David Macallum and his three sons, along with a couple of other crew members, are working smoothly and efficiently when our Iron Test team arrives at Macallum Harvesting’s operation in the Deep South near Fiordland. 

It’s good to see family working well together, says Iron Test writer Tim Benseman. He continues: “There are a lot of big, shiny and notably straight machines on site but we’re here today to do an Iron Test on the Eltec FHL317L, Eltec’s biggest tilter running a fixed head Quadco QB4400. After over two years doing Iron Tests I finally get to sit in an Eltec

“First impressions are that this is one powerfully built machine. And power is the number one reason why David  bought the 317L.

The bare pin lifting capacity is over 8 tonnes so that’s a tremendously large amount of fuel tanks it can lift. The 8.9 litre Cummins engine is supplying 320HP to the four Linde hydraulic pumps.

“ ‘It’s actually crazy how fast and powerful this machine is. The power levels go from 1 up to 5. I run it on 1 and its awesome. I accidentally bumped it up to 3 one day when we were resetting things after a service and holy f*ck was it quick. I wondered what the hell I’d struck, so I put it back to 1 again. Apparently over in Canada where there’s a lot of these, there are some guys that get it up around the 3 but I think that’s because they have the disc saws running and they’re bowling over bunches of pulp stems at a time.’ ” 

To read more, get your copy of the July 2024 edition of NZ Logger magazine, on sale from 1 July. Check the link on this page to subscribe to either a printed or digital copy (or both).