Doherty Couplers & Attachments has become the exclusive Australian and New Zealand dealer and service partner for Swedish tiltrotator and attachment manufacturer Steelwrist.
Doherty Couplers & Attachments has become the exclusive Australian and New Zealand dealer and service partner for Swedish tiltrotator and attachment manufacturer Steelwrist.
Tiltrotators are hydraulic attachments used on excavators and backhoes that allow the bucket to be rotated 360 degrees and tilted to about 45 degrees, giving the machine much greater flexibility.
The attachment was invented in Sweden in the early 1980s and has become ubiquitous on machines throughout the Nordic countries (Sweden, Norway and Finland) where it can be found on around 90 percent of excavators.
Doherty Couplers & Attachments is based in Mount Maunganui, New Zealand, and has a fully owned and operated subsidiary in Australia. Steelwrist says Doherty was a natural fit for their brand.
“With this strategic co-operation we would like to offer our customers best-in-class service on sales and after-sales,” Steelwrist CEO Stefan Stockhaus says.
“Apart from the fact that Doherty Couplers & Attachments is a well-known brand in the Australian and New Zealand markets, we also recognise the need to offer package solutions including buckets and other work tools together with our tiltrotators,” Stockhaus says.
“This makes Doherty an excellent partner for offering solutions based on both Symmetrical and Universal Pin-Grabber standards.”
Doherty Couplers & Attachment is perhaps best known for its Snaplock+ safety coupler, a coupler that only allows attachments to swing if secured by two pins (rather than allowing one-pin swing) and keeps both pins locked in the event of loss of engagement forces.
“To be able to offer safe couplers for both symmetrical and universal pin-grabber type on our tiltrotators, is in line with our goal to deliver safe, efficient and easy-to-use solutions for our customers,” Stockhaus says.
The tiltrotator concept is rapidly becoming a standard attachment on excavators and backhoes worldwide and Steelwrist says it can deliver productivity improvements of up to 35 percent.