by Nick Drew | Mon 13 Sep 2021
Rare BRØYT Tracked Excavator Spotted
The old Norwegian brand BRØYT was first established as far back as 1949 by two brothers, Ingebret and Kristian Soyland. The company is probably best remembered for its quirky and simple designed wheeled excavators, like the X1 and X2 models which were launched in the late 1950’s and featured no drive to the wheels.
Those machines would effectively pull themselves around sites using the digging boom and arm and if they needed to travel any distance, they would be towed by a lorry piggy back style, really quite unique machines.
Photo: Courtesy of tungt.no
Its tracked models were somewhat rarer machines, but the 13-tonne class X 20 and X 21 TL models were probably their most popular examples until they were discontinued from the range in 1992.
Norwegian operator Olav Wendelbo is something of a BRØYT enthusiast, whom I believe owns a number of these venerable excavators in their spiritual homeland of Norway.
While doing some research I came across this great drone footage of Olav at work on his X 21 TL face shovel model taking out a sharp bend on his driveway up to his property. Its great to see these old machines still working, even more so in this stunning location!
Historically the BRØYT business was subject of some takeovers, most notably by the Brown Group in the late 1980’s. In 1999 the business was purchased by Finnish manufacturer Sandvik and for a while the machines were manufactured in Turku, before eventually being phased out signalling the end for the BRØYT brand.