Looking to replace a pair of competitive models for an on-going long term contract hire, the company chose Volvo models. “We’ve had experience with excavators from the Volvo range that gave us good reliability and availability but this is the first time we’ve switched to their loading shovels,” explained Arnold Plant’s service director Alan Laithwaite. “This coupled to the outcome of a recent demonstration and the very positive feedback from the personnel on site persuaded us in taking a leap of faith with the L50Fs.”
The pair of loading shovels has been put in charge of handling a wide variety of road materials ranging from road planings, aggregates, tar macadam to sub base and crushed concrete in a local authority’s stock yard servicing the demands from the Greater Manchester area. With the diverse range of product, both machines have been supplied with several attachments that can be interchanged with the Volvo quick coupler. These include a 1.4m³ general purpose and a 2.0m³ light material buckets as well as pallet forks. Existing attachments on site include high tip and heavy duty buckets.
The L50F, along with the smaller L45F, are mid-sized wheeled loaders in Volvo Construction Equipment’s F series line up and share the same design of the rear chassis. Visibility is improved from the cab by mounting the 4.8 litre engine transversely and having a sloping hood.
The L50F has an operating weight of 9,430kg and full turn tip load of 5,900kg with the optimum bucket size of 1.4m³. Engine output is 117hp.
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