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Choosing an excavator for your job is only the first step in acquiring the tools you need. Whether theyre mini or large, excavators are incredibly versatile because of the available bucket and attachment options. Given the many types of backhoe and excavator buckets on the market, a lot of factors contribute to finding the right bucket for the job.
From understanding excavator bucket dimensions to learning about the different excavator bucket types, this guide will teach you how to choose the right excavator bucket for your needs.
When choosing an excavator bucket, the first thing to consider is the specific application and type of material you are handling. You typically want to find the biggest bucket for your job, taking into account the material density and the size of the hauler truck.
Remember the weight of the bucket limits your cycle time, and the bucket only becomes heavier when loaded with heavy materials. As a general rule, use a small excavator bucket for higher-density materials to avoid slowed productivity. You want to be able to load your hauler truck quickly with as few cycles as possible to reduce fuel consumption, wear, and downtime.
Different applications can also require specific types of buckets. For example, you wouldnt be able to dig an 18-inch trench with a 30-inch bucket. Some buckets have features to handle certain types of materials. A rock bucket has a V-shaped cutting edge, and long, sharp teeth that can break through hard rock and push heavy loads with more power. A digging bucket is known to handle hard soil. Consider the type and density of your material and ensure you select a bucket that is capable of lifting it.
An excavator can do anything from digging trenches and laying pipes, to landscaping and moving snow. Several bucket types enable an excavator to handle various materials within these applications. While there are also many specialty buckets available, the five most popular buckets include:
A general-purpose bucket has the most versatility and is appropriate for many excavating tasks. It is also known as a digging bucket, and it is the standard attachment that comes with an excavator. If you rent an excavator without specifying a bucket, youll probably receive a general-purpose bucket. It comes with short, blunt teeth that work great on soil and are available in many sizes for various applications.
Here are some of the materials you can move with an all-purpose excavator bucket:
You can also find wear-protection components to allow an all-purpose excavator to work with more abrasive materials.
Grading buckets stand out for their smooth edges, wide construction, and flat cutting edges. They also have lift eyes, weld-on side cutters, and reversible bolt-on cutting edges. This construction creates smooth edges for all digging areas and works best with soft materials and soils. Grading buckets, also called clean-up or ditching buckets, have a lot of versatility for loading material, grading, leveling, back-filling, sloping, and cleaning ditches for improved drainage.
When you know how to use a grading bucket, you can use it for many applications, including:
A heavy-duty or severe-duty bucket is usually made from high-strength, abrasion-resistant steel. Because of their superior durability, these attachments are often used in rock quarries to load trucks with high-density material in fewer passes.
Cat® excavator buckets come in general-, heavy-, severe-, and extreme-duty varieties. They provide enhanced digging for heavy or abrasive materials, such as:
Severe- and extreme-duty buckets can handle even heavier materials, including:
Like a grading bucket, a trenching bucket is used for trench digging. It works well for narrow cable trenches, pipe culverts, and drains. It has a narrow shape, a sharp, flat blade, and an extended front section for better access. This tool can dig deep trenches while maintaining a fast cycle time. A trenching bucket should be used for high-precision jobs, such as digging around pipes.
This narrow bucket looks almost claw-like and is used to dig deep trenches that are only a few inches wide. It can save contractors a significant amount of time in backfilling and digging. It can also be known as a fiber-optic bucket because it is useful for creating trenches for laying fiber-optic cables, irrigation systems, and pipes.
An angle tilt bucket has many of the same applications as a grading bucket with the added feature of 45-degree rotation in either direction. Because of the tilting ability, these buckets are useful for creating precise slopes. They also allow an excavator to move or shape more land without changing positions as frequently. These features may allow you to experience increased uptime with heavy-duty construction.
Angle tilt buckets come in many sizes for a variety of applications, such as:
A tilt ditch cleaning bucket does exactly what its name suggests. This specialized cleaning bucket shares a similar design to a grading bucket. It can tilt at a 45-degree angle to allow the operator to work at difficult angles. Many consider this a finishing bucket used at the end of a project for tidying and creating smooth finishes.
Visually, a skeleton bucket closely resembles a digging bucket. However, there is a major difference between the two. A skeleton bucket has large slots that work like a grid on its back. This is used to let fine materials filter through it, leaving behind larger materials.
The skeleton bucket is a versatile tool that does two things at once. It works as a usual excavation bucket that simultaneously separates stones, concrete, and trash from useful or building materials.
Utility buckets are incredibly useful tools when excavating near pipelines and cables. When cables are struck, it can harm the excavation crew and affect the system they are connected to. With a utility bucket, a crew can work without worrying about the risks of striking cables.
The bucket is double-enforced by using rounded edges rather than teeth, improving structural integrity. This bucket type is best suited for working near gas lines, water and sewerage pipes, and underground cables.
Besides the most commonly used buckets, you can find a variety of specialty bucket designs to use for specific jobs:
With so many types of excavator buckets, its a good idea to consider renting one when you need to accomplish a particular task. If you plan to use the bucket for many jobs, you can save money by buying a used excavator bucket. If choosing a previously owned or rented bucket, you need to understand how to inspect for damage or repairs. Look for the following elements:
Most construction projects benefit from a bucket that will increase productivity by reducing the number of passes the tool needs to make. Select the biggest excavator bucket that wont compromise efficiency except when you have a particular size requirement, like when digging a trench.
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Remember that the bucket you use on a 20-ton excavator would be far too big for an 8-ton excavator. A bucket thats too big will require the machine to do more work, and each cycle will take longer, reduce efficiency, or cause the excavator to topple over.
Generally, a range of bucket sizes will work for the excavator you have. Mini excavator bucket sizes can range from specialty 6-inch buckets to 36-inch buckets. Keep in mind that some sizes only apply to grading buckets, and you shouldnt use other types of buckets with those dimensions.
To see what size of bucket is possible for the weight of your excavator, use this excavator bucket size chart:
Each jobs bucket capacity depends on the size of your bucket and the material you are handling. Bucket capacity combines the material fill factor and density, the hourly production requirement, and cycle time. You can calculate your buckets capacity for a particular project in five steps:
To tool your excavator bucket for whatever applications you have in store, you can customize the bucket with many add-on features:
The best time to replace the teeth is before they wear down entirely and expose the bucket adapter. To fit the bucket with new teeth, follow these nine steps:
When youre ready to shop excavator buckets or need expert advice for your job site and machine, partner with the local leaders in tractor parts and repairs. We have a wide selection of Cat equipment attachments for excavators whether youre in the market for new or used buckets. Get the parts you need fast from the experts with over 60 years of experience in the business.
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The construction industry is constantly growing and changing to keep up with the needs and demands of the users and operators in it. Where having the correct equipment for the job is essential. So, choosing the appropriate excavator bucket for your machines are necessary to efficiently tackle the specifications of the job and the type of material you are handling. There are now a huge selection of different types of buckets, so you might not know where to start if you're new or just looking to try something else. We have complied a list of 10 Different types of Excavator Buckets and what we believe are their best uses.
Also known as a general purpose excavator bucket, the digging bucket is the attachment you will most likely recognise. Digging buckets are the most common bucket provided with mini diggers and excavators when buying or hiring. It's primary use is what the name suggests - bulk digging through soil and rubble in construction, landscaping or groundworks environments.
The digging bucket is most commonly seen with fitted with teeth to help penetrate tougher, more compact ground. The teeth break through the material allowing you to scrape it into the bucket to be moved or removed. They're also becoming popular to be fitted with a blade for creating a flat bottom to your trench or to be used around utilities. The general purpose digging bucket usually comes in a large variety of widths to best suit the job at hand. For example, Rhinox mini digging buckets are available for 0.75 to 25 ton excavators, in 6", 9", 12", 18" and 24" to best suit the application, whether that be digging a small ditch or clearing a larger area.
Although a durable bucket, the standard digging bucket may not always be the most suitable bucket for your digging job. The rock bucket is a heavy duty version of the standard digging bucket. Rock buckets are reinforced with much stronger and thicker wear plates to add 'bulk' to the bucket and are fitted with sharper teeth. These modifications reinforce the bucket for use in much harsher conditions and help penetrate solid materials. A popular use is continuous breaking up of rocks and extremely abrasive, compact materials, like in quarries. Rock buckets are currently not available at Rhinox.
The utility bucket is a modification of the standard digging bucket, featuring the addition of the Uni-tusk - a rounded edge, bolt-on blade. The Uni-tusk is a Rhinox invention and was initially created to help protect utility workers when digging near utilities as it deflects cables away from the bucket. The unique Uni-tusk blade system has been manufactured as a bolt-on edge option to replace teeth or standard bolt-on blade options. As well as, the improved safety for utility works, the rounded, cast steel blade locks the side plates and lip plate in place, to increase the structural integrity of your bucket. It is also heat treated to 550 HB to further maximise the wear strength for continuous digging in harsh conditions.
The grading bucket is known by a wide variety of names, including: dyking bucket, finishing bucket or ditching bucket. The grading bucket is a wide, shallow bucket used for levelling and profiling the ground. The low profile shell design was designed to increase the width of the bucket without increasing the weight, as not to overload your excavator.
As mentioned, these buckets are best used for profiling, particularly softer materials and aggregates. The wider shell enables you to cover a wider distance in one motion. These buckets create a smooth finish to the material you're profiling due to the flat edge of the bucket, as well as the flat bottom. But they can also be used for a variety of other tasks such as: cleaning ditches, loading material, back-filling and sloping. The grading bucket is commonly fitted with a bolt-on blade to strengthen the lip plate and provide additional resistance against wear to prolong the life of your bucket. Grading buckets are available in a wide variety of widths to suit your excavator size. For example, Rhinox mini grading buckets are available for 0.75 to 25 ton excavators, in 30" to 84" wide.
The tilt grading bucket is exactly what the name suggests, it is a grading bucket that has the ability to tilt. A tilting bucket is the solution to grading and profiling on an angle. They're manufactured with a hydraulic hook up to allow them to tilt from left to right, providing greater flexibility when working on more complex forms and shapes, such as levelling slopes, cleaning ditches and maintaining sloped landscapes. The Rhinox tilt grading bucket is manufactured with 1 ram to allow you to tilt 45 degrees in both directions and plugs straight into your standard auxiliary or hammer hydraulics making it quick and easy to attach them ready to use.
6. V Bucket
The V ditching bucket is a triangular shaped bucket, designed to form clean sided, sloped drainage trenches. These V shaped dyking buckets are also commonly used for digging V shaped trenches used for laying pipes and cables across large plots of land. These buckets are usually manufactured for larger excavators due to the complex design required to create the trapezium shape. Currently, Rhinox do not manufacture v buckets but some of the popular manufacturers of this bucket on the market include Bucket Warehouse and Digbits.
7. Frost Bucket / Hardpan Bucket
A frost bucket or hardpan bucket looks and performs similarly to a rock bucket but has a bonus feature...a ripper tooth style attachment fitted to the reverse of the bucket. Depending on the manufacturers design, they might fit multiple of these ripper teeth features, with the purpose of these to further increase the digging ability. They provide additional penetration to help break up extremely compacted grounds, where your standard digging or rock bucket can't quite cut it - helping to loosen rocks and other aggregates as the bucket curls round. Rhinox do not manufacture frost buckets.
8. Micro Trenching Bucket
The micro trenching bucket, also known as a deep dig or fibre optic bucket, is a deeper, narrower bucket than any other. The micro trenching bucket was initially designed for digging narrow trenches for the installation of fibre optic cables but is now used for a variety of applications, such as laying standard cables, pipes and irrigation. The main benefit of the micro trenching bucket is the time spent digging, backfilling and remediating surfaces. The amount of time taken to dig out the initial trench is drastically reduced alongside a reduction in the amount of time spent backfilling the area you have dug out. You can also save large amounts of money on materials usually required to reinstate the surface to it's initial condition, such as retarmacking a public footpath. Rhinox micro trenching buckets are available for 0.75 to 4 ton mini diggers, in 3", 4", 5" and 6" widths at depths of 400mm and 700mm (15" and 27").
9. Riddle Bucket
The riddle bucket is also referred to as the skeleton bucket due to its design or a shaker bucket due to the action required to use it. Riddle buckets are manufactured with a slotted back and used for separating different sizes of material, for example removing bricks and roots from soil. They are primarily used on building sites to remove larger aggregates from the ground to be reused or recycled. Most often, it's more cost effective to separate the aggregates on-site and arrange for their collection or repurposing, rather than disposing of them as mixed aggregates. Rhinox riddle buckets are manufactured using a similar design to our standard digging buckets which allows us to produce a variety of sizes, from 24" to 60" wide, to suit 0.75 to 25 ton excavators.
The rake riddle bucket is a combination of your standard land clearance rake and a riddle bucket. Also known as the rake bucket, the rake riddle bucket is a shallow bucket with a slotted back and narrow tines along the front edge. As the name suggest, the rake riddle bucket allows you to rake through materials in the ground like tree roots or brambles and then riddle the material of bricks and larger rocks in one movement. The rake riddle bucket is designed to save you money as you not only save space required to store two separate excavator attachments, you also save money on purchasing and maintaining two separate attachments. Rhinox rake riddles buckets are currently available for 0.75 to 8 ton excavators.
In conclusion, excavator buckets come in various shapes and sizes, each tailored to meet specific construction, excavation and landscaping challenges. From standard digging buckets to specialised attachments for rock excavation, grading and trenching, these versatile tools are essential for maximising efficiency and productivity on sites, as well as saving you money on repairing or replacing damaged buckets. Understanding the unique features and applications of different types of excavator buckets ensures smooth and successful project execution.
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