USED MACHINERY Introduced for harvest 2008, the Claas Tucano range originally comprised two five-walker models — the 320 and 430 APS — and two six-walker combines, the 440 APS and 450 APS. The two larger machines could be seen as replacements for the Mega series, the smaller ones for Medion models
Claas UK placed a provisional factory order for 30 Tucano combines for harvest 2008, which sounded like a reasonable tally at the time given the then size of the UK combine market and the previous sales of the outgoing Medion and Mega series.
Was 30 enough? Not by a very long way. By August 2008 no fewer than 130 Tucano combines were at work in the UK. So, how had Claas managed to get its marketing sums so dramatically wrong?
To be fair there were a number of extenuating circumstances, with several unforeseen factors having a massive impact. For starters, Claas couldn’t have timed the introduction of the Tucano any better, the new models arriving just as many of the UK’s smaller arable farms were looking to invest in a new combine. Secondly, those owners who previously would have plumped for a lower output Lexion model, to gain access to the Vario header, now had this option on the relatively more affordable Tucano. Furthermore, on all 440 and 450 models the Vario header comes with Claas’s Auto-Contour header guidance as standard.
