The ripper is 16" long. Right now our soil is soft so it is easy to push the ripper straight down and pull up anything down to 16". Deeper than that would require removing some dirt with the bucket first. Yes I also got the BXpanded backhoe coupler. I used to change the pin on buckets pretty often, but after adding the thumb that became quite a chore. The coupler allows swapping backhoe implements while leaving the thumb attached.