Mutt - That looks more like a suicide-bomber barricade than it does a "wall". "Wall" gives that thing a bad name! /w3tcompact/icons/smile.gif
The 4-in-1 bucket that EarthForce supplies appears to be
very heavy duty. I'll know for sure before long. If I don't bend it, it's unlikely it's bendable. /w3tcompact/icons/wink.gif I routinely place landscape rocks that my L4310HST with 2 1/2" cylinders and hopped-up hydraulics wouldn't
think about lifting by rolling them. At a project I worked on recently, there was a landscape rock that a guy on site with a big Cat TLB (I forget the model, but it's 80 hp, 6500 lb FEL capacity, extendahoe, 4-wheel steer, crab steer, you name it, it's a monster) had to take off the 18-wheeler that brought it (along with the Cat). He carried it to a spot near where we wanted, but then had to go lift a stack of plywood onto the roof - he said when we figured out where we wanted it, he'd come back and move it for me - that was his way of "rubbing it in". I made sure that by the time he came back I had moved it to where we wanted it. But it was all my
L4310 would do to lift one side of it enough to roll it. In the end, I had to sort of lift it, sort of shove it, sort of rotate it from side to side. I'm hoping I'll be on a little more even footing with the Cat when I have my EF-5. /w3tcompact/icons/wink.gif Well,
even isn't quite the right word, but it's in the right direction...
The Long 4-in-1 I had on my
L4310 was what I would classify heavy duty, as opposed to very heavy duty, but the only thing I ever bent was the back of the bucket - when I would pick up a big rock by pushing under it, then roll the bucket back, if it slammed into the back of the bucket a bit hard, I'd get a bulge there. The cutting edges and the contact points of the jaws were pretty much bullet proof. A friend of mine has the smaller Long 4-in-1 on an
L2550 and he's bent it a couple of times so that it's racked the whole thing a bit, so they're not all the same. It goes back to my "everything is a compromise" philosophy. When you only have 1500 pounds or so of FEL capacity, you can't put a 1000 lb bucket on it and expect to accomplish much. (Of course, you won't hurt the bucket...) On the other hand, you can't put 200 pounds of steel into a 4-in-1 bucket and expect it to be bullet-proof, but you've got 1300 pounds of payload capacity left to do some real work left (if the bucket can take it).
Even if you have lots of FEL capacity to play with, you still can't have one bucket accomplish everything equally well. That's where a quick attach and some different attachments comes in handy. The EF-5 4-in-1 is a 2/3 yd bucket and it's perfectly sized (for the machine) for general grading, etc. but if you have to haul a lot of mulch, compost, etc. for any distances, you're going to be making a lot of trips, unnecessary ones, given the FEL capacity - it's the bucket's capacity that now becomes the limiting factor. That's why I had D&E make a 1 1/2 yd (struck) bucket for the EF-5 - less than half the number of trips means more than double the amount of work accomplished in the same amount of time. Of course, that means you have to switch buckets, haul two of them, pay for two of them, etc. - as I say, nothing is without compromises.
MarkC
P.S. I corrected the capacity of the EF-5 4-in-1 from 3/4 yd to 2/3 yd.<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1>
Edited by MChalkley on 12/11/01 03:40 PM (server time).</FONT></P>
