Lyne Grounds Maintenance, based in Balderton near Newark, offers clients in the East Midlands a range of services for the upkeep of all types of grass surfaces, as well as tree pruning/removal, hedge cutting and clearance of unwanted vegetation.
Owner Doug Lyne said: “The little Harsh unit totally fits the bill and is an absolutely perfect match for the 7.5t Isuzu chassis. It’s a truck that we can take to wherever we are working, which includes open fields, rural lanes, schools, sports grounds, hospitals and private clients.
“We have two bodies for the hookloader, the first being a high capacity cube body and the second a flat platform. Whilst the big box body is generally used for moving woodchip and other cut - down vegetation, it’s also ideal for transporting equipment such as our tracked chipper. As with the platform body, the ability to load our various pieces of kit on the flat at ground level makes everything very easy, as well as being much safer for our staff.
With a hookloader body on the ground, we obviously don’t need long loading ramps for our grass mowers etc to climb up. We simply take all our equipment for whatever job we are doing in the bodies, so we don’t need trailers either. Altogether, it’s a great system.”
The Harsh unit is an HH6 model, which offers a 6-tonne lift capacity from a single lifting cylinder. Operation is with a conventional PTO/pump system with an optional handheld remote control that affords both greater visibility over the loading/unloading procedure as well as minimal intrusion into cab space. In any user application, HH6 can handle containers between 3.8 and 4.3 metres in length, while providing a maximum tip angle of 52 degrees.
“For a small business such as ours, going down the hookloader route offers some really big benefits,” Lyne added. “I’d say that in reality the Harsh hookloader system effectively doubles the work capacity of the truck, and therefore increases our overall efficiency and productivity very considerably.”