The Revolution Bike Park is an extreme cycling facility set in over 120 acres of private woodland in Llangynog, at the foot of the Berwyn Mountain range, North East Wales. Customers can test their skills cycling challenging trails through the woods, and then catch the up- lift back to the top to do it all again. The terrain can be rocky, wooded, steep and criss-crossed with roots – fun for the riders but a potential nightmare for maintenance. James Foster, owner of the park, has recently taken delivery of an Engcon EC204 tiltrotator with a DC2 control system for his new 4 tonne, Volvo ECR40D, unusually for its size it’s fitted with steel tracks – and he loves it.
James started using Engcon almost by accident. He regularly hired kit from Greg Mills at DG Mills to help with maintenance of the bike trails and the uplift track. By chance one of the hired diggers came equipped with the Engcon tilty. James explains: “It opened our eyes to how great they are for what we do. It’s the perfect tool for trail building. We do a lot of work in limited spaces as 80% of our site is in a steep, wooded forest and the rest is former quarry workings and spoils so we need a very versatile machine. I was so impressed that when it was time to upgrade our equipment from the CAT 303 we started out with, choosing the Engcon tiltrotator was a no-brainer.”
Safety is a priority for James. The park is large and there is no mobile signal in the area – so he needs to be sure that operating the equipment is as safe as possible as it would be difficult to summon help quickly if they got into difficulties. The new machine is mainly used for building and maintaining the bike trails as well as smaller jobs including drainage, small bits of grading on the uplift track (the road used to drive customers to the top of the trails) and general landscaping of the carparking area.
James again: “The new machine is a lot safer for us to use with the Engcon. We work a lot on very steep ground and being able to dig from one spot makes it a lot safer and more efficient. I can make a section of trail without having to move the digger around to get the angles I need to create when we’re building trails.
Getting used to the equipment is straightforward. A competent excavator operator will find the tiltrotator very easy to use. James saw the benefits immediately: “The Engcon cuts out a lot of the manual labour needed to finish off. We can build new trails way faster than we have been able to before. It’s one hell of a bit of kit!”
James has been impressed with the service too: “The service has been great. Engcon has gone above and beyond to help us out to make sure we ended up with the great system we’ve got. It’s definitely worth the investment, whatever the job you’re doing, because it’s only going to be an advantage having a tiltrotator. It makes any machine more versatile.
It was a dream for me to get one of these on a new excavator as I knew the benefits it would bring.”
