Kubota SVL97 Loftness Battle Ax. Forestry Customizations

Neil from Messick's here to talk to you today about this awesome SVL97. This machine is set up with a forestry mulcher. Mulchers are one of the most demanding attachments that you can put onto a piece of equipment. In order for compact track loaders to be able to support one of these things, in a production basis, we're often going through a machine like this and making some modifications to it in order to make it ideal for that application. Today, we're going to walk around this machine and show you some of the things that it takes in order to put one of these attachments to work.
Briefly, what is a forestry mulcher? There's two main types of forestry mulchers, either a disc style or a drum style. This is the drum-style mulcher. These are going to be the more expensive but unsurprisingly more productive and preferred mulching attachment. These are made for you to be able to drive over top of brush or trees and essentially have the machine consume all the woody debris that's in front of it. You can go the whole way from using this push bar to push a big tree over, drop it onto the ground, and then quite literally drive the machine up over the tree and then consume it, shred it up as you go, leaving only mulch left over. It is the fastest way to go through and clear land for further development or maintenance. At Messick's here, we can get mulchers from a lot of different companies for a lot of different machines, and I've done some videos on other ones in the past. We've got some smaller ones now that can fit onto a tractor, and several suppliers for ones that can fit onto a track loader like this. Specifically, though, this one here's from a company called Loftness, it's their Battle Ax. The one thing that we like about this is that it is a little bit easier on the machine than what some other ones on the market are today.
This Kubota is fully kitted out with the hydraulic coolers and stuff on the back that we'll look at shortly. This is though one of the very few combinations that you can get away with running this mulcher on this machine without a cool pack on it. There's only a very small subset of units out there on the market that can pull that off, but the Kubota actually has enough cooling capacity on its own to not require this kit on the back. However, this is going to be running a mulcher regularly and frequently. For that reason, we're erring on the side of caution here by installing that additional kit on the back. Really cool attachments. Something that you really need to understand well when you're fitting one up to a machine, these things can be really costly, and the configuration on the base unit, the power unit, needs to be right. Forestry applications are extremely hard on equipment. When you're working around wooded areas and you have branches, limbs, and even trunks punching up against your equipment, you can do a lot of damage to your machinery really quickly, and that's why on the back of this SVL, we have this heavy guard. All the kits here that we're going to talk about in terms of hardening our Kubota equipment, this isn't stuff that we're going out to an outside company in order to fit up to this unit. It's easy stuff from Kubota that can be financed right into the cost of the machine.
There's a couple places here on the unit where you're going through and hardening it, and if you've ever been around an SVL before, it's almost a little silly to think that you need to harden the back end of this machine because there's already so much steel there. You'll see though this heavy solid piping and these big bars are going to protect the back end of the machine if you back into something, and when you're using an attachment like this, you're very frequently going front and back all day long. This is going to cover the back end of the machine here if you happen to back into something. In terms of backing up, there's also a backup beeper that's been installed on this to have safety for other people around the machine while you're backing up. This also comes through with a standard camera. There's a camera in the cab that you can see as you're backing up to know if there's somebody or something behind you. If you don't have that on your machine and you're going to be installing a mulcher, I highly recommend that. On the left-hand side of the machine, there's two places here that have been hardened. One of those is the hydraulic outlets here at the front. The last thing you want is a tree limb to come around, catch these hoses, and rip off these expensive hoses and big couplers. You have this really substantial guard here that wraps around the hydraulic coupler assembly, and then this drops down in order to protect the hoses from the side. That's really cool.
We actually sell this separately on a lot of machines for customers that may be in lighter applications than this. It's a cool addition. The other thing that we frequently sell as well is the def cover kit. On the left-hand rear of the machine, there's a big blue plate that can go over the def filling tank, and that's to go in and protect those plastic necks, the plastic knobs and stuff there at the top from, again, being damaged by trees and limbs, and that kind of thing. We do often actually sell that kit as well to rental yards. If you want to go through and be able to fill the def tank on this machine, bolt that thing shut, and send it out on say, a rental to somebody who might do something silly like put diesel fuel in your def tank, putting that plate on is a good way to cover that up and prevent that scenario from occurring. Those can be a useful addition to just about any machine. Demolition applications are going to call for a little different type of door here on the front of the machine.
This is called a demo door. Swing it up here out of the way. The glass that's on the front of this is made to protect the operator. The standard window that you have on here is going to have a normal type of glass pane in here, but really meant to keep the operator cool and dry and isn't intended to protect the operator from flying debris.
This, though, while it's mulching all this stuff up, does throw debris. You're going to notice warning signs all over the attachment because of it. In order to protect the operator, you're going to want to install a demo door on the machine. Now, this is a heavier piece of Lexan-style glass. It is, gosh, nearly a half an inch thick or more when we look at it down here at the end. When you slide this door up, you can feel the additional weight. Not a big deal, but I'd say, particularly when you get right here above your head, you get a little bit of additional weight that has to be pushed up and locked into place. One thing you're going to be able to be definitely cognizant of is if you're running the machine around with a demo door on and you have all this extra weight up here on the door, is locking both of the retention pins on the left and the right-hand side in order to hold all this weight up when the door is open. Many people try to take the shortcut and just pin one side because it's quick and easy and it'll hold the door up. As you're traveling around with this heavy door up here and only one corner supported, you can eventually bend some of the linkage and track that is up here. Definitely, if you had the demo door install, remember to engage both of the retention pins when the door is up.
Up here on the roof, you're going to find two different assemblies. One here on the front is an additional guard that is added onto the machine for falling object protection. This is Fox level two certified. What that is going to do is protect the operator. Something happens to fall, say a limb falls and lands on the cab at the machine, this additional guard here is going to protect the operator from that falling debris. On the back here is an additional hydraulic cooling pack. Now I said before this attachment can be run without this cooling pack, but it's certainly not a bad idea to add it. In high flow, you have 40 gallons a minute of hydraulic flow running through the hydraulic motors down here on this attachment. When working hard, that can create a lot of heat. This additional shielded cool pack here is added to the back of the machine in order to keep that hydraulic oil cool and hopefully add longevity to both the machine and the attachment. We pride ourselves in working with a huge variety of customers here at Messick's, and it's with partners like Kubota and Loftness that we're able to put together some really awesome pieces of equipment and really cool setups for some of the most demanding applications. The company that this is going out to is going to be able to be really productive and get a lot of work done with this machine very quickly and, hopefully, make some money in the process. That's what it's all about. If you're shopping for a piece of equipment and we can help, or if you have parts or service needs for a machine you've already got, give us a call at Messick's. We're available at 802-222-3373 or online at messick's.com.