Scott65
Silver Member
After much trial and error (more error) and a bunch of help from the fine members of TBN, I've nearly completed my grapple. It's not pretty, but its mostly functional. The only thing it lacks is paint, and I think I may make some stops to protect the cylinder from bottoming out when opening the grapple. But here ya go, hopefully it will help someone who is building their own.
Here's the first model. The cylinder was mounted high up based on the theory that it would have better clamping force with a greater downward angle. The problem was that it would only open about half of what was desired.
So out with the old, I decided to redesign it a bit. It was suggested to lengthen the grapple arms. I never liked the generic square pivot mounts I made, so I remade them and used that opportunity to lengthen the arms without actually having to modify the arms themselves.
It was obvious that the cylinder pivot had to come down as well, so I made the appropriate mounts to match the others.
I was surprised, it will hold a pretty decent amount in the bucket if you can grab it just right. This was a pretty large pile of cactus. I believe they are called Century Plants. This pile was 3 or 4 of these plants, each of which when sprawled out was 4-6 feet in diameter. Obviously when I backhoe'd them up a couple months ago, the spears collapsed onto each other in the pile. But still, this was a pretty hefty chunk of stuff.
I added beams across the bottoms of the tines so that I could pinch stuff and pull them around. My thought was pulling out dead branches from trees. But it worked well for the piles of this stuff (barn tin?). I was happy to see that even after beating on this thing, the bottom still lined up well enough to grab and hold a single piece.
This project took me a while and had some added costs because I didn't have any of the hydraulics for this. I'll write up another thread on this process in case someone with this model of tractor has any issues as I did. But hydraulics aside, the grapple itself couldn't have cost more than $3-400 in material. That probably includes the cylinder. Not too bad considering what the commercial units cost, in my opinion
Here's the first model. The cylinder was mounted high up based on the theory that it would have better clamping force with a greater downward angle. The problem was that it would only open about half of what was desired.
So out with the old, I decided to redesign it a bit. It was suggested to lengthen the grapple arms. I never liked the generic square pivot mounts I made, so I remade them and used that opportunity to lengthen the arms without actually having to modify the arms themselves.
It was obvious that the cylinder pivot had to come down as well, so I made the appropriate mounts to match the others.
I was surprised, it will hold a pretty decent amount in the bucket if you can grab it just right. This was a pretty large pile of cactus. I believe they are called Century Plants. This pile was 3 or 4 of these plants, each of which when sprawled out was 4-6 feet in diameter. Obviously when I backhoe'd them up a couple months ago, the spears collapsed onto each other in the pile. But still, this was a pretty hefty chunk of stuff.
I added beams across the bottoms of the tines so that I could pinch stuff and pull them around. My thought was pulling out dead branches from trees. But it worked well for the piles of this stuff (barn tin?). I was happy to see that even after beating on this thing, the bottom still lined up well enough to grab and hold a single piece.
This project took me a while and had some added costs because I didn't have any of the hydraulics for this. I'll write up another thread on this process in case someone with this model of tractor has any issues as I did. But hydraulics aside, the grapple itself couldn't have cost more than $3-400 in material. That probably includes the cylinder. Not too bad considering what the commercial units cost, in my opinion
