IslandTractor
Super Star Member
- Joined
- Sep 15, 2005
- Messages
- 15,802
- Location
- Prudence Island, RI
- Tractor
- 2007 Kioti DK40se HST, Woods BH
GreatWhitehunter said:
That is an interesting question. I find that when I advance into a brush pile that I fill up the grapple well before my front wheels come in contact with the pile. When I am in living brush I am generally not charging in but rather selecting which bush or batch of bramble I will attack next and move directly to that object with the grapple centered. The times when I get all tangled in brush are when I get too aggressive about moving forwards and don't properly clear my flanks. Then I have briar, trees, bushes whatever all around me and in that circumstance my front wheels are the least of my concerns. The appropriate way to prevent brush from harming your tractor is not to be too aggressive and to clear an area wide enough for the tractor to easily turn around in by moving and clearing laterally, not just forwards.
Even ignoring the 200-400+lb weight penalty of the bigger grapples, I think having a grapple as large as 72" would for brush work be more of a disadvantage than advantage. Manuverability would be compromised and you could not selectively put all the FEL power into a central spot as easily as with a smaller grapple. Think about having a backhoe bucket that is 6ft wide. Unless you are strip mining even the biggest excavators don't have buckets that big. Not because they don't have the power but because the optimal size is smaller. I think that is also true for grapples, at least when used fo general landscaping purposes. In my experience, grapples are different than mowers, rakes, box blades etc where one generally gets the largest size their tractor can handle. With the grapple it is more like choosing a backhoe bucket. You focus on what you are trying to get done and choose the correct size. You don't need T1 steel tines 3/4" thick for brush. If you are doing construction debris removal then you want a very heavy duty T1 steel wide bucket and an appropriately sized skid steer to manage it. When using a CUT for general landscape work, brush removal, picking up the occasional big rock, lifting or dragging cut trees, ripping out brush and saplings, etc, the width of the grapple is not the limiting factor in what you can get done. I don't have experience on 50hp tractors with loaders capable of lifting >2500lbs or with breakout power in the 4000lb range. I'd still imagine that even with that power you'd like to be able to concentrate the force on the specific bush, rock, tree, whatever of interest though and therefore a grapple narrower than the standard bucket would be more useful. If you look at purpose built stump grapples you can see that they are much narrower than regular root or general purpose grapples for just that reason. I certainly understand that 48" is not necessarily optimal for every size tractor and I would guess that a 60" grapple would start to make sense with >2000lbs lift capacity at pivot pins or approximately a 40-45hp CUT. I honestly don't see any use of >60" grapples for general purpose work even for big CUTs or smaller utility tractors like the Kubota M series.
Size ain't everything and bigger is not always better
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