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The Ultimate Lightweight Wicked grapple for Kubota BX subcompact tractors.
HI I'm Ted from Everything Attachments, and we're here with our latest edition to our new Wicked Grapple Line. This is our smallest grapple we've made to date and the lightest, one specifically made for the BX Tractor. We are going to offer this, this is a 48 inch rake style grapple. We do have a 50 inch already in a root rake style, with the longer bottoms. But with this rake style especially, on a small tractor like this it's going to keep your load really close the tractor. We've kept the weight down to this to under 150 pounds.
We've really worked hard at doing some special things on this grapple, we've looked at the Land Pride Grapple that's similar to this. We've added a little meat where it needed to be, we've actually ended up with less weight than what they advertise theirs as. But we've checked everything on the Land Pride, and we'll show you where we've checked the thicknesses of everything, and we're the same or thicker. We're definitely using AR400 steel for all of the rake tines, front and top, and we've put these nice grippers here. Because for the rake style you've got so much lid there, but you do have the dual cylinders, these are the same heavy duty four inch stroke cylinders that we use on our compact grapple that go on tractors up to 50 horsepower.
So you're going to have a lot of clamping force. We've made some things, some changes from the Land Pride grapple, simply for durability and some things we wanted to do. We increased these gussets to go all the way to the top. I didn't really like having that single bar back there where it didn't have any support to the rear cylinder, and it was only a two inch piece of steel. So I increased that by 3/8th's of an inch to give it a little more strength, even though it's the AR400 metal, it needed a little bit there in my opinion.
We've also raised the tines just a little bit here, so we're not cutting out so much of this AR420 to get to the main tube frame, so it's a little thicker here. All of the teeth are on the outside of what like the Land Pride is, so it gives you a little more meat. We didn't actually cut into the meat and take away some. We've increased the hinge-pin here by an inch and a half, to give it more support and we've only allowed an eighth of an inch of clearance there so it has to be right, where the Land Pride had over a half an inch of slop, not to mention, we've also sized this material here, which is a DOM tubing, to the size of a three quarter inch bolt, where it actually has 30 thousandths clearance, it's nice and tight, the other grapple, I'm going to show you later, it's just loose and floppy, they advertise a 30 inch opening and the only way you're going to get 30 inches is if you manually hold it open because it kind of droops down another inch with all that play in it.
So we've added a grease fit in here, we've got it to where when it's fully opened and you would be back dragging and raking and so forth, that this piece of AR400 is actually touching the back of the frame right when the cylinder bottoms out, so when you're raking it's duly supported and you're not going to be bending anything when you're pulling backwards on this.
We've put our wicked in here. Now I've seen this grapple on the internet as a Land Pride, and it seems like they've gone through at least four or five different versions. Because at first these pieces that hold the lid were just packed on to the top, and they were only welded on one side. And every attachments we double-weld everything, we don't tack weld, we don't stitch weld, if it's there we weld it. So on the newer grapple that we've got here sitting on the floor, and we'll show you, they did come down and give it some support on one side, but not on the other. So, that's fine, you know, one side is for your crimping force you need, the other side when you rake is needed. So we did it on both sides, it's double welded on both sides. I've seen this piece here on some grapples, it has a piece in it on the Land Pride, on some it doesn't. The last one we got, it's the latest version that I know if, it doesn't have this piece in here at all, and it's kind of needed just to keep the whole grapple from tweaking around, and it was a good place to put our wicked logo. And that's still made out of the AR400 steel there.
When you take this off because of the way it's designed, it's a fairly short attachment to start with, this is sloped up. so to take it on and off with pins now, if there is a quick attach we offer for this, it adds about 40 pounds to the tractor, but it's a really nice feature, and once we have our 54 inch grapple and our universal hitch you would be able to use it with the quick attach which is nice over these pins. But to be able to take this on and off and to have to work with these pins, we've got the nice stand similar to Land Pride has where you can simple drop this down, lock this in place and they're on both sides, that way you can put this down safely and get your pins out without having to fight it falling on you the whole time.
Another thing we've done, Land Pride uses a bushing between this stand, and it's only held from one side. Which you either crush this into the bushing and make it so tight that it's not really secure, I didn't like that so we welded another tab on the other side to keep it fully supported from both sides, instead of just putting a bushing in it and a bolt and held from one side. So this is a nice feature, makes it easy to put on and off your tractor so when you're having to do your pins, it just makes it easier.
The pins on this, because this is a three cylinder design. The pins that go in your original bucket are shorter, they don't have near as much balls, this you're going to really use hard, you know, when you're using this type of stuff and want to rake through the ground. So we custom make the pins, they're longer, they go all the way to the end of the bushings there, they're welded on. The center cylinder, it's a lot bigger diameter, and it is a very close to the bottom pins which means it takes a lot of abuse just for one cylinder, that's why it's so big in diameter versus two little ones on the side, which most bigger tractors have. So it's an inch and three sixteenths pin that goes through that, we custom make that. There's a lot of push there, that's why I was not wanting to take out this plate here, I know that pin and this tube and everything are going to take a lot of abuse, and this plate's going to make it twice as strong where none of this moves around in here.
So we've put as much...also in the plumbing, now this is the third time I've plumbed this thing, and this is the second grapple I've built to get the things I wanted right and get the geometry right, but we're 30 inches of opening and as you can see, you can't push it up anymore because our grapple simply fits right and it's tight. If we go to the plumbing, they're using a JIC and I've had this battle with people over tractor by net. We use pipe fittings on all of our grapples, we simply have zero problems so I'm, on this one we keep all types of Parker fittings and hose here of every size, so we can do what we want. We put the JIC fittings on this, we decided it would be easier, quicker and we're trying to keep it, you know, as inexpensive as we can, but then after moving it a few times, and trying to work it a little bit we had a couple fittings come loose. Just didn't like it and just went back to the extra work of plumbing it with pipe fittings.
And we'll show you some pictures of that on the back, so it's plumbed like our regular Wicked Grapples. We feel 100% safe doing it that way instead of the JIC way. Even though that's quicker. So with this extra support and everything for the lid, and so for the BX ones we are going to go through the...it's a little more trouble but we're going to paint them Kubota Orange so they match your nice little tractor. We're also going to make it in a 54 inch, which is needed if it goes on the small...the same size of sub-compact tractor on the John Deere, there's just not enough room on a 48 to put a John Deere Hitch on it. So we will have this same grapple in a 54, and then we will also have it in a standard quick attach on the 54 because it takes more room to do that also. So we will be increasing our grapples here very shortly on this style of rake grapple.
The cylinders that we're using, the four inch cylinders that we're using, when I look at the Land Pride, you know, they're called a tie-rod cylinder, and that's got the four rods that hold it all together and it's all cast iron, steel cylinder instead of an aluminum cylinder. And I just like everything about that better. The tie rods on this and the heavy-dutiness of our cylinders are like a third bigger tie rods and just a much heavier cylinder, it's what we use on our bigger grapples, so I'm sure we're not going to have any problem there, and it's going to give you your maximum crimping force and with that extra steel that we've added into it, and we've still ended up with less weight than what's in the Land Pride, and I think that's pretty easy to figure that they just don't have their weight exactly right.
Maybe, it's a shipping weight or something like that. A lot of companies try to make their attachments, they want them to be heavier because it sounds like you're getting more for your money or its heavier duty. But on grapples, I want mine to be as strong as they can, but as light as they can be, just simply so you can do more work. When you've got this size of tractor, every 20 pounds you can push and pick up is the difference between a yes and no sometimes. And Nate's going to pan around o the back. We've got our new little landscape rake on the back, and so between the grapple and landscape rake this is really just a little clean machine. You can do everything, you now, from the front and clean up and get the main debris out of the way, and then we're going to show you here in just a minute our new landscaping rake on the back with the gauge wheels, and that really does make your sub-compact tractor something that becomes a tool that'll actually do some work for you. These are not just overgrown lawn mowers, they're a machine that needs real attachments to do real work, and at Everything Attachments this is what we specialize in. Give us a call or an email, and we'll make sure that you get the right grapple and attachments for your tractor.
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Love my new grapple 
