McClain Murphy of Gwinnett Stripers review of ABI Force z23s

Transcript

Hello, I’m McClain Murphy, the sports staff manager for Gwinnett Stripers. I’m here today to talk about the ABI Force infield grader. We recently purchased the ABI infield machine about a month ago. We have roughly about 20 hours on our unit. Our unit came with the laser ready system, which has been phenomenal for what we do here, being a multi-use facility on a single baseball field. We use our Force daily, whether it’s track maintenance, infield maintenance, we do small touch upgrading work with ours in between, soccer conversions and we also have some football games out here later in the fall. So that will really help out with our conversions from football to baseball.

We recently received a new hitch from ABI. They’re stepping away from the H-bar style hitch to a new single pivot pitch, basically the equivalent of the gooseneck trailer. It’s a single pin. It allows more fluid motion on the rear end attachments with this. They’ve also added rear nails, which we’ve implemented along with our underneath the machine, our mid-mount nails. We use our mid-mount nails mainly for track and aggressive infield nail dragging. We also use the pro finisher. We’ve had extremely good luck with the pro finisher. It allows for the conditioner and the callsigns to flow evenly through that grate, allow for a very even infield surface.

One thing that I found with ABI since we’ve been involved with these guys from the budget process to purchase and they’re very user friendly, very user focused. These guys are constantly developing and and demoing new attachments and putting new ideas in the owner of that unit to make groundskeeping much more streamlined.

For example, we got our hands on a brand new demo this past week of a mid-mount roller. This roller will allow us to basically roll post-game after using the light nail sets and just going to knock down those cleat marks and those little dirt clods without having to bring out a big double drum roller. It cuts down on the amount of people that we have to have post-game.

We asked the question, what would we like to see add into the ABI infield machine in the future? I think think we just ask guys to keep being ingenuitive. Keep putting what groundskeepers are telling them first. Yeah, these guys use it every day. We’re using it every day. We’re finding out things that, you know, would make life easier, such as the mid-mount roller. It eliminates the need to bring multiple pieces of equipment to a job site or own those pieces of equipment. So realistically, I think as far as any attachments coming forward, it would just be, you know, keep taking the suggestions from the guys that are using it.

Overall, I think the ABI infield machine is extremely effective for Parks and Recreation as well as professional sports. If you’re sitting down to your budget time and you’ve got a list of five pieces of equipment, you know, a roller, an aerator, a spreader, a new infield machine, I mean, you’re getting up into seventy eight thousand dollars worth of capital expenditures and you can sit down and look at this ABI Force and you can add those attachments to it and eliminate that much more room in your shop and make a singular piece of equipment, multi-Functional. You know, they offer the mid-mount aerators, the spreaders, all the laser grading attachments. I mean, you can take four or five pieces of equipment and put it on that one standalone unit.