Nick digs and blogs

Already as an eight year-old Nick Drew followed his father to work and “helped” in his excavator. At the age of 51 he now has all the experience anyone could wish for, and runs Nick Drew Operator Service in Devon in South-West England.

“Primarily I work as a machinist for other contractors, but I also do an amount of work with my own Hitachi Zaxis 33U”.

Over the years Nick has been active in various types of social forums, amongst others Classic Machinery Network. This was noted in autumn 2008 by the webmaster of Contract Journal’s website. 

“I was really shocked when he called and asked if I’d like to write a blog for them. At the same time I was of course happy to have been paid attention to”.

His “Digger Blog” can now be read on Construction Index’ website, Britain’s leading source for news in the contracting industry. Nick publishes his blog on average 5–6 times each week, and he has many readers who think the blog is both interesting and informative. 

“My readers seem to appreciate my articles about Caterpillar, mainly old machines, and tools”, he says.

Hooked straight away

His readers also know that he’s an enthusiastic advocate of engcon’s tiltrotators. He test-ran a tiltrotator as far back as 2001, and was hooked straight away.

“The tiltrotator is a fantastic tool to work with, that provides endless possibilities to get the job done quickly and efficiently”.

He recently did a job for MJL Contractor in a Doosan DX140LC with an engcon EC15B. One of several blogs published about the tiltrotator was titled “Digger continues to find new ways of working with an engcon tiltrotator”.

“It’s usually easiest to do as you’ve always done, and it can be difficult to adapt to new ideas. However I try hard, through the blog for example, to convince contractors and machinists that the tiltrotator is the way forwards for the industry”.

Nick Drew visited Sweden for the first time this spring and blogged from the Maskinexpo trade fair. He also got the opportunity to visit engcon in Strömsund and see for himself both the manufacture and demonstrations of the latest 2-series.

“I’d love to come back”, he said. One idea may be to work for a while in Sweden and see with his own eyes how Swedish machine operators work with tiltrotators.

Check out the Digger Blog here