensure leveling perfection. And the bubble in the butt of the heavy equipment operator is the instinctive leveling tool that senses when you are operating on a slope.

Seat-of-the-Pants Training

One of the biggest reasons ATS Heavy Equipment Operator Training School insists on seat-of-the-pants experience during the training process is that you can’t exactly teach how to sense when the machine is level. It has to be experienced, learning how to sense what is going on around you and safely making mistakes so you can see when you are not level.

The best heavy equipment operations programs provide on-the-seat training with a variety of machinery along with the knowledge to become competent and professional. The “bubble in your butt” is a good thing because it means you have one of the most basic skills needed to do your job.