Hoppt construction equipment has only been in the Australian market for the last couple of years but this Singapore-based company has been producing construction equipment since 1975.
The HTL350 Terrain Loader is one of their newest pieces of equipment.
The HTL350 is a petrol-powered, four wheeled drive tipping barrow. Providing the power is a quality Honda GXV160 engine. These engines are proven, reliable workhorses suited to this type of application and are extremely easy to start.
Drive is via a belt from the engine to a front gearbox; this drives the front wheels for two-wheel drive mode. Turning and steering the machine in two-wheel drive is easy with little effort required.
The gearbox has four forward gears and one reverse, with the fourth gear pushing the machine along at a very good pace – much faster than a person would wheel a fully laden barrow, making it an economical machine. The lower gears creep the loader up hills fully laden in places where a barrow could barely be pushed empty, saving enormous amounts of strain on the operator.
I managed, with the machine in four-wheel drive, to cart mulch up a dry creek bed over large river pebbles with minimal effort, something that could not be achieved with a wheelbarrow. Carting the same load across a turf area, the machine left some tyre imprints so I would assume care should be taken when moving heavier loads on grass areas. The HTL350 can safely climb slopes up to 30 degrees.
Four-wheel drive is engaged simply with the lifting of two levers, one on each side of the machine. This pushes the two small pneumatic tyres located above/between the two wheels into contact with the front drive wheels and back wheels to make all four wheels drive together.
The HTL350 has an impressive carrying capacity of 345kg and even with this heavy load it is easy to tip its contents with the manual tipping mechanism. If required, the bucket can be quickly changed to a flat tray for transporting bulky items around the jobsite. Routine maintenance would be a simple task with all the daily checkpoints easily accessible. A handy lift point enables fast loading or the ability to crane lift into tricky, inaccessible sites.
All in all, I found Hoppt’s new HTL350 Terrain Loader to be an impressive piece of machinery. It is stable on uneven terrain and, even fully loaded, powers up inclines, greatly reducing operator strain and fatigue. The HTL350 enables large amounts of material to be moved easily and effortlessly, therefore increasing productivity enormously.