JCB 4 Archive Footage #ThrowbackThursday

With JCB celebrating 70 years of its iconic backhoe loader range, the Staffordshire based manufacturer is continuing to roll out videos from its extensive archives.

Launched in 1960, a year before I was even born, the JCB 4 was much larger than anything the company had produced before and followed on from the success of the Hydra-Digga and Loadall models.

The open-ended cab was described in brochures as the JCB Superview cab, and it was cavernous, but in reality, not much in the way of creature comforts as we know it today, however, it was different times back then and operators really appreciated these machines with the much simpler two lever digging controls for the backhoe.

This machine was aimed at the major contracting and civil engineering companies and it was quite a beast of a machine in its day offering a digging reach of 6.7 metres, in addition larger bucket rams made the machine capable of carrying much bigger digging buckets than those carried on previous models.

I was very fortunate to have seen the superbly restored example of the later 4C model owned by Ayrshire based Andrew Craig & Sons when it was displayed up at JCB World HQ during a product launch event in 2015, I think you will agree they done a fantastic job of it!

Checkout the video from JCB below.