Grapple Bucket

[JWB Contracting]

Here are some pics of a home made grapple bucket on a non-working 450B that I picked up in December. It was constructed by a dairy farmer and his son. They were feeding cattle with it and also doing a few farm chores. They even claimed to use it as a scarifier by backing up and dragging the grapple tongs along the ground. One tine is slightly bent, which should be fairly easy to straighten. Also, when the bucket is tilted all the way back, the grapple will not open, so it must be slightly over centering so, so the engineering was not perfect but still pretty dam good.

I do enjoy seeing modifications that others make to their crawlers to make them more useful. That is not to say I don't enjoy the factory fresh machines as well, especially the green ones.

Anyone else out there build a grapple for their crawler loader?

[77 Ford]

That's very close to a design that I was thinking about building.

Can you explain in a little more detail why the grapple will not open if the bucket is rolled back? It seems to be they should be independent functions.

[JWB Contracting]

I believe that the grapple is over centering when in the fully clamped position. There is a few ways to fix this such as,

1. Cutting the tooth section off and remounting so that when fully clamped before over centering.

2. Weld some stops to the top of the bucket to prevent the overcentering.

3. Lower the lower cylinder mounting bracket.

I actually don't think I will need to do anything, it is not often that you need to open the grapple when the bucket is tilted all the way back. Most of the time you would be dumping forward and ungrappling so gravity corrects this issue. Just wanted to let people know of the very slight design flaw.

I belive that they were mostly using for cleaning manure out of their cattle pens. The crawler does runs so I could try the hydraulics, but the tranny is buggered up so could not do a full demo. I have a 450C loader with growser pads that I will put this bucket on. Will make a nice coral cleaning machine.

[77 Ford]

Thanks that makes more sense. Hopefully I can build my own grapple this summer. I assume that is running off the extra power valve right of the boom/bucket controls?