The idea becomes real
The two men had no plans to buy a tractor. Neither did they want to pull them with a dozer, a practice adopted by a couple of Dutch earthworks contractors.
Later last year, the two friends were invited to a working K-Tec demonstration in a sand pit in Denmark. They took the AP boss with them and the three men saw that a Volvo A30G had no trouble at all towing a single 21.0m³ scraper. The burning question was would it pull two of them?
They did not have to wait long to find out because a few weeks later AP celebrated its 40th anniversary. One of the company’s special creations on display to commemorate the occasion was the firm’s first twin-scraper combination.
Based on two AP15s (15.0m³) made for a Dutch customer’s New Holland T9 articulated tractor in late 2018, Benny and Nigel liked what they saw. Pleased with the narrower 3.5m width, they bought them at the anniversary event, which was the starting point for the two men to officially join forces as RA Grondverzet.
Selecting a power source to pull the twin scrapers was easy. After 8,000 hours of service, Benny sacrificed his 2014-made Volvo A30G, which he bought as an ex-demonstrator from Germany in 2015 with just 15 hours on its clock.
The drawings and modification plans for the new swan-neck drawbar to connect the first scraper to the A30G took two months at the back end of last year, and the modification work began in earnest in January this year.
One of the last jobs was to sand blast the paint work back to the bare metal (the scrapers were painted blue in the former owner’s colours) and paint them Volvo yellow. Finished a little later than planned, we caught up with the lengthy combination four weeks and roughly 250 hours into its first job, a couple of miles from RA Grondverzet’s base at Swifterbant.
Striking is the best word to describe it. Stretching to just over 26.0m from head to toe, it depends on the material, but fully loaded the GVW often exceeds 100 tonnes.
The second thing that caught my attention was the surprisingly tight turning circle. The test location is to shift 21,000m³ of soil and 10,000m³ of sand to level the land in preparation for a new harbour project on the edge of the Ijsselmeer lake near the Dutch town of Lelystad.
There is no change to the front half of the five-year-old A30G, which continues to take its power from a 355hp six-pot and turbocharged 10.8-litre Volvo D11 Stage IV engine. The six-speed automatic transmission is also standard and the 6×6 stands on 750/65R25 tyres.
