Connop & Son is a household business that started within the Seventies as an agricultural contractor. It quickly moved into building and, particularly, concrete flooring.
It already has a number of Caterpillar machines – it’s a long-standing buyer of Cat-dealer Finning – and its latest arrival is a Cat 299D3 XE CTL compact tracked loader, coupled with a GB124 Smart Grader Blade attachment. As early adopters of machine management, Connop & Son has mixed this with a Trimble 3D laser grade system.
Using sensible know-how like this enhances productiveness and reduces waste. Being in a position to full the work in fewer passes additionally decreases put on and tear on the tools.
The GB124 blade attachment that Connop & Son has fitted to its loader has hydraulic wings, giving it the aptitude of a mini grader, and with the Trimble laser system fitted as properly means it’s simply potential to attain accuracy as much as 5mm.
Iwan Jenkins, Finning’s account supervisor for Wales, mentioned: “On massive scale tasks comparable to industrial builds which cowl enormous areas the flooring have to be completely correct by way of tolerance in any other case it might cost hundreds of kilos because of the cost of concrete.
“The beauty of the D3 collection is that it additionally helps a line of latest sensible attachments which suggests the machine management recognises the device and routinely tailors the controls and operator info to match the device and the duty.
“It also has advanced control features that assist operators with repetitive tasks like grading, digging and loading, and the assist feature can automatically maintain the desired slope without the operator making any adjustments as the machine travels the cut.”
Connop & Son already has two Cat telehandlers, a 320 excavator, a D6T dozer and a D6 Next Generation dozer. The 299D3 XE CTL is a alternative for an current machine and was chosen by director Chris Connop after an illustration of the smaller 279D3.
He mentioned: “I used to be on the lookout for one thing dependable and after the demo of a 279 two years in the past I used to be impressed general by the machine. After that we bought a name from Finning asking for suggestions and I defined that I assumed the attachment wanted some modifications and now that’s precisely what they’ve constructed.
“I feel we often is the first within the nation to have this machine and it’s wonderful. It’s in use 5 days per week and our driver completely loves it.
“We use it in projects such as industrial builds with 2D and 3D prepping as it’s fitted out with Trimble GPS and it adjusts everything to suit, and with a warranty up to 6,000 hours we’ve got everything covered.”
