Last Tuesday, I went to see Jason @ Folcomer Equipment and picked up a couple of the items I bought from him. One of them that's applicable to any tractor with a FEL is the FFC bolt-on edge. I thought they looked quite interesting on their web site, so I went ahead and sprang for one for the EF-5's 74" 4-in-1 bucket and another for the 78" large capacity bucket I had built. They're about $400 for a 72" one, delivered.
When I picked them up, I was quite surprised - they're much heavier duty than I expected them to be; well, more aggressive might be the better way to put it. Anyway, here's the web page I found them on:
http://www.ffcattachments.com/cdrom/buckets/BK10.htm. I got the wide tooth model. Don't be fooled by the pictures - those teeth are not nearly as small as they appear: they're 4 3/4" wide at the bar and 5 1/2" long. Rather than coming to a sharp point, they're a bit rounded with respect to width and tapered to an edge with respect to thickness. They seem to be made of extremely high quality steel. I'm anxious to try them. It's already pretty clear that regular teeth will no longer be needed on the bucket, using this edge. Plus, an advantage of this style of edge vs. traditional teeth is that the bucket can still be used for smoothing by just flattening out the bucket. I'll see how well that works, too, when I get to use it, but it seems a viable concept, anyway. This isn't of too much concern when you've got a 4-in-1, because you can always open the bucket to get a flat edge, but the ability to have a lot more teeth with this edge may be very useful for breaking up clods, cleaning up debris, etc.
For smaller tractors, I'd strongly suggest considering the narrow-tooth model, though - as I said, the teeth on the wide-tooth model are
serious. I'll post a picture of it with a quarter laying on the tip of a tooth to give a better perspective of the size soon.
MarkC
