Rent Bobcat
Equipment in Canada

In the winter of 1957, a turkey farmer in Rothsay, Minnesota named Eddie Velo posed an engineering challenge to brothers Cyril and Louis Keller: he needed a compact machine that could manoeuvre inside his turkey barns to clean them out, something that could turn in its own length and operate in spaces too tight for any conventional loader. The Keller brothers built a prototype, brought it to Melroe Manufacturing of Gwinner, North Dakota, and the result - after several years of refinement - became the M600, the world's first true skid-steer loader, introduced in 1960. The machine that came to be known as the Bobcat had no steering axle; instead, it turned by independently varying the speed of the wheels on either side, a zero-radius turning capability that made it uniquely useful in confined spaces.

That original insight - that compact, highly manoeuvrable equipment opens up job site possibilities that larger machines cannot access - has guided Bobcat's product development philosophy ever since. The skid-steer platform grew from that first turkey-barn cleaner into a global product family spanning dozens of models and hundreds of attachments. Bobcat engineers the attachment system as seriously as the carrier machine: the company's universal quick-attach interface allows operators to switch between buckets, augers, cold planers, trenchers, hydraulic breakers, sweepers, and dozens of other tools in minutes, transforming a single machine into a versatile multi-function platform.

Bobcat's compact track loaders extended the zero-tail-swing, compact-footprint philosophy to ground conditions where wheeled machines would struggle. The T76 and T86 compact track loaders, with their wider undercarriage stance and aggressive rubber tracks, can work on the soft, saturated soils common on Canadian construction sites during spring thaw - a period when wheeled equipment often becomes trapped and conventional excavators create unacceptable ground disturbance. This capability has made compact track loaders the machine of choice for Canadian landscaping contractors, utility crews, and residential builders working through the shoulder seasons.

Doosan's 2007 acquisition of Bobcat from Ingersoll Rand brought Korean manufacturing resources to bear on the North American compact equipment market, enabling product investment and global distribution expansion that the brand's previous owner had not pursued. Today, Bobcat of the Rockies and a network of regional Canadian dealers support Bobcat equipment from Alberta to Atlantic Canada. The brand's deep attachment library, its intuitive operator interface, and the familiarity that comes from decades of market leadership make Bobcat compact equipment a default choice for Canadian contractors who need versatile, manoeuvrable machines without the operational complexity of full-size iron.