About a year ago, Aspen-based contractor Shay Stutsman was looking for a better, more efficient way to use his fleet of track loaders.
After collaborating with AMI Attachments, OilQuick, Caterpillar and Trimble, the owner of Stutsman Gerbaz Earthmoving can now say he has the first 963 track loader with a six-way dozer blade – one that can be connected and disconnected without leaving the cab and is equipped with 3D machine control.
“It's a completely new design. It is a one-of-a-kind design,” Stutsman says. “It is designed specifically to go onto a track loader, but the blade itself is the equivalent of the D5 or what I would call the D6N.
“It’s the only one in the world.”
During a recent visit to Stutsman Gerbaz, AMI Attachments shot some video of Stutsman Gerbaz's Cat 963 with the new AMI/OilQuick coupler and AMI's six-way dozer blade. The video above shows the track loader quickly attaching to various buckets and the dozer blade to demonstrate how it can help reduce the number of machines on a job, increase productivity and save operators time.
Track loaders are a staple on Stutsman Gerbaz jobsites for grading because of the steep terrain and the complex work they perform. Adding a six-way dozer blade makes the loaders more versatile and eliminates the need for a dozer or additional excavator on jobs, Stutsman says.
For example, the company is currently using the track loader with six-way blade on building a horse arena complex.
“If we had the dozer on the job, we’d have a bunch of spoils and other material that we’d have to load up,” he explains. “We would also need to have a wheel loader or an excavator on the jobsite in order to load that spoil, put it into a truck, and some of the demolition debris that we're hauling out from the old horse-riding arenas.
“So being able to switch back and forth between a bucket and the dozer blade allows us to just have one machine on the jobsite versus having a dozer and a loader and/or an excavator.”
His younger operators were also an inspiration for the six-way blade. They were having some difficulty angling a traditional bucket to grade on certain slopes.
“A lot of our grading projects have a lot of complexity to them,” he explains. “There's a lot of angles, a lot of pitch and a lot of roll.”
To learn more about Stutsman’s unique 963-dozer blade setup, check out the story at [ Ссылка ].
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