Gotta customer, a landscaping contractor who wants me to make a new bucket for one of his excavators. I've done several buckets for his big machines, but this one is an itty-bitty thing that he uses in tight quarters and for odd jobs. He wants a VERY narrow bucket, I mean 3 or 4" wide, for when he has to put some cable or pipe down. The trouble is that the narrower these things are, the worse they work in our Puget Sound clay, which gets stuck in the bucket with the first scoop. This Tonka Toy excavator (the operator stands on the back of it) is so weak that the owner says he can hardly bang the bucket hard enough to get the clay out, and that's with the factory bucket which might be 12-14" wide. Any ideas? I doubt that surface finish will have much effect. Holes in the back of the bucket to break the suction (if there is any) are one idea, but how would you size them? The customer no longer has a motorized trenching machine, and has more equipment than room to store it anyway. I was thinking about whether the job could be done with a regular moldboard plow, but aren't those primarily for cutting and turning over sod? Would they work in our wet, heavy clay?
What your customer may need is a slim bucket without sides so it can slice through the clay and easily discharge the load. Needing only to dig 3-4" wide and laying cable pipes in what I assume to be residential applications, should fit the bill. Something similar to this-
A piece of chain hanging in the bucket might help. Never dealt with any buckets that narrow before.
What CM1995 shows is perfect. You can drag a lot more dirt out of a narrow trench with that than you would think. I've even dug a trench for a water line with a frost ripper tooth when I had nothing else.
I have seen buckets like that on railway jobs always wonder how it would work for digging :beatsme
I've thought about something similar to this we have very heavy sticky gumbo clay here too, and I've often thought about something that looked like a spatula, keep us posted on how it goes.
That pictured bucket, with very shallow sides, makes a lot of sense; the deep sides surely have a lot to do with why more conventionally-shaped small buckets hold the clay. I'll make ours like that. Do you know if the sides are parallel to each other, or do they angle out a little? Never heard of the trick with the chain, tho' the customer might have. What do you think of my notion of putting holes in the upper 2/3 of the back of the bucket? I'm a welder and a fixer, not an operator, so I don't see these implements in action very often. If I get around to learning how to post photos, I'll have to show you one specialty bucket I made for this same customer: quite narrow, maybe 18" wide, and LOONNGG, like 13', IIRC. I think he uses it to stab into a pile of backfill rock and then lay it in the gap alongside a foundation wall. He doesn't use some of the oddball items we've dreamed up very often, but occasionally they fit a particular job and save a lot of time. Thanks, much!
The trick with the chain or putting holes in it probably wouldn't work with the machine due to it's size. I've run large machines with heavy chain in the bucket and found it more of a nuisance for sewer and water work than any real help, plus the chain idea only really works if it has enough mass to fling the clay out and with something so small it wont work. Putting holes in the bucket is really only good if your working in swamp and want the water to drain out. And if you get into something of a more granular nature then it will just spill out the holes. The nice thing with clay is that it's cohesive and just clumps together, when I was a teenager I dug a pond for my dad and used a garden fork because the clay was sticky that I spent more time scraping it off the spade than digging so I used the garden fork that my parent's usually used to dig up potatoes since there was so little surface area for it to stick to and it actually worked pretty good. I just trimmed up the bottom and the sides with a spade afterwards.
I've heard of guys in the cranberry industry that make there own rigs to go on the back of tractors with 3point hitches for putting in irrigation pipe. It's basically just a big j shaped plow with a spool on the back that holds their pipe.
I've done the chain thing on loaders and in glacial till it works only marginally. The coal mine down in Centralia used to line the truck boxes with UHMD which is a high density plastic material. The clay would not stick to it. Weldco has a design for a small bucket like CM1995 has the photo of. From experience you will probably have to figure on some kind of bar to dig the stuff out of the corners anyway that you go. Good Luck!
Talked to the customer again. He says that since they are laying pipe or cable over uneven terrain, sometimes he will have to dig deep. That means that the width of this bucket has gone up to about 6" so that the hole is just wide enough to clear the ends of the pivot pins for the bucket when he has to go deep. It doesn't appear that the pictured bucket is built that way, but depends on the fact that it is already a deep bucket. This Tonka Toy excavator hasn't much power, and won't curl a deep bucket with a lot of leverage. Hopping up the engine a bit won't do; it does have enough power to nearly toss the operator off the back of the lightweight machine if the bucket snags a big rock. And the clay here is glacial till, and just loaded with rocks (which is why I'm told that plows and rippers have a hard time here). I'll hunt for that Weldco bucket photo.
If you can post a picture of that little digger I'm curious as to what it is or what make. I've been looking at getting a little digger in the future myself.
The operator will have to learn to dig by slicing the clay rather than ramming the bucket through. Any time you're running into problems with clay sticking taking longer but nice thin cuts with the bucket almost flat so the clay slides up in (prevents sticking by cleaning itself constantly).
Interesting. That would seem to argue that the shape of the back of the bucket would make a considerable difference as well. I'll see if I can find the manufacturer name. The owner and his boys have done a lot of recent repair work on the little beast, and have been running it without any of the external sheetmetal, but I imagine I can find that, and maybe a data plate. However, the word is that only about 130 of these machines were built, and the manufacturer doesn't support it with any parts and would rather not hear about it. Seems like all I work on any more is orphan equipment and cars! Besides, this rig is SO small as to have very limited use, and a crew of motivated illegals might out-dig it. I have a little grey-market Takeuchi TB-10 that I bought off this same customer. It was well-worn (I'm going through it), but I think he wishes he had it back in place of the Tonka Toy, because it's a lot more capable while still being quite compact.
This stuff really can't be sliced. As Seattle Smitty stated "there are too many rocks". The stuff also has lots of quartz in it which wear out GET and undercarriage something fierce. It this machine a walk behind or a rider with a tractor seat?
I had an 8" bucket made for my 416. At that width the the center of the bucket is not very wide (maybe 5" or 6"). It was made with three teeth (had to use Hensley top loaders as there is NO room between the teeth). When digging in clay the bucket does not fill. As Vantage said the operator needs to take a slice (this is the best way to dig anyway), filling the bucket over the entire digging range. When done like this the dirt is basically peeled up and will slide up the side cutting edges (not into the bucket) in a single peice. This will work in rocky applications as well. It just takes more time and more technique. It can be done...I have done it. I would not make the bucket to long so that it doesn't have good leverage. The photo that 1995 showed would be ideal IMO. That photo is probably for a larger machine so that's why the attachment ears are so much widder than the bucket. You will need to make it wider than the attachment point to go any deeper than the bucket itself (obviously) but such a small machine will not have a very wide dipper, though it will probably be widder than 6". I can't remeber where I saw it (maybe Bobcat) but someone already makes a "spade" type bucket (no sides that is arched, and I think it may even have a poly coating of some sort) that is made for minis. I'm remebering better now...it had three spades so as to fill over the entire bucket rotation and to make up for not having any sides. Do a search. In the videos I saw it worked well.
This machine has a platform behind it that you stand on. I'm going to search for that bucket. Found some unusual designs for clay buckets here: www.mcplantspares.com
That clay bucket type 1 the blue one would work good in gumbo type situations after a couple of tooth shanks were welded on. The teeth would help pick through the rocks you mentioned and the lack of bucket sides would keep the clay from sticking to much. I'm thinking about getting either a small excavator or a towable backhoe for use in backyards and that kind of thing and I know from experience buckets as narrow as eighteen inches do nothing but clog up solid. One guy I use to work with wanted to use a windshield washer pump and nozzle to spray diesel in his bucket during the winter to keep mud from freezing inside. lol Somehow I dont think the environmental people would like that to much.
It's not that bad. I have a small 1.5T machine with a 14" bucket, and it doesn't stick too bad or freeze up. A couple times in the last 10 years it's been a problem, but then again, I'm sure I've had to leave the jobsite a couple times in the last 10 years to clear MY system. Nothing works perfect all the time. Pete