Beyond merely supplying the earthmoving equipment pastoralists and graziers need, Dixie Holdings refines the investments with its custom designs, to ensure they can go the extra mile
With a team of specialist engineers, draughtsmen and fabricators, plus new transport solutions, Dixie Holdings can help farmers get more out of their equipment than they thought possible.
One example of this was in April, Dixie delivered a customised Cat D8T dozer to a cattle station at Goondiwindi, near the Queensland-New South Wales border.
“It was fitted up with basically one of everything that we supply,” Dixie Holdings manager Tom McDonald says.
“It was a brand-new machine as well and it was one of the next generation D8Ts they just introduced.”
In most cases, customers will source their dozer – or other desired machine – directly from Dixie Holdings, however in this instance the D8T was bought brand-new from the OEM dealership before being picked up by Dixie and taken to its facility at Woongoolba in Brisbane’s southern suburbs for the magic to happen.
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A range of customisations converted this Cat D8T dozer into a multi-use machine
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There began the task of fitting it out with removable hungry boards on the pre-existing
SU blade, a 26-foot (8m) pin-on Dixie stick rake, 13-foot (4m) V-series SS cutter bar, Dixie removable bolt-on drawbar and full scrub canopy.
“Everything was done in house,” McDonald says.
“We modified the dozer in house using our own design, our own engineers and our own fabricators.
“We did all the paint work in house with our own blasters and painters and then delivered the machine using our own transporter and oversized pilots.”
The result was a versatile, all-encompassing dozer that will allow the one machine to carry out a wide scope of works on a remote property.
“Their dozer is probably what you would look at as the perfect station dozer, where it’s very versatile and basically doing everything they would ever need to do,” McDonald says.
“They do crop farming. They also do cattle farming and they’ve got a feedlot, so they’re using the machine in different applications, and they wanted the dozer to be versatile and used for every application, so they don’t have to use other machines.
“It was a fairly big investment for them and, given they were spending so much money, they wanted a multi-use dozer, basically a machine that could be used for all aspects of works that they need to carry out on their property.”
The family-owned Dixie Holdings is a company with almost 50 years of history and a wealth of experience to offer.
In addition to dozers, Dixie also specialises in graders, scrapers, wheel loaders and dump trucks for the agricultural, construction and mining industries.
Attachment fabrication is far from the only area covered by Dixie, which has separate divisions covering equipment sales, rental and refurbishment plus boiler making, powertrain overhauling, logistics and heavy haulage.
Where Dixie Holdings particularly excels is in the knowledge and experience of its team, which flows through in the solutions it can offer its customers.
Examples of this were evident in the recent D8T dozer job.
“The hungry boards are an idea that we worked with the customer on to basically increase their pushing capacity in the blade,” McDonald says.
“Usually, with D8s, when you want to push more, you’ve got to change the blade from an SU blade to a U blade.
“That in turn changes the dimensions of the tractor for transport, so we designed hungry boards that bolt on to the side plates of the blade, which acts like a U Blade but keeps the width of the blade the same as what it usually would be.
“It increases the carrying capacity of the blade by about 25 to 35 per cent.”
Also to increase simplicity, a simple pin-on system was designed for the stick rake and is an easy, five minute setup job for a lone operator, making this attachment easy to use.
The cutter bars are another example of Dixie’s custom design, with a second shank added on.
Describing the cutter bars as a “big knife which goes underground about 300mm”, McDonald says these make the removal of tree roots easier.
“They’ve got root lifters on the bottom beams, so, as the knife goes underground, these bars that stick up bring all the tree roots and everything to the surface,” he says.
“It stops regrowth so you don’t get the trees growing back within a few months, you only get grass growing back. It aerates the ground and removes the tree roots at the same time.
“Our design pushes the tree roots down and cuts them at the same time, stopping the tree roots wrapping around the tine and getting clogged up, which in turn increases drag and increases fuel usage.
“That way it stays clean and streamlined so that you can get along faster with less drag and use less fuel.”