Lapland (Finland), the northern part of Finland, is known for its reindeers, beautiful nature, and Santa Claus. All this on the northern side of the arctic circle. On these latitudes also works Mika Huttunen, owner of a construction, earthmoving, and geothermal heat pump drilling company.

In between the Made in Finland machine tour’s 2020 tour locations, we visited a few of Mika’s worksites where his machines and workers were working on between Rovaniemi, Kemi, and Oulu area in September of 2020.

Before meeting Mika, we stopped at a pipeline construction site in Rovaniemi, where one of Mika’s workers Jani Mäkelin was excavating. He was also giving electricity for the plastic welding of the pipes and for other work with a Dynaset HG Hydraulic Generator.

• I’ve been working for Mika for two seasons, and I’ve always liked the job. Here, I mainly do excavation, but sometimes the guys need electricity when their own equipment cannot produce enough or is already occupied. The hydraulic generator is a handy tool that helps in many situations, says Janne Mäkelin.

Machines in Tidy Condition

This tidiness could also be seen on the next work site where we found Sami Uusihanni who was drilling a well with a Commachio drill rig for a geothermal pump. We have seen a bunch of drill rigs during the past years, but this 3-year-old machine was in extremely good condition. It looked like a brand-new machine.

• We invest a lot in machines and after that, we keep and maintain our gear and machines accordingly. A good machine with the right care lasts a lot longer. Here we are using the Dynaset HPW pump for flushing the drilling dust and loose soil out from the hole. The high-pressure water binds the dust and carries it and the soil to the container, he tells.

We chatted for a while with Sami and carried on to the next place, where a new house foundation site was being dug and constructed. On the site, there were four machines working and making the new foundations for the new houses to be built. On the site, there was a new Hitachi excavator, operated by Jani Puro. On top of the excavator, you can easily spot a DYNASET HG Hydraulic Generator.

Since the day was turning into evening, we decided to leave the workers to continue their job and carried on with our journey. We still needed to meet Mika. He was loading trucks with soil on a road construction site between Oulu and Kemi.

• What is it like to work on the Arctic Circle?
• It is not that different than working anywhere else. The soil is harder, rockier and the bedrock is much harder to drill. But otherwise, working is the same as elsewhere in Finland. Here the time frame for working is a bit different. On our job, we can work efficiently between the May-December season. We are busy during that time period. The rest of the time is for machine and equipment maintenance.
• We noticed that you take good care of machines here in Lapland. You also have Dynaset HG Hydraulic Generators and pumps on your machines. How did you come up to equip your machines with them?
• Yea we have them [HG Hydraulic Generators] on a total of six excavators and the [DYNASET] pump in the drill rig. It just is so that we need electricity in almost every site and in whatever we do, so it is a natural thing to have them on board. Quite frankly we have used them so long, since 2005, that it is hard to be without them.

Because of the tight schedule of the worksite, we decided to let Mika carry on with his job. We continued to Oulu to rest while others were still working on the northern hemisphere.