All About the ARA #FlashbackFriday

Taking another look back at this one that we done previously on the Digger Man Blog.

I was taking a look at the excellent German Facebook group Historische Baumaschinen which focuses on classic machinery from a bygone era, when I came across a thread about the long-gone Finnish brand of excavators called ARA.

The first image featured a tracked model, possibly an 18-tonne class AK42, and looked to have been from a promotional brochure from those days and it inspired me to take a look back at this less well-known brand.

One of the first hydraulic excavators manufactured by ARA was the 10-tonne class AK31 wheeled variant, which would have been built in the factory in Turku sometime between 1965 and 1974, my Finnish friend and industry colleague Olli Päiviö, who spotted one of these machines at rest on a farm back in 2017, and kindly sent over this shot of it.

Several model variants of the AK31 were produced during that time from A to F Series. The AK31 was eventually replaced in 1974 by an upgraded model the AK131 which featured a number of improvements over the old machine. In 1980 another Finnish company called Lokomo bought out the ARA excavator business. As previously mentioned, the ARA machines were built at a factory in Turku on the south-west coast of Finland possibly in the same area where Sandvik have a factory today.

The photo below was posted by historical machinery enthusiast Eric Nialcop (Yes that’s a pseudonym for Poclain!) and shows an ARA model at a machinery fair somewhere, possibly in France.

Photo courtesy of Eric Nialcop

Eric (I don’t know his real name?) is a font of knowledge on old machines especially those of Poclain, and shares some amazing old images on social media platforms and forums.

I came across this footage on You Tube of a surviving ARA  AK131 machine being used on a farm to load dung onto a spreader.