Why I bought an Avant 528

The property

1.38 hectares of former farmland outside Aarhus, Denmark. No livestock, no crops. The whole plot is garden and park: sloping clay, a lot of mature trees, and a remarkable amount of heavy, awkward stuff left behind by previous owners.

That last point matters more than it sounds. A place like this generates material constantly — branches, stumps, soil, gravel, stone, the odd rusting implement found in a hedge — and all of it has to go somewhere else. On a slope. On clay.

The job that justified a machine

Heating. When we moved in, the house ran on a pellet furnace, and we burned roughly ten pallets of wood pellets a year, each weighing a tonne. Every one of them had to come off the delivery lorry, across the yard and into storage, and then be broken down bag by bag. Moving ten tonnes a year by hand is the kind of job you only do for one winter before you start pricing machinery.

The second driver was the garden itself. With 1.38 hectares of planted ground there is always something to move, and the scale of it — a trailer load of wood chips, a felled tree, a pallet of paving — is exactly the scale where a wheelbarrow stops being funny.

The moment I knew it was the right machine came later. A storm brought down a fairly large tree in an inconvenient spot. Instead of cutting it up where it lay, I picked up the whole tree with the 528 and carried it to somewhere flat and dry to process it. That is not something I had expected a machine this size to do.

What I had before

A Massey Ferguson 35. A lovely old thing, constantly broken, and it could not lift much even when it ran.

I also seriously considered not owning anything and renting as needed. The argument against renting is not the cost, it is the friction: if you need a machine for an hour, you don’t go and rent one — you postpone the job. Four years in, the single biggest benefit of ownership is that I’ll walk out and use the loader for a five-minute task, because it is there.

The shortlist

Why articulated, and why Avant

Four things, in roughly this order:

1. The attachment ecosystem. Avant lists well over a hundred attachments. You will never afford the ones you’d actually find useful, but knowing that whatever job comes up there is a bolt-on answer for it counts for a lot.
2. Resale value. Used Avants hold their price in Denmark.
3. Dealer proximity, as above.
4. The advice. Showing up at the dealer and being talked through the range by someone who clearly knew the machines made me comfortable spending the money.

Why the 528 and not something smaller

I walked in thinking about a smaller machine. The sales rep pushed me toward the 528 for the extra lift capacity, and four years on I’m glad he did: it lifts everything I’ve asked of it, including the tree, and it is still compact enough to get around the garden without wrecking it. A 600- or 700-series would have been more capable again, but also noticeably more expensive, and I’ve not once wished I had one.

Figures from Avant Tecno’s 528 page.

The deal

New, from Avant DK, in 2022. The invoice reads Avant 528 Tele Optidrive, 227,000 DKK excl. VAT (roughly 284,000 DKK / €38,000 incl. 25% Danish VAT), as a package with:

• Standard bucket 1300 mm (A36698)
• Pallet forks, 85 cm (A21047/1)
• Grapple, 900 mm (A36299 — a hydraulic clamp that closes over the bucket or forks to hold loose material)
• Weight block with tow hitch (VK50T)
• 26-12-12 grass tyres
• Two-year / 1,000-hour factory warranty

The attachments weren’t priced separately on the invoice, so I can’t tell you what each one “cost” — it was one number for the lot. That was it. I would have liked more, but the budget was the budget. The things I miss are small: extra work lights, and the orange beacon for the short stretches of public road around the property in the dark — that one is probably happening soon.

Four years and 100 hours later

100 hours in roughly four years is not a lot. That’s the honest picture for a garden-and-park property rather than a working farm: short, frequent jobs, long idle stretches. It also means the machine is barely run in, and that the cost per hour is eye-watering if you calculate it — which is why the “I’ll just walk out and use it” argument matters more than the arithmetic.

What surprised me: grease

Nobody mentions grease in the brochure. The 528 has a lot of grease nipples — I’d never heard of a grease nipple before I owned one — and keeping them fed is genuinely the biggest recurring maintenance task on the machine. I spent far too long working out what to do about it.

What I landed on, after some YouTube and a conversation with the dealer:

• Grease: Chevron Delo Starplex EP 2 — a red lithium-complex grease. Works well, easy to see where it’s gone.
• Gun: a KABI grease gun with a locking (grip-lock) coupler, which makes the awkward nipples far less of a fight.

There is still one nipple I can’t reach properly: the one right where the telescopic boom starts.

What I would do differently

Check the revision properly. On a recent visit to the dealer I saw a new 528 on the floor with a display in the cab; my 2022 machine has none. I assumed a 528 was a 528. It isn’t — Avant revises machines within a model name, and as a buyer you want to know whether you’re getting the current spec or the outgoing one, and what the difference is.

Beyond that, I’d buy the same machine again. I’d just negotiate the lights in.