Duffin Builders Ltd have literally built themselves an enviable reputation throughout Leicestershire and Lincolnshire for the impressive quality and attention to detail they put into all their projects.
The family-owned company is based around the skills and experience of Michael Duffin, Susan Duffin and their two sons Patrick and Jamie. Offering a wide range of services throughout the construction industry, the company undertakes both commercial and residential contracts both for external clients and themselves.
As the company has grown, they have become more self-sufficient in project delivery to ensure their high standards are delivered each and every time. “We have always kept a keen eye on project costs, tweaking what we do to improve our efficiency on site without compromising on quality.” Patrick Duffin commented. “Many of our projects were refurbishments or conversions and this threw up a lot of waste material such as brick and concrete. Not only was the cost of removing this material from site increasing, but the environmental impact of bringing in fresh material wasn’t sitting well with us.”
After looking for suitable solutions to this issue, Patrick believed a crusher bucket mounted to their Hitachi ZX135 may be the solution they were looking for. “We opted for a used MB BF60 from Worsley Plant, just to give us a cost effective toe in the water.” He explains. “To say we were impressed with what the bucket could do is an understatement! Where we were spending time loading brick and concrete rubble into skips or tippers for someone else to recycle, we could now do the job for a fraction of the cost and reuse the material as suitable fill on the same job cutting costs and our environmental impact. Our initial thoughts of taking the crusher bucket as a trial were soon dispelled as we actually had it for five years! In that time, we never laid a spanner on it. It’s built like a tank and just kept running and running and has produced decent quality material from rubble we would have paid to get rid of.”
All good things must come to an end and earlier in 2025 Patrick and the team decided it was time to swap their old Hitachi, replacing it with a new ZX135-7B. “This was the first new machine the company had purchased as we usually buy second hand.” He explained. “We had several large projects to undertake and decided that a new machine would be beneficial in terms of warranty and reliability. We also decided to replace the original MB BF60 with a new model as the older one had paid us back time and time again over the past five years.”
A call to Worsley Plant’s Business Development Director Andrew Purse saw Patrick quickly given the cost and delivery times for a new BF60. “We’ve spoken with Andrew on a regular basis and it’s the efficiency we like about dealing with Worsley. There’s no pushing from them to get the deal, you get the price, and they’ll leave you think about it. There’s nothing worse than being pestered to make a decision.” Patrick commented. “We are a busy company and having any supplier constantly on your back to make a decision doesn’t sit right with us. Thankfully, Andrew and the Worsley team are not like that.”
Patrick knew the purchase of the new BF60.1 was the right decision and subsequently called Andrew to confirm the order. With the unit delivered to Worsley Plant’s impressive workshop, their engineering team manufactured the correct hitch and produced the hoses in-house to package the bucket up for delivery to Patrick. On its arrival, it was a quick job to mount the MB to the machine with Andrew on hand to make sure everything went smoothly.
Worsley Plant supplies a wide range of premium demolition and recycling attachments from their head office in Middlewich, Cheshire including the Italian manufactured MB range of crushing and screening buckets. MB manufacture a range of buckets designed for skid steers, wheeled loaders, backhoe loaders and excavators and are available for machines ranging from 2.8 to 70 tonnes in weight.
The BF60.1 has an operating weight of just 1.6 tonnes and a capacity of 0.55m3. This is combined with a wide opening to the bucket of 610mm and an opening height of 500mm allowing large pieces of material to be processed with ease. The simple and robust design of the jaw mirrors that of larger mobile crushers with a fixed bottom plate and an oscillating top plate moved by an eccentric shaft. Easy maintenance and adjustment of the top plate allows a variety of material sizes to be produced with the BF60.1 capable of producing material from 130mm and down to 15mm with any size available in between. The simplicity of the crusher bucket ensures material rarely gets blocked in the jaw and on the occasions it does, it can simply be tipped back out. “In the five years we had the first bucket, we never had an issue with it, the jaw plates were still in good condition when we handed it back to Worsley despite the volume of work we put it through.’ Patrick commented. “Most of our material is clean brick or concrete, but when we have put through material with reinforcing bars in, it has still managed it with ease leaving clean rebar which we can recycle.”
One of the first jobs for the bucket was processing a large pile of material at the company’s yard which had been left over from recent renovation works. With Michael in the seat of the Hitachi, and a large dump trailer waiting, the pile was processed very quickly and efficiently filling the trailer ready for reuse. “It’s a great addition to the company.” Michael commented. “It has allowed us to become more cost effective and efficient on certain projects. Whilst it won’t replace a mobile crusher for large, high volume jobs, processing small volumes of material efficiently, when we want to, has made a huge difference to our business.”
Written by Paul Argent
