The Easy Petrol Post Driver is perhaps one of the most useful pieces of kit that most forestry professionals still don’t know about. We paid SPA Power Machinery a visit to discover the product’s capabilities and hear the company’s story.
CONVICTION is everything in business; just ask Simon Anthony. When he first came across the Easy Petrol Post Driver, few people believed it would have any place in forestry. Even his children – Alex and Laurie, who later enjoyed their own ‘Road to Damascus’ moment – had their doubts. But more than a decade on and with thousands of units having left SPA Power Machinery’s Sheffield base, Simon doesn’t flinch when asked if he believed the tool was destined for success.
“To be honest, yeah. No one else around me did, but because I had done my time with it, I knew there was no chance it wasn’t right. How could it possibly be wrong?”
Nestled in the heart of an industrial estate on a late February afternoon, Forestry Journal finds it hard to disagree. But for those not in the know, let’s recap the SPA Power Machinery and Easy Petrol Post Driver story.
It begins in the 1980s with SPA Landscaping, founded by Simon and his wife Pamela, which for decades now has been involved in landscaping projects. From grass cutting to amenity planting, tree surgery and everything in between, it has come on leaps and bounds, today employing around 30 members of staff out in the field, plus eight workers in the office.
But things really stepped up a gear when SPA won the contract to do a major planting job on an old landfill in the city in 2010, comprising 20,000 trees. By any measure, that wouldn’t have been easy work with a typical post driver, which had Simon wondering if there might be a better way.
As if by chance he came across a YouTube video – best described as “sketchy” – of an early version of the Easy Petrol Post Driver being used in Australia. One phone call Down Under later and the rest is history.
Simon said: “The job we had was basically a capped-off landfill. They had to plant something like 20,000 trees, each with two stakes on them. These were anything from half standards up to full and extra-heavy standards. The traditional method is just to use the post driver.
“I’ve always known there was a better way of doing this. I had asked a friend of mine to invent something probably 20 years prior to this. He was involved in pneumatics and hydraulics. There’s this thing they call a pecker; it basically just pecks away at stone. Why couldn’t we make a miniature one?
“But we got this job and I wanted to see what was out there. I saw the Easy Petrol Post Driver in its infancy on a video on YouTube. I traced it back to a wholesaler, some random store in Australia.
“I basically just picked the phone up and said: ‘I can sell this.’ They sent me one and I loved it. I said I’d sell it all over Europe for them.”
Eyeing a gap in the market, Simon founded SPA Machinery in 2010 under the SPA Landscaping umbrella, with the primary goal of selling his newly discovered gem.
Even now some readers might still be wondering what exactly the Easy Petrol Post Driver is. Manufactured by Australia’s Christie Engineering, the machine is used to knock in fence posts, tree supports, deer fencing, and more.
Featuring a four-stroke Honda engine, it strikes each post 1,720 times per minute, capable of putting in a three-inch post in 20 seconds or a four-inch post in 80. A series of adaptors can be fitted for different applications, giving users flexibility. Several changes were made to the original design to make it more suited to the UK market, including the resizing of the head. But, Simon says, the unit is “finished now and as good as can be”.
“In Australia, they put in metal picket posts. We had to adapt it and change certain things. It took nearly a year to sell the first one because people were very, very sceptical.”
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To this day, Simon, Laurie and Alex (the siblings are directors with the firm) admit scepticism remains about the product. They’ve lost count of the number of times a punter has come up to them at a show and simply asked: “Does it work?”
Yes, is the short answer, but the shows have proved a fruitful hunting ground for the team. Not least APF – described as a “big exhibition for us” by Laurie – which has been a frequent fixture in SPA’s diary since a first visit in 2012. On that occasion, two petrol drivers were taken and both sold. David Randall Forestry was one of those early adopters and he used his original unit to whack in thousands – if not hundreds of thousands – of items, before later returning to upgrade to a newer model at APF 2018. With a tinge of regret, Laurie says the initial driver was subsequently stripped for parts.
Watch the Easy Petrol Post Driver in action
Going back to those questions about whether the post driver works or not, Simon points to forestry’s long-standing difficulty in shifting attitudes.
“A similar analogy would be the transition from an axe to a chainsaw, or a hammer to a bolster chisel,” he says. “It always fascinates me that people will still knock a stake in manually. Or they’ll find some other dangerous method of doing it. People can get stuck in their ways and be very sceptical about it all.
“We started using it on our own jobs. The key to it becoming successful was the trade shows. You had to go out there and show people what it’s worth.
“At shows, we give it to potential customers to use and you can see from their expressions they are quite amazed by it.”
Laurie adds: “It’s not an off-the-cuff purchase at £1,800, £1,900. People see it one year, then again, and it sticks in the back of their minds. It’s not something you buy on a whim, but it’s considered. But once they have one, they can’t live without it.
“It’s one of those tools that will last a lifetime. People aren’t buying a new one every few years; they’re buying more.”
This last point is best summed up by the sales figures for the unit. When SPA added the Easy Petrol Post Driver to its repertoire, Simon, Laurie and Alex believed they could sell around one per week. More than a decade on, they are shifting 25 times that number, with clients including forestry contractors, planters, and even the vineyards of France.
SPA is the dealer across Europe, and had actually made its first tentative breakthrough into the Spanish and Portuguese markets in the days before FJ’s visit.
“Nobody thought we’d sell nearly as many as we do,” Laurie says. “We thought it would be some sideline and we had a goal of selling 50 a year, one a week. It’s a lot more than that – it’s about 100 units a month, 25 a week. It’s really just taken off.”
But what’s driving demand?
“Labour saving, first of all,” says Laurie. “You have the safety aspect of it. A little story behind that. The driver has Network Rail approval because they had a few injuries and bumped heads using a post driver. Once the stake has gone quite low down, they raise it up too high, then there’s a gap at the top of the post. The post driver comes towards you and can cause a really nasty injury. As a result, Network Rail picked our product for solo working, as it’s lightweight and portable.
“Access can also be a problem that we can come across. If you have nice long stretches of road, then use a big machine. That’s what it’s there for. But when you have steep ground, have to go under trees, or just remote access and a big rig can’t get in there, you have two options. By hand or with a machine like ours; that’s where we come in.”
Currently, all models are powered by petrol. Will that change anytime soon?
“Not at the moment,” says Laurie. “The technology isn’t there yet and there are of course the questions over where all these batteries are going, how we are making them. There’s a way to go with it. If Honda does something, we’d be more likely to consider it.”
In any case, demand has been so high that SPA was able to open its own Power Machinery base in 2018, which is right next door to the Landscaping HQ. In time, it has added further brands to its lineup, including much of the Makita range, while Westermann – which offers a moss brush and weed ripper – is a new addition.
Key to that success is undoubtedly SPA’s own background. How do they know the Easy Petrol Post Driver is any good? Well, they’ve used it themselves for more than a decade, thumping in thousands of posts and tree supports. SPA Landscaping works with housing associations, estates, and airports, also doing planting work for the Forestry Commission and local councils.
Recent jobs have included a full biodiversity plan for a national portfolio of commercial business centres, made up of woodland planting, wildflower creation and specimen tree planting. Alex is cautious to go into too much detail (in case the competition is reading), but says: “Our planting is a big mixture of species, but all native stuff. That’s a big part of our work. We hang a lot on the fact we’re extremely green in what we’re doing.
“We always making improvements, ripping out some horrible cotoneaster and putting in something that’s going to be much more interesting, and supporting biodiversity. People are realising how important it is to have green space and how much of an asset it can be.”
As for the future of SPA, it is certainly in good hands with Laurie and Alex. Having joined in 2006 after leaving school, Alex oversees much of the field work and long-term projects. Pamela has taken something of a step back from running the accounts but remains involved, while Simon shows no signs of slowing down just yet.
It’s Laurie’s route into the picture, however, which is arguably the most interesting.
She first went off to university, earning a master’s in physics before joining the family business at around the same time the Easy Petrol Post Driver came to town. The irony is that despite the fact she is often the smartest person in the room, she still finds herself having to deal with stereotypes; what was that about forestry’s difficulty in shifting attitudes?
“You’ll get these people asking for someone who knows what they are talking about,” Simon says. “It’s quite amusing!”
Laurie adds: “There is still a big male/female divide, especially when you go these exhibitions. It’s about knowing how to deal with it. You need to move past it and have to know what you’re talking about.
“Not so long ago I remember being at a show and one of the big tractor brands had got these scantily-clad models to hand out pamphlets but they didn’t know anything about what they were there for. It doesn’t do people like me any favours.
“But at no point was it bad in the industry. There were just fewer women. It is a lot better now.”
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