My

My name is Antonio Teijon and I am a Site Manager for Percasa. The company was established 40 years ago and is named after founder Jose Antonio Perez Canedo. It specialises in public construction projects, such as roads, docks and industrial sites, and is based in Ponferrada, Spain.

Percasa is one of the contractors working on the construction of a new exterior port at La Coruña. When it is completed in 2011, it will be one of the biggest ports in Europe.

I operate a Hitachi EX1200-6 excavator to extract materials from a nearby quarry, which are then used in the construction of the port.

Hitachi

Percasa also has a Hitachi EX1200-5 excavator and nine EH1100 dump trucks currently working at this site. In total, the company has three EX1200 models, six ZX870s, one ZX670, five ZX470s, two ZX350s and 35 EH1100 dump trucks.

Percasa was invited to test Hitachi excavators five years ago. At that time, Hitachi was not renowned in Spain for construction machinery, but Percasa has a good relationship with the official Hitachi dealer, Serex. Now every machine in the company’s fleet is a Hitachi.

Experience

The most important benefit of the Hitachi EX1200-6 to our company is high productivity. The 6.5m3 bucket makes an average of five passes per truck load when loading material into a Hitachi EH1100 dump truck. It can load 600m3 of sand or 300m3 of stones per hour.

Compared to other brands, Hitachi excavators are more reliable and have less downtime. The EX1200-6 currently has completed 4,014 working hours.

I like the air conditioning in the pressurised cab. It’s very important to have a clean cab, free from dust, on a site like this.