Dromone Engineering, based outside Oldcastle, Co Meath, is now recognised across the agriculture and construction machinery industry as an authoritative voice in terms of tractor hitches and construction machine couplers.

What has brought the company to this level of world recognition has been the Dromone approach to developing tractor hitches and construction machine couplers to the highest international standards, by working with R55, ISO and NSAI in developing new products.

We recently visited the Dromone Engineering factory site to get an overview of how its tractor pick-up hitches and excavator couplers are manufactured. The €25 million turnover business, with a 90% export level, was created by Pat McCormack in 1978. He was joined by William Egerton as managing director in 2002, who since then has overseen the expansion of the business into dozens of global markets and the development of further advanced machinery attachments.

Management changes

In the coming weeks, William is stepping back from his role as managing director to become company chairman, as Pat McCormack’s daughter Caroline takes over the managing director role.

Dromone Engineering remains a family business, with many of Pat’s family members, including grandchildren, now involved in the day-to-day activities.

It now employs a team of 127 people, with most of them based at the factory site, where a new office section is about to be completed.

The company is now working to enhance its environmental footprint, with a new focus on developing renewable energy options for what is one of Ireland’s few heavy engineering manufacturing operations.

OEM supplier

Within agriculture, Dromone Engineering is best known for its range of tractor pick-up hitches, which are supplied to almost every major tractor manufacturer. These hitches are designed in close collaboration with the tractor design engineers across the world. Dromone is using the latest technology, where manufacturers can share designs in the development stage, so that Dromone will have a pick-up hitch ready for assembly on production lines to meet tractor production deadlines.

Dromone’s first tractor pick-up hitch breakthrough was selling a system to the then Renault (now Claas) tractor assembly lines in Le Mans, France. This was quickly followed by deliveries to Massey Ferguson’s Coventry factory, now closed and then to Case IH tractor factories.

Today, the list of tractor companies using Dromone pick-up hitches as original equipment includes Argo (Landini and McCormick), JCB, Massey Ferguson, Valtra, Deutz-Fahr, Same and Lamborghini, and Kubota. The company is currently working with some new tractor manufacturing entrants, including YTO and Zoomlion from China and Solis from India, to produce pick-up hitches to suit its specific tractor designs for the European markets. Dromone is also developing a new tractor pick-up hitch for specific southern European tractor applications.

The company also retains a bespoke tractor pick-up hitch production facility, to provide an ongoing service to farmers and contractors who need to provide modern pick-up hitch systems for older tractors. It has also developed linkages with machinery end users, both large and small, including the likes of the UK-based Flannery Plant where they have provided versions of their Dromone Hitch Alert System (HAL) for use with the company’s fleet of John Deere 6M155 tractors.

The HAL pick-up hitch combines integrated rugged sensors with a control box to provide an audible and visual signal to the driver in the cab of the tractor. This system of sensors provides assurance that the trailer hitch locking system is secure and safe in both vertical and horizontal positions.

Construction sector

The second part of the Dromone story revolves around its construction equipment and excavator quick coupler production. The company has patented some versions of these couplers including the ‘Multi Lock’ automatic coupler which was designed following market concerns regarding coupler safety and updated policy decisions and implementations around the issues of construction site safety.

With this design, both the front and rear attachment pins are independently hydraulically released by the coupler and are independently mechanically locked through the full working cycle of the coupler.

Attachment can only be disengaged when the coupler and attachment are in the crowned position and bucket cylinder is fully extended. More recently, Dromone designed and developed the new ML:SMART quick coupler, which received a number of innovation awards since it was launched in 2020. Dromone supplies excavator coupling systems to excavator manufacturers and construction plant operators as end users across the world.

It is the preferred supplier for the Volvo Construction Equipment, supplying excavator coupling systems into Volvo factories in Sweden, the US and South Korea.

Dromone has more recently developed a dedicated Volvo coupler production and assembly line facility at its factory to meet the Volvo quality standards.

Dromone’s success is a combination of ingenuity, inventiveness, determination, dedication and setting high standards.

The company has patented many designs around the area of tractor and construction machine hitching systems, to good effect and it retains the intellectual property value of these designs.

In a world of high input costs, Dromone has worked consistently to be a standards setter rather than a price taker.

It is that authoritative voice, rooted in an agricultural design, along with flexibility to adapt to new markets, new entrants and new opportunities, that will continue to set it apart as a leading Irish engineering company.

Dromone Engineering – a very personal retrospective

It was back in 1981, just over a year after I joined the Irish Farmers Journal team as a young journalist, that I first met Pat McCormack, the founder of Dromone Engineering. Pat was attending the Royal Show at Britain’s National Agricultural Centre in Stoneleigh, outside Coventry. He was there to finalise a deal to sell his patented multi-function tractor linkage stabiliser system to international parts supply company Vapormatic.

Pat had developed and patented the unit and with the aid of the Irish Export Board, he successfully concluded a deal to sell the patents to Vapormatic which included the extension of Dromone’s manufacturing rights back to the Oldcastle premises. With a small group we celebrated his success that evening in Birmingham, as Pat provided us with a slightly unconventional mode of transport, the back of his Fiat Daily pick-up truck.

This was the financial seed capital that set Dromone Engineering on the path of today, where the company turnover now exceeds €25 million. Some legacy.