What gives you 25 years of hard work with consistently strong performance? Don will tell you the answer is his Quik Spray unit
.jpg) |
|
Don Roderick with his original Quik Spray unit
|
The team at Quik Spray’s offices in Warana, on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast, were delighted to meet Don Roderick when he popped into their offices late last year.
It had been a long time – he was dropping in to repair the remote control for his Quik Spray unit – for the first time in over years!
After owning his Quik Spray system since 1995 with no troubles at all, he was happy to tell the team how successful and consistent his spray system had been.
“It’s still working, and this is the first time it’s been repaired,” he says.
“It’s never had anything go wrong with it. It still has the original motor which has never been touched. It even still has its original hose!”
Running a family property of 1000 acres, a quarry and a successful earth-moving business on Maleny-Kenilworth Road, QLD has been no easy feat for Roderick.
With undulating, steep terrain and hills that seem to get steeper every year, Roderick says the Quik Spray system has been ideal for his property.
“There are a lot of weeds between here and there,” he says, pointing out the boundary line, bordered by the Conondale Ranges.
“I remember Dad saying to me, ‘It’ll all take the farm off you, the lantana, wild raspberries, even the trees will take it all off you.’ If I stopped spraying for five years, the farm would be completely gone”.
After hearing about a neighbour from Belthorpe purchasing one of the first Quik Sprays in the area, Roderick says he acted straight away.
“We saw how good his one was, and we bought one straight away. This was the biggest one we could get at the time, so we took the 9hp motor”.
“It was delivered by one of the original owners, Grant Mitchell, who is still the owner and Chairman, to this day. He pushed it straight off his Ute onto ours. It’s still working, and this is the first time it’s been repaired.”
With the strong pressure and remote-controlled retractable hose reels, the Quik Spray has saved him time and drastically reduced his fatigue levels while spraying, eliminating the need to manually rewind the hose.
“I did one season without the automatic rewind and that was a nightmare!” Roderick says. “The hose is a fair bit shorter now, less than 100 metres. Occasionally it has gone across the exhaust pipe and burnt off.”
Roderick has a spray-dedicated vehicle has been used primarily to scale the steep, rough terrain around the vast property.
“Ever since we bought the unit brand new, it was bolted on to this 1976 International and it’s never been off,” he says.
The seats and interior were stripped out and plastic chairs used so Don could stand up in it to spray, without chemical soaking into the seats. It regularly gets hosed down after it has been used.
“Everything that’s underneath it that could get torn off, is long gone and there’s no exhaust pipe, nothing! All it’s got is the engine and a good set of brakes. That’s all you need!” he says.
Not only has the Quik Spray system proven its worth in the battle against weeds, but it’s also come in handy for controlled burns during fire season.
Roderick was so thrilled with the high-pressure performance of the spray unit that he even uses it to degrease his work trucks, simply by filling the tank with water and increasing the pressure.
“Everything still works, and it’s certainly proved its worth over the years,” Don says with a chuckle.
.jpg) |