Good day all, I am looking for information on a specific type of forestry land prep tool that was developed in the '90s in Australia and New Zealand, I believe it was called a "Spot Mounder", with one of the manufacturers being one "Wilco Products". The tool was fixed to an excavator in place of a bucket and was used with a ripping tine to create planting mounds for tree seedlings. I am lead to believe it is still in use, but information is very scarce. In my perusing of the internet, I have not been able to find technical specifications for one of these, nor really any current manufacturers of said attachment. Does anyone have information about one of these, or similar? Being in forestry in Africa, we're looking at soil prep methods that are less labour intensive and that can handle a wide variety of soil types, with the key focus being on breaking down impediments to root growth, and minimum tillage, and this tool seems to have had great success in the past, so we would like to resurrect the concept for use over here. I have attached two images of the tool by way of explanation.
I would suggest you contact someone like Devine Engineering, Taupo, NZ https://www.devine2006.co.nz/ they make grapples for excavators and and stick rakes (though they mainly do excavator conversions for forestry use now). They may know where there are used spot cultivators in an taupo equipment yard or could check out the patent situation for making new ones. Probably require some lateral thinking for transport from NZ. Active VMA, rotorua, nz did the excavator conversions for some of the land preparation companies. (when formerly named as Active engineering solutions)likely to know who to contact for the spot cultivator story. https://www.active4solutions.co.nz/ There are a few other companies in NZ that make excavator forestry attachments, they only put their contact details online and not their product catalogues. In some of the forests where the spot cultivator was used in NZ, the forest was converted to farmland and Taupo hands for excavators were built to clear the tree material https://www.feederleader.co.nz/the-taupo-hand The Davey people in Toowoomba, Queensland, Aus have cultivators. http://www.savannahequipment.com.au/
Thanks for the response, Plebeian. I will investigate these further.