The high country near Mount Buller is a demanding environment for arborist equipment, but for Al Seaton’s High Country Tree Service, Rayco has proven the perfect partner.
Thirty-five-year-old Al Seaton remembers perfectly well how he made the unlikely transition from mechanic to arborist. “My brother-in-law was working for High Country Trees,” says Al, “they were doing a climbing demonstration and my brother-inlaw said ‘come and watch this’. I had a look and I said ‘I want to do that.’ And two weeks later I started.”
Seaton freely admits that it was hard to go past what appeared to be the merging of an adrenaline sport mixed with a job. “The adrenaline, the physicality, the outdoors nature of it, and climbing trees which I used to love doing when I was a kid… I could see that I could get paid to do something that would be fun. From big removals to pruning olive trees in someone’s backyard – it was just a huge variety and it was a way of getting out and seeing the countryside and being paid for it.”
Al started working in the business in 2003 and bought it in 2010. He could see potential for the business to grow, and since it has roughly doubled in size since then, it seems his predictions were on the money.
Twelve years later, High Country Tree Service employs 17 staff in the field and five in the office, and spends most of its time maintaining vegetation around the assets of power company SP Ausnet.
In a district of only 8500 people – Mansfield, in northeast Victoria – High Country Tree Services is quite a large business, and its contract to maintain 9500 spans in a high bushfire risk area is important stuff, made all the more difficult by the combination of steep terrain, wet terrain, creeks and snake-infested country.
The business had Rayco equipment when Al started, and he has significantly grown the equipment list since then. “Because we’re in such harsh terrain,” says Al, “most of our chipper vehicles are Land Cruiser four-wheel-drives and we have four, 6-inch RC6Ds, as well as three 814s (which are the 8-inch chipper). We’ve got an 1824 which we tow behind a large truck, one of the 100hp tow-alongs and a 35hp, self-propelled stump grinder. We’ve also got one of their 4-inch chips which we hire out, and a 20-inch on-site chipper which does a lot of the recycling at the sawmill, just chipping waste product.”
“I use the Rayco guys, or Global Machinery Sales as they’re called now,” says Al, “because they are really easy to deal with, offer a competitive price, a reliable machine, and great after sales service. Nothing’s ever an issue and whatever I have needed, they have always accommodated.
“Being so distant from Melbourne, it’s often hard for us to get spare parts off the shelf for a machine that we are going to need operational all the time. But Global Machinery Sales will do the best they can.
“For instance, in April our large chipper was playing up and we didn’t know why and because I rely on having the big machine operational all the time I rang them up and said ‘I need a new one, and I need it tonight’, and they delivered a brand-new machine that night within six hours of notice.
“They knew I was desperate and they delivered for me. They’ll bend over backwards even for the smallest thing. The computers that the 6 inches run they are only $700 each, but if I need one, they will express post it and we can have it that afternoon or the next morning.
“They always offer a great service because they know how reliant I am on having equipment running full time.”
Al considers the Rayco products to be a very reliable product, but to him an even bigger issue is the low weight, and he will reject rival equipment that’s 500 or even 200kg more than his Rayco item, simply because that extra weight might make the difference when his crew needs to lug the equipment up a steep hill or through a very wet paddock.
“Sometimes somebody trying to sell me a rival brand will respond by saying ‘a lighter gauge machine isn’t going to last as long’, but to us, the longevity isn’t as important as not being able to get the job completed at all because you couldn’t get the chipper to the job site.
“We trade in very regularly, because the machines are being worked very hard. We look after the machine the best we can, but it’s a hard industry for equipment. Any machine in the arboriculture industry goes through a lot of hell. But if we can look after it, we can trade it in and keep good quality stuff and then the reliability is perfect.”
For the future, Al is considering a Rayco horizontal grinder as his next acquisition. “With a normal chipper you pick the branches up and feed them through and it comes out as a nice woodchip, but it has to be a clean branch or a clean trunk or whatever to go through. The horizontal grinder allows you to feed in green waste – there can be dirt in it, rocks in it, it doesn’t really matter as long as there is no major steel content – it will chew up everything and turn it into a finer mulch, so it’s a better way of recycling waste product.”
Asked if he intended to continue his business’s relationship with Global Machinery Sales, Al was quick to reply. “Their service is great, their price is competitive, their machines are reliable and really what else would you look for? “That’s why I don’t shop around. Whenever I need a new machine now, in the various different sizes, I just ring up Global Machinery Sales and say “this is what I want, what can you do?” I hassle them on the price, they drop a little bit, I come up a little bit, and we meet in the middle and it’s usually delivered as soon as they can.”
This article originally appeared in The Australian Arbor Age Magazine. Written by John Pinnell.
