R & L Wiffen
Wiffens LiuGong CLG842II loader out on hire
I recently caught up With Robbie Wiffen of R & L Wiffen who are based in Indented Head, Victoria, here’s what he had to say…
“I’ve been going for about 40 years now and I’ve always been in trucks and earthmoving. I started off with an old loader and slowly worked up from there, I’ve had a few Cats, which I used to be a big lover of, and I’ve still got a Cat excavator actually. I’ve also got a John Deer grader, but it wasn’t until I met Andrew that I discovered LiuGong, from there I bought a LiuGong Loader, I love it, absolutely love it. Out of all the machines I’ve owned over the years, it would be the best loader I’ve ever had. I know because technology has moved on and they get better, they’ve got to other wise you wouldn’t want to buy another one would you?!”
“Driver comfort, its perfect, inside noise – very good, the Cat was very noisy in the cabin, this isn’t. It’s a beautiful machine, I could not be more happy with it, it’s definitely a good investment for me, I’ve had it a while now, and it’s been great value for money.”
“Whenever you want to use it, you go out there, flick the key and it’s away. That’s all I ask of a machine, I hate going out and starting a machine and it won’t go, but this machine is perfect, Daryl, one of the operators has been around machines his whole life and he swears by it. So it’s not only my opinion, its Daryls’ as well. It’s been out on hire a few times, it’s up on a concrete plant at the moment, they usually have a Kawasaki which has broken down, and they said there’s no comparison – it’s just so much better. So they’re the sort of things you look for in a machine.”
“For the size of the machine, it pushes extremely well, you can have three ten metre loads of dirt one in front of the other and it’ll push through them all, the Cat loader that I had wouldn’t, it would start spinning the wheels, I’m not sure exactly why, but everyone who’s driven it says the same. Another good thing about it is the climb – we clean out a lot of dams and it’ll just climb up the face of the damn with a full bucket with no problems. It sounds like I’m raving on, but from my point of view, I’m very, very happy, and as I’ve said before, I love it.”
I asked Robbie what his operators have said about the machines features…
“Well look, here comes Daryl now you can talk to him, but Ill tell you what we do like, the automatic kick out for your levelling bucket, I mean you can lower your bucket down and drive straight in and know your bucket’s level, where as the other loader we had before this one used to bite in if you weren’t dead level, but this automatically finds the right level and you’re straight in.”
“As far as I’m concerned, dead straight, it’s a perfect machine, and also, the service is absolutely 100%. For example, I had a little bit of a problem with it when I first got it, when I rang Andrew at 4.30 at night, 7am the next morning someone was there to sort me out, now you can’t get better service than that! With the cat, they’d be going ‘oh well we’ll have to get a man down there, it might take a couple of days for someone to be able to come out to you’, well that’s no good, when you want to work you want to work, you cant wait around for a service man to come. Here’s another example of LiuGong’s excellent service; I broke a mirror, so I rang up the office, and the guy I spoke to said yeah no trouble at all, 2 days later it was here posted down through the mail & was on my doorstep. With things like that you think ‘oh no this is going to be a pain, im going to have to wait for it’, but it came straight from Newcastle – he must have rang the factory there and then while I was talking to him because it takes 2 days to get here! They’re just really good people to deal with, Andrew and I have got on great. That’s all I ask, if I buy a machine and the bloke does the right thing by me, that’s all you need. I just want to tell people how it is.”
I then caught up with Daryl, who regularly operates the LiuGong loader…
“I think the machine’s great, it’s driver friendly, no worries there, all your controls are good to work with, the display is nice & clear, with the bucket as well, you just tap it across and she floats down straight away which is a really good thing, the access in and out is really good, and there’s very good vision.”
Robbie went on to say “This thing will pay for itself in the first 3 years, where as the other one, the cat it would take 6 years, this is doing the same, if not a better job, so why would I want to go and spend the extra money on a cat.”
With the back up service, if you ever have a query, they’re always prepared to talk to you and always very friendly. He’ll always say this is how it’s done & this is what to do, you can’t get better service than that.”
He continues “It seems to come down to paying a huge amount of money, just for the leading brand name, you know, other machines we looked at might be $40,000 more expensive, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to be $40,000 better!
“Yeah very good, we haven’t had a spanner on that machine, I mean I think all new gear should be good these days, but there’s a lot of it that’s not. The few people I’ve spoken to down here who own LiuGong machinery think it’s great too.”
Something I’ve noticed about the LiuGong loader is its fuel consumption – it’s fantastic! It takes 13L per hour when its shifting heavy loads and working hard – now that’s fantastic!”
“When you’re working for a living and you’ve got to make your time count, LiuGong is the way to go. Years ago when Japanese stuff first came out, people would be going ‘be careful’ and were very sceptical, now people would kill for Japanese machinery, I think these Chinese LiuGong machines are going to do exactly the same thing, we’re lucky we’re getting it on the ground floor because in a few years everybody will be chasing them.”
“I love it.”
