Catvet:
At Power Trac on Friday, Hans Luginbuhl (Bubenberg) and I looked at the tree hugger, mini hoe, forks and 4 n 1 and grapple buckets regarding your questions about placing rocks in a wall. The tree hugger does not rotate, and clamps only horizontally. The mini hoe doesn't have a thumb and probably wouldn't handle as much weight as you'd like, but with some minor modification to add a thumb would be good at amaller rock placement. (See Babineau's thread and check with Sedgewood re thumb.) Forks would probably do most placement jobs, and give you the most weight capability, and the grapple or 4 n 1 bucket would handle the most shapes. I'd go with the grapple bucket or 4 n 1.
Power Trac doesn't make a perfect rock placement tool, but I'm not sure others do either. The rotating jaw devices look great, but they're expensive, heavy and may have trouble gripping irregular rocks.
I didn't see any rocks in Power Trac's demo area, but if you call them and tell them what you want to do, maybe they can find some for you to try stacking with the various attachments.
