SIN CITY’S SHOWSTOPPERS
This year’s CONEXPO-CON/AGG show, staged from March 10th to 14th in Las Vegas, USA featured an enormous range of fantastic site clearance and forest machines from dedicated manufacturers, as Eoghan Daly reports
BANDIT INDUSTRIES
Above: French manufacturer Plaissance brought along its Vario-Trac 350B wheeled carrier with mulching head. Below: 480B is Tigercat’s largest purpose-built mulcher, shown here with Tigercat’s 4061 mulching head.
IMAGE CONEXPO-CON/AGG
Left: The CONEXPO event covers 2.7m square feet and attracts more than 2,000 exhibitors every three years.
TIGERCAT
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n advance of construction work on any project, a degree of site clearance is always necessary. Effective clearance of trees and scrub leads to a more efficient project start-up, and a range of dedicated contractors serve the sector in this regard. While a host of large manufacturers already provide the UK and Irish markets with equipment for clearance work, it is always interesting to see what smaller producers have come up with to overcome challenging
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AUTUMN 2020 FORESTRY MACHINERY
situations. Many of the machines in Las Vegas for CONEXPO-CON/AGG 2020 showed great potential for use outside the USA in forestry clearance applications, and their high end durability really shone through. As well as purpose built self-propelled mulchers, a large contingent of shredding and grinding plants were exhibited at the show. While many were presented by world-renowned manufacturers, others were
shown by smaller producers of niche products. When it comes to horizontal-feed grinders, the machine’s ability to handle both longer and shorter material makes them particularly flexible when processing site clearance material, and reduces the need for advanced size reduction in most situations. Other American trends included the manufacturing of dedicated forestry specification machines by a large number of excavator manufacturers. These machines
