Tommi Makinen is building a smoke sauna near Tahko, and the logistics of getting an 18-tonne excavator onto a rocky island turned out to be a project of its own
Before the rally cars, Tommi Makinen drove a forestry machine hauling timber. That job paid for his first competition car, and what followed was four consecutive World Rally Championship titles between 1996 and 1999. Three decades later he is back at the controls of a machine, and the opponent has changed: not other drivers, but Finnish bedrock.
Makinen is building a traditional smoke sauna on a small rocky island near Tahko, in eastern Finland. The site needs levelling and it needs trenches for electrical cable and water pipe, which on Finnish granite means breaking rather than digging. For that he is running a Normet Xrock XB18 hydraulic breaker on a Volvo EC180 excavator.
The logistics came first
The story that any contractor will recognise is not the rock. It is getting there.
An island site has no access road, and an 18-tonne excavator plus attachments is not something a small boat handles. Makinen had a 60-tonne pontoon barge built to move the machine and its tools across the water.
That is the part of a job that never appears in a specification sheet and frequently decides whether the job happens at all. Anyone who has priced work on an island, a riverbank or a site behind a weight-restricted bridge knows the shape of it: the machine you need and the machine you can physically deliver are two different questions, and the second one usually wins.
The machine and the tool
The Volvo EC180 class sits at roughly 18 tonnes. The current EC180E is quoted at 17,330 to 19,830 kg operating weight, with 110 kW gross power, buckets from 0.3 to 0.96 cubic metres, a maximum digging depth of 6,070 mm and reach of 8,980 mm. It is a mid-size machine, big enough to carry a serious breaker and small enough to barge.
The images supplied show the breaker mounted through an engcon tiltrotator, a detail the release does not mention but which matters for this kind of work: on uneven rock, being able to angle the tool rather than reposition the machine saves a great deal of tracking back and forth on ground you would rather not disturb twice.
Normet Xrock, formerly Rambooms, has more than 30 years of engineering behind its rock-breaking products, and the range is built for construction, quarrying and mining. Normet’s current breaker line-up is published in three bands: an S-Range of 335 to 450 kg for 4 to 10 tonne carriers, an M-Range of 740 to 1,680 kg for 8 to 26 tonne carriers, and an L-Range of 2,020 to 7,250 kg for machines from 23 to 120 tonnes. An 18-tonne carrier sits in the middle of the M-Range band.
First time on a breaker
“It’s been a good start, even though this is my first time using a hydraulic breaker on an excavator,” Makinen said. “Perhaps all the operating positions and techniques aren’t yet completely optimal at this stage, but you learn more with every strike.”
Coming from a driver who spent a career finding the last tenth of a second, that is a familiar sentence in an unfamiliar setting. Breaker technique is genuinely a skill: angle of attack, when to reposition rather than keep hammering, recognising blank firing before it costs you a tool bushing. Operators build it over seasons.
Worth reading with the label on
Normet’s own media alert is unusually candid about what this is. The company states plainly that the article was produced for Xrock’s marketing communications purposes and is intended to highlight the XB18 breaker and its delivery to Makinen, while arguing that the story stands up on its own merits.
That honesty is worth respecting and worth repeating to readers. It is a manufacturer telling a good story about its own product, and it happens to be a good story: a well-known name doing ordinary, difficult work, on a site with a real logistical problem, learning a tool he has never used.
The sauna, for what it is worth, is a smoke sauna, the kind heated over hours with no chimney. It is a fitting thing to move 60 tonnes of barge for.
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