Rare Stokey Plant Hire Brøyt X4 (Archive Images)

How about this for a #ThrowbackThursday post. These photos have been doing the rounds on various Facebook groups recently and I figured it would be great to share them on the Digger Man Blog.

The images have been posted by our Norwegian friend who is without doubt a Brøyt expert, Markus Brøyten Helle, so we are indebted to him for the share.

The pictures feature a brand new Norwegian built Brøyt X4 face shovel which had been purchased by Wolverhampton based Stokey Plant Hire and is believed to be dated around 1974. Markus explained that he could date the photos due to the fact that the machine was sporting yellow paint, instead of the previous orange livery. This change in the Brøyt colour scheme took place in 1974.

As we have previously written on this blog, these curious machines had no drive system to the wheels, instead the operator would pull himself around the job site to get in position for digging, a simple system but one that was apparently very effective, and these machines were super powerful and by all accounts pretty conservative on fuel.

The machine is seen loading a Cat 769 rigid dumptruck on a Gleesons site on top of the moors somewhere between Lancashire and Yorkshire.

Stokey Plant Hire is of course a long-standing business who are synonymous with quarrying and hard digging applications, as such they must have seen the benefits of these unusual machines back in the day.

Checkout this old promotional video featuring the X4 complete with groovy 1970's music from the Brøyt Tube, You Tube channel.