Old Hymac mount re-appears

by Nick Drew | Tue 27 Sep 2016

Old Hymac mount re-appears

I was astounded recently to see some photos appear on Facebook courtesy of Chris Maginnis featuring an old Hymac 580D that I used to operate back in the early 80’s through to early 1990’s; so much so that it has inspired me to write a blog about my time with it.

It was around 1983/84 and I had been laid off following the end of a contract I had been working on operating a JCB 805BT machine on a site in Waterlooville. Having had a look in the situations vacant pages of the local Evening Echo, I spotted a job listed for a Hymac operator. The detail was sketchy and only included a phone number. Anyway needs must and I make the call and it turned out that the company looking for an operator was a firm called Swanwick Construction Ltd. This company had a reputation for, shall we say getting the best out of their equipment and generally ran a lot of old kit and lorry’s. The main man also had a fearsome reputation and was well known to have a short fuse, but as a newly married man with a young baby to look after I had no choice but to take the job. My initial thought was it would do as a temporary measure until I found a better offer.

Photo: Courtesy of Alan Russell. The machine in question was a Hymac 580D, which had been operated by a well-respected operator (seen in action above) who had joined Swanwick’s from Winchester based Ken Hicks Plant Hire. I only ever knew him as “Tom Cat” as that was what he had written on the machine. His were big boots to fill for myself as a young 21 year old and although I had every confidence in my own ability, it’s often the case of sometimes your face just doesn’t fit, something that has been proven on a number of occasions in later life since I relocated. Hymac 1

Photo: Courtesy of Alan Russell. Anyway to cut a long story short, I got “the start” and went out on my first job with them, which was a sewer diversion project on the busy A27 Bursledon Road on the east side of Southampton. Like most first days on a new job, the initial few hours felt a bit edgy and I was just waiting to feel the wrath of the gaffers tongue, but happily for me it never came and at the end of the day he came over and said, for a “youngan” you aren’t too bad on that machine are you! So from that day on we got on like a house on fire and I quickly settled into the job which saw me working with them for the next 9 years on a wide variety of small to medium sized contracts, mainly for local council’s right across Hampshire, Dorset and West Sussex.

The Hymac 580D I was on was from the companies IBH period of ownership and in all fairness was a decent machine for its time and a vast improvement on the old 580C models I had operated for Wimpey Plant previously in terms of operator comfort, the most awkward thing about these machine was that the tracking levers were mounted behind the armrests, which could make tracking and moving the boom and arm together impossible. Fortunately during a later refurbishment of the machine a track pedal conversion was put in place which made life a lot easier. The machine has now been found by Chris Maginnis in a breakers yard in Northern Ireland and still has its company stickers on it from its last respray, which was done around the same time as the aforementioned track pedal conversion was put in.

Powered by a Perkins 6 cylinder engine, these machines were never the most powerful in the dig, but grading with them was a dream, I used to often grade base and topping tarmac with this machine and it was just great for that type of work. There were no servo controls on the 580D, just direct lever linkage to the valve blocks which gave you plenty of positive feel, but like everything these linkages used to wear badly so you would end up with a lot more travel on the levers than you would like, but you grew old with the machine so you didn’t really notice it that much in all fairness.

They gave their fair share of problems too, this one used to eat gear boxes, including the track and slew gearboxes, they also used to leak a lot of hydraulic oil and the rotary coupling in the centre was prone to needing new seals on a regular basis. It also used to suffer from cavitation on the dipper ram and you had to be careful when slewing that the dipper did not suddenly fly outwards as the oil had not caught up quick enough.

Another not so fond memory of this machine was the heat build-up in the cab in the summer months, with the valve blocks being right behind the cab, in addition to the heat of the engine the hot air would flow into the cab where the control linkages used to come through, I eventually eased this problem a bit by spraying some expanding foam into the holes which did help a bit but it was still a hot cab to spend your days in!

The gaffer on this firm was always mad to get me working weekends on the various little tips he had dotted about but at the time I was enjoying a successful ice hockey playing career so often needed to take the weekends off in the winter months. One particular weekend he had asked me to work, I was heading off up country to play so I told him I could not work, he said that’s ok I will get someone else in on it. When I got back on the Monday I arrived at the yard in the usual manner to be told you better go up the tip and see the Hymac. When I arrived the machine was well and truly bogged and lying on its side with the diesel tank submerged under water. It took us over two days to get her out of the peat laden bog, after which the gaffer said, “I don’t think I will put anyone else on it again!” I did have a good batch of photos of this incident but sadly they got mislaid during one of my house moves.

In the last year of working for Swanwick Construction before I relocated the Hymac was replaced as my regular mount by a much different machine in the shape of this FAI Italian based Komatsu PC95 which, although it was a brand new machine, if I am totally honest I was not a fan of it.

Overall though I look back on this old Hymac and the job with very happy memories and it’s great to see that the old girl is still in one piece at least for the time being. Chris Maginnis reports that she is still very much a runner and I truly hope somebody snaps her up for a restoration project in the future. I would like to thank Chris Maginnis for firstly tracking down the old machine and secondly for kindly sharing the photos with me for reproduction here on the Digger Man Blog.

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