Ollie and Eddie’s Swedish Roadtrip (Part Five)

by Nick Drew | Thu 04 Jul 2019

Ollie and Eddie’s Swedish Roadtrip (Part Five)

Time for the final instalment of photos from Ollie Kitchin and Eddie Warrener’s road trip to the MaskinExpo Show in Stockholm earlier this year, words and photos supplied by Ollie.

While we were at the show, we got to meet Ernst Menzi! He is the grandson of Mr Menzi, a true gentleman and an amazing operator, we must have been able to speak to him for well over a hour or so.

He told us that has been driving machines since he was 4 years old and was actually born in the Menzi factory. Apparently the top two floors of the factory back in those days were for the workers to live and stay in.

He was saying that his grandfather first got his idea for the machine from the British Smalley grave digger machine and even had one bought across in the early days of development of the Menzi Muck machines. I took this video on the day as Ernst put the machine through its paces!

Touring around later we came across a couple of Kobelco’s including this smart SK75SR model that were on one of the dealers stands.

There is always so much choice and options available in Sweden and on the SVAB stand there were lots of different types of joysticks to choose from and on another stand, different types of seats. Nothing ever seems to be too much bother in the Scandinavian territories, whatever you want as a customer you can generally have!

There was also another company that just did seats and different styles of armrests, I’ve actually bought a pair like this for my machine, my arms tend go either side of the armrests in my duck, but with these ones been fully adjustable, they will be a perfect fit.

YRC Rental were at the show, with a number of Cat machines equipped with tiltrotators for hire to the general public.

There were also examples from the latest Next Gen range of Caterpillar mini and midi excavators.

If I’m honest I was a bit surprised to see the back end of the Cat 307.5, which juts out like a little seat on the back. Potential there for operators to get caught out when slewing in confined areas I think.

We stopped by the Lännen stand and were very impressed with the quality of these Finnish built backhoe loaders or as they prefer to call them muliti-purpose tool carriers, just stunning machines!

So that was it for this year, the Digger Man Blog would like to thank Ollie and Eddie for their input into this series of blogs, next stop for the pair in Sweden is likely to be the Maskin Massan show next year and if all goes to plan I will be attending that one again myself.

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