Buying Advice Building a front-hoe for my PT-1418 - Advice?

[Sedgewood]

<font color="red"> I am about halfway on my mine-hoe project. I have three buckets to chose from. </font>

Nice work. If I may, I'd like to offer an observation based on my "extreme minihoe" experiences with a thumb. As you probably know it took me about two hours to break the boom by pushing over trees and then "worrying" the root ball until I worked them free. I recently had the 3 x 3 x 1/8 boom tube replaced with a 3 x 3 x 1/4 tube and had the bucket somewhat reinforced too. But not enough it seems. In less than an hour I twisted the bucket! /forums/images/graemlins/tongue.gif That is, the tabs that pin the bucket to the boom twisted. I don't know what you plan to grapple with, but if you are at all like me, ya just gotta "see what she'll do" /forums/images/graemlins/laugh.gif Its hard to see from the pictures just how stout the pin tabs are but if they are at all questionable you might want to think about reinforcing them on your bucket of choice. Same goes for the thumb pin tabs.

Again, nice work,
Sedgewood

 

[J_J]

Here is a picture of one of the buckets I will be using with the grapple. The tabs are 1/2 thick with 1" holes That is the way it was designed. I will be pushing the bucket with a 8" stroke 2 x 8 . I designed the boom with 1/4" thick sleeves for 1" pins with grease fittings

 

[J_J]

I have an extra backhoe bucket that I would like to sell. It is a CP bucket very heavy duty, Weighs about 120 lbs. Has extra thick bucket mounting tabs. Good teeth. A little rusty, but will clean up nicely.