Old Lännen at work

by Nick Drew | Mon 24 Apr 2017

Old Lännen at work

Following on from last week’s In search of Golden Oldies in Finland post we have been contacted by a Finnish blog reader called Samuli Salonen, who has kindly sent in some information on an old machine they used to own.

The machine in question is a Lännen M12 model which was manufactured by the Finnish company in 1980. Samuli says that the machine was originally owned by the local council in the city of Pori on the west coast of Finland, where it spent most of its working life on road maintenance works and general up keep of ditches by the side of the road.

During this period the machine amassed a total of 6900 hours on the meter before suffering from an engine failure, afterwhich the Pori city council engineering team swapped the old engine for a new one.

Samuli discovered all this information after finding work sheets relating to the excavator going back over a many years, some of which made for interesting reading! At some point in 1990 the Pori council sold the machine to a farmer in the local area who put the machine to work on light duties on his farm for around 20 years.

In 2011 the farmer put the machine up for sale once more and the Salonen family purchased it. Samuli said, “We bought the machine from the farmer and put it to work to make our home yard better, we dug out for a pond with it and made some roads into and around our property in addition to that we formed a couple of yards and made some small ditches with it”.

The machine has since been sold to a family friend who lives in Valkeakoski which is further inland where it continues to offer good working service to its new owner. It has proven to be a good, reliable and economic machine to own over the years, but Samuli reports that it has recently broken a steel hydraulic oil pipe which he was heading off to fix over the weekend.

I have not been able to find any video footage of an M12 model in action, but here is some footage of a later and larger M216 model at work on a farm.

The Digger Man Blog would like to thank Samuli Salonen for getting in touch with us and don’t forget if you have anything you would like to share with us, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.

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