BACKGROUND UNIVERSA L HITCH PATTERN

Compared to agricultural tractors’ standardised rear hitch patterns and Scandinavian universal quick couplers and attachments, excavator users in the UK and Ireland suffer from a lack of flexibility. This is mainly due to excavator manufacturers offering their own, slightly different attachment pin sizes and spacings. One result of this is the need for the business to carry a largerthan-needed inventory of attachments, which also results in a far from seamless process to swap attachments, for example a hydraulic breaker, between similar-sized excavators.

UK owner-operators of wheeled excavators soon discovered the limitations of the traditional pin pick-up hitches. For a start, their specialist Scandinavian attachments were designed around an S-type coupling, and this small UK community widely adopted this hitch pattern to allow attachment sharing.

The symmetrical (S-type) quick coupler standard was originally defined in 2006 by the Swedish Trade Association for Suppliers of Mobile Machines. It is an open, industry-wide standard, intended to safeguard the interchangeability of quick couplers, tilt-rotators and non-powered attachments, no matter who makes them.

However, pin pick-up hitch systems are the industry standard way to automatically connect buckets in the UK and Ireland, originating from an era when side-swiping with an excavator’s bucket was frowned upon. The design of S-type couplers has a different origin, to transmit the more complex forces generated from the use of an attachment on a tilt-rotator.