my home-made rock bucket

[beerthengasoline]

Allot of work left to do but this is as far as i got with my free time this weekend. Specs on the rock bucket..

Main material is 1.5x.120" wall DOM
teeth are machined from 1020 cold rolled, will be considered replaceable, I sleeved the 4 inches of the teeth with 1.25x.120 dom, in hopes to keep the teeth fairly straight. I'll post more pics as I move forward. I'll eventually be adding 5/8" round stock to minimize the gap for rocks to squeeze through. Just focused on the frame/structure for now.

I've never built or even used a skeleton/rock bucket before so any input or criticism is welcome

 

[AchingBack]

Looks very professionally built. Great job. With those spear points you could use it as a torture device.

 

[beerthengasoline]

Thank you I'm curious to see how well the points hold up.

 

[beerthengasoline]

Got my blank ssqa in the mail today. 104$ on Amazon w/free shipping. It's 5/16" thick.

 

[Carl_NH]

Looking very good. I wish I had a QA bucket on my B21 many times to have a rock hound like you are making.

I would suggest along with the filler bars for small rocks to add some flat stock or bars on left and right sides to stiffen and also prevent roll off of large or small rocks.

 

[beerthengasoline]

Thanks Carl, total bucket width is gonna be around 60". I was gonna do the sides with tube but flat bar might be better to shed a little extra weight.Thanks

 

[Rustyiron]

You are doing a very nice job. I have used one on my skid steer in our gravelly rocky soil, it takes a good bit of fast, violent shaking of the bucker to "clean" out the soil. My concern for a tractor is that tractors (generally) are much slower on the loader functions than a SS. To be fair, it would have been fine for cruising a freshly plowed or disked field picking up stones, but for what I was trying to achieve, I was glad that I had only borrowed it. My ideas for improvement on the bucket that I had borrowed was to have a built in hydraulic vibrator and various bolt in bar spacing for different needs.
I'm not trying to be a downer here and I hope it does what you need it to do, and again, very nice work. I really would not weld in the 5/8 bars for smaller spacing you've mentioned until you have tried it in your soils. You might decide to make the opening's bigger or smaller or have both for different purposes.:thumbsup: Keep taking the pics for us!

 

[JKR]

I have to follow your build. I want to know how the pipe holds ups and what you did for a frame to attach it to your tractor.

I'm building a rock bucket right now. When I get it done I will post the build. I'm using 1 1/8 cold rolled steel rod.
17 of them with about a 2" space on a 50" wide bucket. I finish the frame tonight. A lot of welding.

 

[OldMcDonald]

It looks good. I agree with Rustyiron about trying it out before filling in the gaps. You might want to take out anything bigger than a pebble on some areas, and you might be happy with a 2" gap on other areas. I made something similar a few years ago, but to operate on the tpl for picking up stones in windrows from a rake I also made, and found that sheeting the sides suited me best. Just a thought, skeleton sides might be best for you.

 

[David Devuono]

Drooling over what looks like a tube bender.