Demolition kit was thin on the ground – But JCB’s product range is bursting with new machines.
Along with a rag-tag army of camera and notepad wielding construction trade journalists from across Europe (the diggerazzi, as they’re known) I made my annual pilgrimage to the JCB World Headquarters to see what the UK’s bastion of machinery manufacturing had in store for its customers in the coming year.
Although there were a few items on the packed menu that had either been seen before (the new site dumper range, for example) or “merely” a step-up in engine technology (the latest Stage IIIB compliant JS excavators) there was also a lot of the “new stuff” that makes my job both possible and enjoyable.
Key among them was a new JCB 3CX Compact; a new backhoe loader that it 35 percent smaller than the famous machine upon which it is based; and a pair of new specialist backhoe loaders designed specifically for the piling and pole-placing sectors. And for those that have been around long enough to hanker for the Rocester company’s old-school livery, let joy be unconfined as the company is making 70 such machines to coincide with its 70th anniversary.
Thanks to our buddies at Diggers and Dozers, we have full coverage of all these machines and more, including video footage of most of them. So please just pick your chosen JCB flavour below:
• Backhoes enter next stage
• JS excavators get engine upgrade
• Pole to Pole
• Piling on the pressure
• Throwbackhoe
• The backhoe for a shrinking world
And, if reading’s not your thing, head on over to the Diggers and Dozers YouTube channel where you can see many of these machines (and a whole host of others) in action.
