JSW Excavators Remembered

A post on these rare excavators over the weekend by our good friend Hervé Exca, founder of the French machinery forum Technique TP, has inspired me to take a look back at this Japanese brand.

JSW (Japan Steel Works) has a long history of steel and machinery production having been first established in 1907, the company is still very much in business and trading to this day, however, their time producing hydraulic excavators was pretty brief.

The history books tell us that the company first ventured into excavator manufacturing in 1964, like so many others this was done under a licensing agreement on this occasion with German manufacturer O&K (Orenstein & Koppel) with the first model produced being the RH5.

In the late 1970’s the company began to develop their own machines. The BH range were loosely based around the O&K technology. These models started with the BH45 and BH70 machines which were essentially modified versions of the O&K RH4 and RH6 machines.

Photo: Courtesy of Hervé Exca.

In the early 1980’s the company produced a range of five tracked excavators ranging from the nice little 6.2-tonne BH30 to the 27-tonne BH110. In certain regions the machines were marketed under trade names of Nikko-O&K or just simply as Nikko.

I only ever saw one of these machines in the metal myself, when I was working on a housing site on the outskirts of Southampton for a firm from Kent way, whose name escapes me, who I was on hire to with a JCB 805BT. They had one on site there, possibly a BH50 model, around the 12-13-tonne size class, one thing that stuck in my mind about it was the sliding cab door, which was unusual on a hydraulic excavator in those days.

Photo: Courtesy of David Madden.

I do recall the operator telling me it was a good machine and nice to drive, but I never got to have a go on it or ever see one again. I believe they were being sold in the UK at the time by Marubeni-Komatsu and were powered by a Deutz air cooled engine, and featured many familiar Japanese hydraulic components in them.

Photo: Courtesy of Hervé Exca.

Sadly, by the middle of the 1980’s they had essentially stopped production of excavators to focus their business on steel and other market sectors.