Teletrac Navman Fleet Focus

In a paddock behind the Borlase Transport yard at Wakefield is the small machine that started it all for Duncan Borlase.

The 41 trucks in the Borlase Transport fleet now working in the Nelson region forests are the result of a casual conversation which drew 17-year-old Duncan into forestry work in early 1977. Pretty good timing as it turns out with work in the Nelson forests beginning to ramp up during the 1980s.

“We got into forestry a little bit by accident,” says Duncan.

“I came from a farming background and my brother still has the farm up at Lake Rotoiti.

“We had a little CAT 922B wheel loader with a bucket on it. One of the forest manage... ... 

Lots of people who love trucks reckon they were “born in a truck.” 

In 25 years of writing about trucks and truckies, I’ve never once struck someone who really did arrive here on a truck seat!

But in Dave Smith’s case, the actual, solid-gold truth – not a mere figure of speech – is that he’s been spending quality time in trucks since he was a newborn baby.

The third-generation owner of the modest Smiths Transport in Port Albert (a tiny settlement about eight kilometres west of Wellsford) spent his first full day in a truck when he was just three weeks old!

And by the time he was a toddler, Dave (along with baby sister Helena) routinely we... ... 

It’s a quarry, Jim, but not as we generally know it. OK, the stuff that comes out of a typical quarry might sometimes start out as solid rock, but by the time it has been processed the individual bits won’t be all that big.

Not so the output of the Wainihinihini quarry (20km inland from Kumara on SH73) operated by Greymouth-based MBD Contracting.

These are seriously big goolies, lumps of granite that weigh an average of five tonnes each – but for some specific applications like seaport protection walls they can go as high as 15-tonnes a stone! In that case they are carted on semi tipulators, and there have been times when a single rock has made up the whole... ...