On the CASE with Knight Excavations

Fri 10 May 2019

On the CASE with Knight Excavations

Towards the end of last year, we reported on this job that Knight Excavations have been working on which involved the bulk excavation of a hillside to facilitate a shed extension at the Dingles Fairground Heritage Centre just off the A30 in Devon. The job involved carving out an estimated 120,000 cubic metres of earth which was tipped on site where some extraction of hardcore has been undertaken, the area is now being backfilled and will be landscaped in due course.

Local CASE dealership M&M Plant Sales have recently received their new demonstrator 1650M LGP dozer and offered it to Peter Knight to try evaluate and this job was a perfect location to try it out and being just a few minutes up the road for us, the Digger Man Blog went along to catch the machine in action.

CASE claims that these hydrostatic drive dozers offer best-in-class drawbar pull compared to competitive machines. The 1650M LGP is powered by a 6-cylinder Fiat Power Train (FPT) engine which offers a power output rating of 122kw (164hp) and uses SCR-only emissions reduction technology so no need for any DPF/EGR or regen. CASE suggest that this unit can offer savings of up to 10.5% in fuel consumption compared to the older models.

The cab looked like a nice place to be spending your days and there were no complaints from Peter’s younger brother Jamie who was spending his first day on the machine at the time of our visit. These machines feature a new blade-control joystick which includes a blade-shake button, for cleaning the blade at the end of a push, and we did notice this function being used by Jamie. This example is fitted with a 3.99m3 straight PAT (Power Angle Tilt) six way blade.

The operator can also select a grading mode that reduces the blade speed by 50% to help improve accuracy at the business end. The built-in load-management system automatically reduces track speed (increasing torque) with a heavier load on the blade and increases track speed (reducing torque) with a lighter load on the blade.

Peter Knight is a guy who knows what he likes and he seems to stick with one particular brand, his excavator fleet for instance is dominated by Hitachi, he has similar feelings regarding dozers suggesting that Caterpillar with such a long historical connection with track type tractors are the only serious option in the long run, it will be interesting to see how this demo pans out over the coming days.

Checkout our video of the CASE 1650M LGP in action during this site visit.

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