By Coughey And Co Ltd t/as Tre-eta's

03/08/2012 Unleashed the forest destroyer Daniel Coughey calls his machine THE DESTROYER.
And after only a few minutes of action in a harvested forest just behind Lake Rotoiti, I cannot think of a better name and a more apt description for this mulching, grinding, smashing, pulverising piece of Armageddon.

It gobbles up anything in its path and sprays out the tiny remnants in a torrent of debris and devastation like no other mulching or grinding machine I’ve ever seen.

I’ve watched forestry mulchers and stump grinders at work in the past, but they are almost tame in comparison to the brutal destruction wrought by the Tre-Eta, a one-off machine developed over the past six-and-a-half years by Daniel, a Rotorua-based land clearance contractor.

Don’t believe me? Well, the numbers given to me by Daniel speak for themselves.
• 535hp (courtesy of a Cummins QSX15) of raw power
• PTO-driven mulching/grinding cylinder head armed with 78 x 50mm cm steel teeth
• Clears a hectare of gorse in two hours (on slopes up to 30-degrees)
• Clears forestry debris (stumps, slash, branches, trunks etc) at a rate of one hectare in eight-to-ten hours – that’s a lineal hectare, by the way, for converting to pasture.

Anyone who has been involved in land clearance will understand just how impressive those last two numbers are, especially when they see how clear it leaves the land and it’s all done with one machine and one person. Traditional land clearance methods would take three or four times longer and can involve two or more people and different machines (probably an excavator with rake and loader attachments, mulcher and stump grinder).