Hitachi fan opts for another orange one

Internet followers of owner/operator John Rowbotham from Ceredigion in Wales, will be aware that he has recently upgraded to another all singing all dancing excavator from Japanese favourite Hitachi. We will be visiting the new machine for Earthmovers, but in this blog I thought I would share a trio of videos I shot during my last visit to Wales to see John’s previous machine.

The core of John’s business and expertise is in land drainage for the agricultural sector, although he will take on all aspects of excavation works, and even takes on some small rural building site projects from time to time. Having worked in the Ceredigion area for the past 20 years, John is in that enviable situation where he has a fantastic customer base and is well known for his specialist services, meaning that he rarely has to travel much further than a 10/12 mile radius from his base. John has been a long term fan of Hitachi excavators, having run the popular Japanese machines for many years.  John is a big fan of tilt-rotators and on this machine he had a new Engcon EC209 fitted which also took his ever increasing arsenal of work tools like this tree shear seen in action here de-limbing trees. [youtube width="725" height="344"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o785FP-sMZk[/youtube]   John then deployed another attachment from his arsenal of work tools, in the form of a timber grab, plucking the timber from the piles by cleverly rotating the grab to suit, John arranged the limbs into manageable sizes before grabbing them and depositing into his Yanmar C60R low ground pressure tracked dumper. At one point one of the limbs fell off and landed awkwardly against the side of the dumper, once again this proved no problem for John as he deployed his Engcon’s integrated grab to pluck the escapee up and place it back in the dumpers skip. Moving back up the field to a storage area, the timber is unloaded and stacked using the timber grab again, one assumes this timber will be used for winter fuel in the farmhouse. [youtube width="725" height="344"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyo8SV6NNco[/youtube]   Later in the day John went on to do a bit of ditch cleaning work and demonstrated the versatility and flexibility of the Hitachi and Engcon combo when working around trees. Watching John at work it was very clear he was a happy Hitachi end user and it’s easy to see why he has chosen to stick with the brand for his latest upgrade, [youtube width="725" height="344"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kbytwQifW1E[/youtube]   Look out for my report on John’s latest machine which also features a two piece boom and new Engcon EC214 tilt-rotator in a future edition of Earthmovers.