A forward-thinking, Lincolnshire-based site services contractor is helping others reap the benefits of his foresight by demonstrating a new Dig A Crusher excavator-mounted crusher bucket attachment.
KWR Plant Hire, a pioneering hirer and contractor based in Grantham, is currently demonstrating the latest member of the Dig A Crusher excavator-mounted crusher bucket attachments, the 600 series. According to company founder Kevin Russell, his dedication to the brand owes as much to the reliability of Dig A Crusher’s aftersales support as it does to the productivity of the attachment itself. Kevin has now demonstrated the attachment to hundreds of potential customers at four national shows.
More Profitable Business
Located at the heart of Lincolnshire’s agricultural business, KWR was founded more than 10 years ago, initially with the intention of providing equipment, groundworks and drainage support to the area’s many farms. Having suffered from the cyclical demand of the agricultural sector, founder Kevin Russell decided to diversify into more mainstream plant hire, contracting and earthworks, and quickly established a formidable reputation among local main contractors and civil engineering companies. “We worked in a wide range of location and applications and we soon realised that we needed to carve ourselves a niche if we were to truly compete in the plant hire sector,” Russell contends. “We decided to offer our customers a broad range of excavator-mounted attachments to help them tackle the many and varied duties they are required to undertake.” Russell says that he originally saw the Dig A Crusher attachment more than three years ago when it had first arrived in the UK. “We immediately saw the potential of this machine not only to tackle recycling duties but also to expand the versatility of our excavator fleet,” he continues. “Even though it represented our biggest single capital investment, I was determined to add a Dig A Crusher 700 to our fleet.”
Establishing a Market
Russell admits that, as a pioneer of the Dig A Crusher attachment, the experience was not without its teething problems. “As the first UK company to buy a Dig A Crusher bucket, we faced a huge learning curve in terms of both the machine and its capabilities,” he explains. “But we worked very closely with Dig A Crusher and together helped establish a market for the attachment. That market is highly specialised but the attachment has more than paid for itself.”
Following on from the success of its Dig A Crusher 700 matched with a 16 tonne Komatsu PC160 excavator, KWR has now matched a smaller Dig A Crusher 600 with a 13 tonne class Komatsu PC130. “The new Dig A Crusher 600 is only slightly smaller than the 700 but, as it is paired with a smaller excavator, it will allow customers to tackle even more specialised work,” Russell continues. “Like the 700, the 600 is a very powerful attachment and unlike many other crushing machines, it has absolutely no problem with products containing steel reinforcement such as sleepers, lamp-posts and concrete posts.” Russell says that before he purchased the Dig A Crusher attachment, he was often required to hire in a large, track-mounted mobile crusher, at considerable cost. “The hire of a dedicated crusher can really eat into your profit margins. But by using the Dig A Crusher buckets, we can utilise the excavator that’s already on site to recycle any demolition material at a fraction of the cost,” Kevin Russell concludes. “Many farms have a couple of hundred tones of hardcore and rubble, often mixed with waste that has to be reprocessed and recycled. Now we can go onto a site with a screening bucket, rotating grab and a Dig A Crusher bucket and cope with just about any work the customer can throw at us.”
KWR have also set up a joint venture with Peter Lord Forestry, offering total site clearance with a promise of zero site waste. The Dig A Crusher attachment is expected to play a key role in any future land clearance project.
