John861
Bronze Member
Well, I got jealous seeing everyone's fancy grapples, and I'm sick of moving brush around, so I decided to build one of my own. This isn't one of those fancy plasma cut jobs. Just something cheap that work. I started with my old Ford 861 with one arm loader (two arms just seems redundant...), and a spare manure bucket. I bought the grapple arm from Dehner Welding - cheap and seems to be a pretty nice unit. A little welding to adapt to the old bucket, and it turned out pretty good. I also had to add extra plate to the bucket to be compatible with the hydraulic dump loader. It was originally a trip bucket style.
The manure tines were pretty corroded, and didn't last long (not even long enough for me to remember to get any good pictures). I snagged a couple of them on tree roots when cleaning up brush, and they bent when I lifted the loader. So, on to version 2 of the grapple bucket. I found some replacement hay bale spears that looked like they would fit the bill. After a little drilling and grinding, they replaced the manure tines (3 of the 5), and I'm back in business. Here is the result (still in need of some finish work).
The complete unit:
Close ups of the bucket:
And a sequence of dumping the load with my assistant:
So, now on to version 3. This will include additional tines to fill the gaps between the bale spears, trimming up the side plates now that I have finalized where the loaders links will attach, and maybe even paint it. That will probably take another year though since I'm staying pretty busy, and the current setup works pretty well.
-John
The manure tines were pretty corroded, and didn't last long (not even long enough for me to remember to get any good pictures). I snagged a couple of them on tree roots when cleaning up brush, and they bent when I lifted the loader. So, on to version 2 of the grapple bucket. I found some replacement hay bale spears that looked like they would fit the bill. After a little drilling and grinding, they replaced the manure tines (3 of the 5), and I'm back in business. Here is the result (still in need of some finish work).
The complete unit:
Close ups of the bucket:
And a sequence of dumping the load with my assistant:
So, now on to version 3. This will include additional tines to fill the gaps between the bale spears, trimming up the side plates now that I have finalized where the loaders links will attach, and maybe even paint it. That will probably take another year though since I'm staying pretty busy, and the current setup works pretty well.
-John
