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Digger Man

Digger Man Blog

by Nick Drew  |  Tue 17 Oct 2017

Looking back at Excavators in the Pink

Back in 2014 I spent a thoroughly enjoyable 5 days in the seat of Havant based Cosham Plant Hire’s then new Pink Hitachi Zaxis 130LCN-5 which is available to hire with all profits from the machine going to the Breast Cancer Charity.

Looking back at Excavators in the Pink
I enjoyed my week on the pink machine, which I think it’s fair to say was getting a lot of attention from pedestrians and the passing traffic. Let’s face it it’s not very often that you actually see a pink excavator at work on a UK building site is it. This pink charity machine was the brainchild of Cosham Plant Hire's Managing Director Louis Silk who came up with the idea after a personal experience with cancer at their workplace. Above: Left, Cosham Plant Hire Managing Director Louis Silk, Right, D.R Groundworks Production Director Phil Whistler. Who can forget the pink star on the Case stand at the inaugural Plantworx show in 2013. This American style backhoe loader was also raising money for the Breast Cancer Charity and had also appeared at Bauma in Munich. In fact the machine has been “touring” events since 2011 raising money for the charity. The idea behind this one came from Marvin Linder who works as a design engineer at the Case Burlington Plant in the USA. Sadly Marvin’s wife Leslie had died of breast cancer so he decided that this would be another good way to raise funds for the charity with the motto “Digging for a Cure”. I was looking for some video footage of pink charity machines but could only find this clip of a pink Link Belt machine taken by well-known plant and machinery video man Chris Maginnis shot earlier this year at the ConExpo show in Las Vegas, where in the gambling capital of the world the machine was being used to roll dice!
Of course there are many more examples of pink machines raising money around the world so maybe in a future blog we will take a look at some more.  

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