Greetings to all. Retired heavy equipment and machinery hauler, almost 70 and BRAND new to the forum. A shout out to digger I also have a HD 5 trc. shovel mine came with a ripper, sweet. Looking for ripper teeth by the way. By raising the arms on the shovel and putting the blade all the way down you can do some pushing like with a dozer but not nearly as efficient, i think I'm right about that. Any thoughts from you veterans? Would i improve things immensely by putting a four in one bucket on my dozer or putting a straight dozer blade on? some of the old timers tell me the geometry with the way the arms are attached differently to the frame than a dozer the leveling isnt near the same, IE lower center of gravity on the dozer than the shovel. At any rate looking at d4s d5s d6s with rop and sweeps, winch or a ripper OR possibly buying a fairly large wheel loader with a 4 in 1 bucket something weighing around 40,000 lbs. I'm kinda jumpin all over but what do u guys think help me get right and straight. Thanks for reading, Clyde
Welcome clydecrashcop! What are you trying to accomplish with your track loader?
Your "Thanks for reading, Clyde" got pasted in the middle of the message, if you catch this quick you can go to the bottom of that post and edit it, just to the right of clydecashcrop 55 minutes ago is "edit" you have an hour from the post then edit is gon. Yes, a track loader doesn't have the control that a dozer has because of the geometry. Wear in all the joints adds up, along with a dull blade makes for some frustrating grading. Digs in and then floats over the surface. Depending on the surface you might do better going at diagonals, loosening the soil then spreading loose soil to fill a surface flat, or get/build a grader/landplane attachment for some other machine. A big wheel loader had a whole different set of issues, what do you want to do?
Have a few big piles from excavating for a shop and barn and a big parking area. I need to level everything out. Well first have all the tall grass and weeds cut then rake it off. level it with my hd 5 or something. Then i'm going to put the 3 point tiller on my bigger tractor and till it all up nice and smooth and plant it with a mixture of grass seed. We are looking at about 3 to 4 acres. Just cleaning up the place so it looks much nicer and easier to maintain. Can you address any of my questions in my first comments? Thank you Clyde
Along with my HD 5 I'm going to buy something hopefully versatile. You know grading loading plowing. A big and heavy enough wheel loader with a 4 in 1 bucket I've been told will grade and doze pretty good. I have a pretty vast collection of vintage wood and metal working machinery, sooooo another piece of equipment sounds like a practical, lol, addition to the rest of my junk (endearing as it is) some people collect stamps I collect equipment and machinery but in a sort of usefull practical way, I'm sure u know what i mean. A man can never have too many tractors and dozers, right? I can by a dozer and it will do a beautiful job of leveling everything out. And then it will set for maybe quite awhile, maybe A big enough wheel loader will move and load snow dirt stumps and with the right bucket doze and grade pretty good as well i believe. The dozer will set more than the wheel loader. iMHO. A nice wheel loader with that clam will pick up alot of stuff, heavy stuff, logs fronts and backs of other machines, shift trailers , i have 5 of them. lifting heavy tractor tires etc etc etc. To give u some idea. With fork extensions on a big wheel loader i can pick up big gensets, engines out of equipment and then in the winter plow snow. use it like scaffolding and so on. Thank you, Clyde. What do u all think? Sometimes 2 3 4 5 heads are better than 1.
For three or four acres, do the best you can with what you have and then use cheap farm equipment to level the rest. Like a $100 quack digger pulling an I beam leveler behind it, something like that. Let it get rained on a couple times and then plant your grass seed. If you want a nicer grade of lawn, plant a cover crop now, then level it again and plant your final grass seed next year this time. If you want the wheel loader, get the wheel loader. I don't know what price range you're looking in, but with the cheap stuff you're not going to find a four in one bucket on a big wheel loader, and it's not needed if you have chain hooks on the bucket. We're talking a retirement machine, who cares about efficiency.
4/1 will be awkward at best Dam things too heavy for ahovel and too small for dozer I took mine off for a GP bucket Point being spread with loader smooth out with drag blade the finish with disc/ cultimulcher
I've had a mix of machines over the years--including a John Deere 350 with GP bucket, a JD 555 with a 4-in-1 (Multi-Purpose, MP) and a Cat 955K with 4-in-1. I really like the MP buckets even if they add weight. I have done a lot of clearing where I push over a tree or three, grab 'em with the bucket, and carry them away to the pile instead of trying to push them. There's a technique for grading and leveling with a 4-in-1 where you open the clam a bit and use it to help guide the blade. With a little practice it does work reasonably well. With a lot of practice it works great. I had an old Cat grader (a knuckle buster) for awhile--best advice I ever had on that was to set it and let it go. I had to completely rework a 1/2 mile long driveway and was having fits trying to adjust the blade to keep the cut smooth. When I followed that advice to set it and go--it worked. Sometimes it's not moving anything at all (which is usually a good thing!). My suggestion is to take small cuts, set the position of the bucket, and don't fiddle too much. If you try to compensate for the pitch of the tracks--it's already too late. The tracks are behind the bucket and you'll go the wrong way. Use what you have, be patient and take your time, and finish up with the appropriate equip as has been mentioned by Delmer. Been there, done that, and it does work.
Once you have some practice with a GP bucket on a wheel loader you can make some pretty smooth surfaces. I don't think overall you'd like the 4 in 1. Weld some heavy duty chain hooks on the top of the bucket, one on each side and one in the center and you can pick some surprising loads with it. Later get creative and build some gin poles to attach to the bucket and use them to lift lighter loads to greater heights. Mike
It fascinates me reading peoples' different opinions about these buckets. Over my 40 years on and off on tracked loaders I've been probably 70/30% between 4 in 1's and GP buckets. If I was most of my time loading it'd be a GP, but the range of work I've done, that bit of capacity loses out to versatility. balance is a compromise, the more weight on the arse, the harder it is to trim some materials, but if you're too nose heavy, the machine is walking on its toes with a full bucket, but that applies to either bucket. In the UK there aren't many new track loaders being bought, but you hardly see them without a 4 in 1 nowadays, I think it's the same in Oz. I've never strained a 4 in 1, even stumping and clearing, but I can see how it could be done if you're bit careless. On older machines, the buckets were nowhere near as strong as current Cat or Liebherr buckets - don't know about Deere, never see them here.