Thinking of putting on a quick coupler on my "new" to me 120 JD Excavator. How do these work on a larger machine? What special "plumbing" needs to be done if any? Is it hydraulic or electrical? This may be a stupid question, however, I need some guidance. What brand is solid? Thanks for the help!
PSM out of WA and CWS out of Canada in my opinion make the best quick couplers and hyd. thumbs. The CWS QC's we had on our 120's were hyd. So you would take out one safety pin (so you don't drop a bucket on someone you THOUGHT was hooked up) and then you flip a switch in the cab and use the joystick to uncouple the bucket. So for example, you take the right joystick, curl the bucket up against the stick/thumb and once it reaches its stop, you continue to hold the joystick to the left and the hydraulics then go to the quick coupler and unlock it, pulling it up and off the bucket. Once you grab your next bucket you simply curl the bucket in, and flip the switch back to its regular position and the clamp comes down and rests against the back pin of the bucket. Hopefully that wasn't too confusing. But back to the QC's. I don't know the knitty gritty part of it but I saw on our excavators that they had a seperate line(s) to the quick coupler, they then added the switch inside the cab for activating the quick coupler and that's all I noticed...I'm sure someone else knows more than me. One thing people need to remember with Hyd. QC's is they HAVE to be greased a lot. If you can do that then I wouldn't have an excavator without a hyd. quick coupler. It's so much faster to switch between a digging bucket and a clean up bucket on a jobsite rather than turn wrenches on stiff bolts in nasty weather in the mud. The buckets we had for our excavators were also from CWS, they were called pin grabber buckets. You can also put these on backwards for scooping or whatever you wanna do with it (PSM also makes pin grabber style buckets). All of our excavators also had their CWS's progressive linked hyd. thumbs, one 160C LC had a PSM thumb which I liked a little better because it had a little more of a curve to it but not TOO much curve. In the end they worked very well. Here's the links for CWS and PSM. Here's the brochure for CWS pin grabber hyd. quick coupler: http://www.cwsindustries.com/products/pdf/pingrabberbrochure_july06.pdf CWS pin grabber bucket: http://www.cwsindustries.com/products/excavators/buckets/pingrabber.htm CWS home: http://www.cwsindustries.com/index.htm PSM Home: http://www.psmcorp.com/ PSM hyd. progressive linked thumb: http://www.psmcorp.com/product_thumbs_maxrot.cfm PSM quick coupler: http://www.psmcorp.com/product_couplers_hydwed.cfm Here's some pics of one our 120's. I say "ours" but I no longer work for them. The one shot of it sitting next to a 310E, if you look on the front of the stick you can see the small hardlines going to the hyd. quick coupler, they're underneath the bucket cylinder. On the two pics here that are posted, you can see the buckets and how they're shaped (I like them a lot) and on the first pic, you can see the digging bucket and the pins hence the name pin grabber buckets, on the second one the machine is MUCH cleaner as it should be, and you can see the QC and the bucket and how it sits on the machine. Not bad.
Here's the pics that I couldn't upload because they're in another thread. Just scroll down and you'll see the machine and the hard lines.