I have a friend who is almost retired from excavating. He mentioned that he can grade like no one's business with his old 953 Cat...the secret being a cutting edge on the back of the bucket. So I put one on the CAT's 80" bucket. WOW, it's incredibly useful. Grades much better forwards or backwards. Cuts and shaves backwards too. In gravel it's kinda like spreading butter with a butter knife. Why don't they make this standard on all buckets you wonder?
Funny you brought this up. I've thought about the same mod, but for a different reason. I do a bunch of gravel work and wanted to use a cutting edge for the additional wear surface. Just never got around to doing it. I'll be finding the time now!
:OMG. Why has this never occurred to me before???
Have anymore pictures? I'm about to put a new floor and wear bars on my bucket and might do this too.
Can You get the back of the bucket to actually dig in a bit? With my new holland when I lower the boom all the way and have the bucket level to the ground the back of my bucket won't quit touch the ground, only when I curl the bucket forward does the front cutting edge get deep enough to pull/push material, maybe the back edge doesn't need to touch when grading loose material…...It sounds like an awesome idea for grading and wear, I would love to see a few action picks. Thanks for the post
Did that by accident a couple years ago at work. Used a piece of cutting edge for a wear strip. It does work great!
I don't have any more pics at the moment, will try to get a few. The CAT sits a bit high at the pin with stock 12" tires (I think 8"...normal is around 7"), so the back of the bucket was an inch off the ground, but now it's a half inch with a cutting edge. If I remember correctly the edge sticks out about and inch past the rear corner and when you curl the bucket (with boom all the way down) the edge makes contact with the ground, but does not dig into the ground - so you can shave high spots, but cannot actually excavate/dig. On another machine that has a lower pin height at rest it would actually remove soil. The difference in spreading gravel is like night and day. Curl the bucket slightly upwards and travel forwards, then reverse with bucket almost flat. Oh...just remembered that yesterday I was grading out the inside of a pole building for concrete slab prep and ripped out a 4x6x10 treated piece underneath the open doors going in reverse in creep (4 ton machine). That edge really grabs stuff so you have to be careful.
I did this modification today and it works great.
Over here we call that KIWI BLADING
We did that to our 287C bucket just to prevent wearing through the bucket. It did change the way it feels grading a bit, and I think the rest of the bucket will likely wear out before the grader cutting edge on the back does. We also put two pieces running from the back to the front to help prevent wear.
Mine already had 3 strips 1/2 thick and 4 wide from front to back so it did not change height much at all.
What was nice was the way it shaved just a little off the hard packed gravel driveway and filled in minor hollows.