JOhN DEERE 850J JOhN DEERE 850J - CablePrice

TRACK & WHEEL
TRACK & WHEEL
ZAXIS conquers
THe King
Country
Following on from its debut in mid-2012, we catch up with one early ZAXIS-5 customer
to see how this new heavy-duty Hitachi is performing in the rough stuff.
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In the last issue of Track & Wheel (Winter 2012) we
reported on the first ZX-5s landing on Kiwi soil and new
owners being impressed with Hitachi’s latest addition to
the range.
Six months on we’ve had a chance to catch up with
an operator who has been able to put his new ‘dash five’
through its paces. As we discovered, there wouldn’t be many in
the King Country earthworks industry with minerals in their
veins quite like Ruakuri Contracting’s Warren Holden.
“My family owns the land Ruakuri Cave at Waitomo is on –
that’s where the company gets its name,” he says.
The famous subterranean cave structure, complete with glow
worms, crystal formations and rumbling underground waterfalls,
is host to New Zealand’s longest guided underground walking
tour. Although, operating a lime quarry works as he does, for
much of the working week Warren is more concerned with the
stuff lying closer to the surface than what rests far beneath.
As far as hardware for the job goes, he’s supremely happy with
his new ZAXIS 350LCH-5; so much so that he brought it in to
replace a smaller ZX330-3 that had only done 2000 hours before
he decided to trade up.
“I was really impressed with the ‘dash three’ actually; we could
have soldiered on with it without any worries at all. But I guess
it’s a reflection of how good the ‘dash five’ is that we decided to
let the smaller machine go so soon into its run,” he says.
“Usually I’d let a machine run to around the 8000-9000 hour
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