I broke my Wicked. It's my fault. Here is a cautionary tale for all of you enthusiastic owners, new and old, of a fine EA Wicked Root Grapple. It is an outstanding piece of equipment and the attachment with the most bang for the buck for your tractor, but it is not indestructible.
Whether behind the controls of a Ferrari at Le Mans, an F-18 Hornet over Baghdad or a tractor with a root grapple, the operator must know and stay within the performance envelope of the machine. Like many of you on this thread, I have photographed and posted images of heavy lifts, wads of brush and long logs. After three years, it finally caught up with me. This log is the one that really did me in.
Shared album - Google Photos
As near as I can figure, the long, heavy tree trunk rocked back and forth in transit, leveraging the lid against the hydraulic cylinder bracket on the top bar of the main frame. Being a single lid, the bracket is in the middle of the top bar where there is little support. It bent back the bracket, cracked the top bar, pushed back the top bar and twisted it.
Shared album - Google Photos
Shared album - Google Photos
Before you get out your pitchforks and torches, this is on me. I do not blame EA in the slightest and would not hesitate to buy another Wicked. In retrospect, here are some of the things I did wrong the past three years.
After about a year, the teeth were not coming together. The Wicked appeared to be good and I thought something was wrong with the hydraulic cylinder. I chained the lid in the closed position and cycled it open a few times until the teeth closed. Now it dawns on me that all that accomplished was to bend the bracket back into position and initiate metal fatigue.
The next couple of times the teeth would not come together, I removed the clevis bolt and turned the clevis out a few threads on the cylinder rod. All that did was overlook the real problem and put more pressure on the bracket when completely closing the grapple. It would probably be a good idea to deliberately have a small gap in the teeth so no unnecessary pressure is put on the bracket when the grapple is empty.
When grappling up Yaupon by the roots or pushing over a dead tree with an open grapple bucket, the lid is pushing against the trunk. This puts a tremendous amount of pressure on the bracket. The mainframe is very strong. The lid, not so much. Based on my experience, use the main frame for pushing over trees and saplings, with the lid closed.
Something else we did not do wisely was carry heavy logs around using the lid to trap the log. We should have curled back as far as possible so that the weight of the log would be supported by the strong main frame, putting less strain on the lid. Long logs should be cut shorter before traveling.
A double lid, by virtue of its design, has the brackets near the FEL arms and quick release plates where support should be much stronger. Now you might say the Wicked single lid should have a larger top cross member or it should be reinforced, or the bracket should be larger and stronger. But not so fast. If the grapple is so strong that it will not fail, then that means you could tear up your front end loader instead. I would much rather bend the grapple.
My poor old 72 inch grapple will continue to function just fine, crippled as it is. My cousin is handy with an acetylene torch and stick welder and he owes me, so I may get him to straighten it out and reinforce it. But all of this could have been avoided if I had just used some common sense. A Wicked will do hard work, just don't work it too hard. So here is hoping you learn from my experience. In the immortal words of Dirty Harry, "A man's got to know his limitations."
