Choosing a Bucket for Track and Wheel Loaders
Most loaders will come with a bucket already equipped, but this is usually a general-use design. While a utilitarian bucket will do good work and move a lot of earth and material around, specialized jobs greatly benefit from specialized equipment. Picking the wrong bucket or just a cheap bucket won’t necessarily lead you down a solid path. At Synergy Equipment, we believe pairing the right equipment with the right job makes all the difference in the world. In that spirit, we’ve put together this short guide to loader buckets. Keep reading for more information or head into one of our locations in Florida and Georgia.
Types of Loader Buckets
Finding the right bucket begins at knowing what’s out there to choose from. Here are a few of the most common buckets.
General-Purpose
These types of buckets come standard on most loaders. They’re heavy-duty attachments designed to maximize filling and material retention. General-purpose buckets handle a variety of jobs well and are especially fit for stockpiling and rehandling material.
Multipurpose
As the name suggests, these buckets are versatile and can handle several types of operation, from dozing to material transport, backfilling and dragging, grading, grappling, excavating, dumping, and whatever else you can get to work!
Light Material
Designed to deal with loose or lightly packed material, light material buckets are great for peat, snow, wood chips, and gravel.
Rock Bucket
Rock buckets are designed specially to deal with heavier and more agitating material like concrete debris, rock, and other applications that need durable construction to handle them.
There are more than just these four, but most are for such specific applications that they aren’t worth mentioning. Just know that no matter what you have in mind for your loader, there’s likely a bucket designed specifically for handling that job.
Material Density
Perhaps the best way to figure out what type of bucket to go with is to look at the average density of the material you’ll be dealing with. There’s no sense going with a bucket that can’t handle the basics of the work you have in mind. If you know you’ll be handling a variety of materials, go with a bucket based on the heaviest, densest material. You also have to be aware of the loader’s working payload, as pushing any piece of equipment past its operational limits causes additional wear, damage, and reduces efficiency of the work.
Matching Bucket to Application
While this might seem like a bunch of noise over unimportant details, having the right bucket for your track or wheel loader can decrease the number of passes it takes to get a job done. So if you’re working with a wide range of materials, you might want to focus on general purpose buckets. However, if you have work to do with the loader that isn’t just general purpose material transport, you could use a multipurpose bucket. Larger loads of loose material will be best served by a specialized light material bucket.
Multiple Buckets
If you don’t mind spending more, you can always purchase more than one type of bucket. There are quality quick-change mechanisms that can be installed in loaders that make it easy to change from one type of bucket to another. You can even go further and get a quick coupler so operators can change loadouts without getting out of the cab.
Picking out the right loader bucket doesn’t have to be hard, but if you’re still having trouble don’t hesitate to head into Synergy Equipment at one of our locations in Florida and Georgia. We can help you make the best decision possible based on the work you do. Come in today and speak with our dedicated team of experts ready to help you find what you’re looking for. We also proudly serve our neighbors in South Carolina!