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Fit for Purpose: Dixie Holdings

As well as supplying machinery and attachments, Queensland’s Dixie Holdings fabricates and customises dozers for specialist jobs on the farm, construction site or mine. Here, we take a look at a couple of the stand-out customised machines at Dixie’s yard

 

Tom McDonald works alongside his dad, Geoffrey, at the family-owned Dixie Holdings 

 

I have been lucky to make some great connections within the civil and mining plant hire industries over the past few years. 

In that time, it has been fascinating to see one business in particular develop its very own niche in the market. 

Located in Woongoolba, south of Brisbane, Dixie Holdings is a family-owned and -operated company that supplies used earthmoving equipment and attachments. 

Specialising in scrapers, dozers, graders, wheel loaders and dump trucks for the agricultural, mining and construction industries, the Dixie Holdings facility has separate divisions covering everything from equipment sales and rental, to equipment refurbishment, fabrication of new attachments, boiler making, powertrain overhauling, logistics and heavy haulage. 

Set up in the mid 1970s as IJ McDonald and Sons before a name switch to McDonald Group and, eventually, Dixie Holdings Pty Ltd, the company’s director Geoffrey McDonald was born into the industry and has always had a passion for exceeding his clients’ needs. 

Working alongside his son, Tom, they are always looking for new challenges to prove the quality of the equipment they supply. 

We took a trip to Dixie’s yard to view the facility and inspect some of the in-house designed and engineered machinery attachments on offer. 

“What sets Dixie apart from the rest is not only supplying the right machine for the job but designing and engineering customised attachments to suit our customers’ on-site requirements, which has been essential to Dixie Holdings’ success,” says Tom. 

With limited time and so much to take in, we selected a couple of machines and attachments that have all been modified and customised with the ‘wow’ factor to show what Dixie Holdings can do. 

 

This D9T has a heavy duty scrub canopy to help protect it from damage  

CAT D9T DOZER 

A Cat D9T dozer was the first that grabbed the eye, fitted with a 30-foot (9.1m) walk-in pin-on stick rake. 

The Dixie-designed stick rake is fabricated entirely out of high-tensile Bisalloy steel. The bottom beam is a fully fabricated box section with internal gussets and laser-cut inserts supporting the rake’s tines. 

All rakes are custom designed with options including tine sucker bars, folding options and either pin-on or clip-on blade attachment options, and are finished with a high quality Two-Pack paint prior delivery. 

Also fitted on this example is a heavy-duty scrub canopy. When clearing scrub, dozer protection is crucial to ensure the machine is protected from damage, so Dixie Holdings offers a wide range of dozer protection, including dozer sweeps that comes in four- and two-post options, either open or sheeted, and a range of light, medium and heavy-duty scrub canopies. 

“Our custom fabricated mounts have been designed to allow for movement in the canopy or sweeps during use and [given an] interchangeable neoprene bushing to prevent any structural cracking and ensure strength and integrity is maintained,” explains Tom. 

Drawbars on dozers can be used in a large number of different applications and can be very useful. 

Dixie Holdings’ custom designed drawbar can be fitted or removed from the dozer’s ripper frame when needed and different pin types can be supplied to suit different applications. 

 

This Cat D7R XL II dozer was set up for stick raking and cutter-baring 

 

CAT D7R XL II DOZER 

Supplied to a customer working in western NSW, this dozer was set up as a small property maintenance machine to do stick raking and cutter-baring. 

This dozer comes in at 27 tonnes and 240 horsepower (179kW) and is fitted with a 22-foot (6.7m) folding stick rake, a scrub canopy with side and rear protection and a 10-foot (3m) dual shank straight cutter bar. 

Stick raking is used for clearing regrowth and pushing trees/scrub into neat piles or windrows to be burnt off in farming paddocks. This stick rake is fitted via a pin-on system, using a left and right chamfered pin to lock in the top of the blade while the bottom of the blade (cutting edge) is locked in via a chocking system. 

Stick rakes take approximately five minutes to hook up to the blade for a one-person operation. This dozer’s blade is 3.6m in length, so the 6.7m stick rake was designed to fold in to under 4.5m for transport, meaning that only the operator is required to move the dozer from site to site, reducing transport costs. 

In addition, when tracking the dozer from paddock to paddock, the stick rake’s wings can be folded in by hand so that the dozer can pass through gates. The 32mm tines have a chamfered sucker bar between them located 100mm off the ground to cut off and reduce the amount of tree suckers left behind while stick raking. 

Another Dixie Holdings design is the cutter bar, used for aerating the soil, which encourages growth of grass seed, improves the flow of oxygen and nutrients through the soil and also brings old tree roots up to the ground’s surface. 

“This cutter bar is fitted with dual hardened leading edges welded to a 450-grade wear plate main beams with specified angle cutting edges and root-lifters to reduce drag and increase efficiency,” says Tom. 

“The canopy is fitted with six of our custom fabricated mounts. A heavy-duty neoprene bar also sits on top of the dozer’s ROPS [rollover protection system] to take the weight of the canopy and increase strength. 

“The framing is fabricated out of a 100 x 100 x 9mm RHS steel with a 6mm high tensile plate roof. The canopy’s fully fabricated exhaust chute is completely sealed to ensure no exhaust gases are sucked into the engine’s intake and [it] is completely protected under the canopy to prevent risk of fire or damage.” 

 

This Cat 962M medium wheel loader has been kitted out with genuine Cat parts for multipurpose farm work 

 

CAT 962M WHEEL LOADER 

Designed as a multi-use farming machine, this 21-tonne, 240hp (179kW) Cat 962M medium wheel loader is perfect for clearing scrub, desilting dams and general property maintenance. 

“The bucket is fitted with a genuine Cat tooth adapter kit to assist with digging,” explains Tom. 

“The machine is fitted with a factory third valve, which we divert to the rear of the machine to run the custom Dixie multi-shank ripper assembly. The multi-shank ripper is designed to have pivoting tines to help in ripping around tree roots/ rocks and take excessive force off the loader’s frame. 

“The ripper is designed to take a Cat D6 tine with genuine Cat D6 boot, and all bushes used in the ripper frame are also a genuine Cat part. The cylinders are fitted with an anti-drop valve so that the loader can be parked or transported with the rippers in the lift position. 

“All [parts are] completed with high tensile steel and are naturally Australian made for Australian conditions.” 

Photography: Shaun Croaker

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