Winches that reach past where the crane stops

HAFO was formed in 2016 when four brothers — Wolfgang, Ulrich, Richard and Josef Haselsteiner — merged their separate businesses into one company. All four are third-generation forest workers, and the first hydraulic auxiliary winches were developed and sold out of an outbuilding at the family home in Ybbsitz, Austria. The company has grown steadily since: a site at Waidhofen an der Ybbs bought in 2021, a purpose-built production and storage facility finished there in 2023, twelve people employed as of 2024, and exports as far as South Korea, Taiwan and Japan.

HAFO’s winches mount on tractors, forwarders and harvesters alike, with a quick-change system so a winch can move between carriers without tools, and manual, electric or radio control depending on how the operator works.

The rest of the range follows the same thinking. The HAFO HEAVY winches take the heavier ropes; the SAPI is a compact, portable winch for work a mounted unit can’t get to; and HAFO also markets Ritter’s German-built mounted cable winches and grabs. Everything HAFO builds itself is galvanised, powder-coated and made in Austria, and the winches have been KWF certified since 2019 — the German forestry-technology body’s own test standard.

Exc@v8 supplies the HAFO range across the UK and Ireland.