MULCHMAN owner Mark Ross called in a five-year association with NZH to smooth out a few wrinkles in his new in-house developed bark blowing system. Mulchman’s five trucks have been spreading bark and bark chips in industrial and domestic landscaping and erosion control applications since 2002.

Mark bought a Mitsubishi Shogun 430hp 8-wheeler with an 18-speed Roadranger transmission system. When fully loaded it can carry up to 12 tonnes of bark. The blowing system can place up to 60m3 bark per hour. “We initially used standard PTOs that worked off the auto transmission and two standard hydraulic pumps to power the product pump. The 200 horsepower out of the PTOs meant our maintenance costs on the PTOs and drive shaft became high. NZH suggested we use a split shaft PTO for the job, which we’ll test for six months before deciding if we’ll fit our other trucks with it, too,” 

“Our loading calculations showed that even our biggest transmission driven PTO would not be equal to this job…but that our split shaft model would be,” NZH customer services manager Stan Kelly says. Kelly explains that the heavy-duty type application split shaft PTO is not dependent on the vehicle’s transmission, but on the drive shaft’s turning action. Mounted on the chassis, it splits the drive shaft in the middle. When the truck is driving, the PTO is set to through-drive and does not interrupt normal operation. However, when the truck is stopped, the driver can disengage the through drive via an air-operated switch, and divert engine energy to the hydraulic pumps driven by the split shaft PTO, which in turn drives the product pump.

The PTO has four auxiliary openings for four pumps that can be mounted directly onto or remote from the PTO. The pumps can be independently engaged via their own engagement switches, to work together or separately. The split shaft PTO comes in two versions- upright apertures or side mounted apertures, depending on chassis space. The PTO supplied for Mark’s Mitsi is the upright version, with two hydraulic pumps mounted directly onto two of the apertures.