How To Use A Root Grapple On A Compact Utility Tractor:
Hi, I’m Ted from Everything Attachments and we’re today with our new little subcompact or compact tractor root grapple. We specifically designed it to be ultra-light and ultra-strong instead of a standard steel like in A36, we’re using a grade 80 steel with a 90,000-yield strength on it.

And we’re just able to keep the weight out of the grapple, put some holes in the grapple because it doesn’t affect the forces that come down on straight. We’ve gusseted the ends, just barely here at the tube to give it some strength, but we’ve not put the big V shape gussets in it. Where the smaller tractors can still rake through the ground with it and get the roots out.

Now this Grapple has got a new feature, and we’re gonna add this to our grapples, it has a tab at the back and a tab at the front. Where a bar can be bolted in there. Our normal spacing on our bigger grapples is seven and a half inches, on this one it’s 10 inches to keep the weight down. And then we added a slat where you can put in there and it’ll bring your spacing down if you’re getting up small debris to five inches. It only adds about 19 pounds to the grapple when you put the slats in. Without the slats, right now it’s weighing 254 pounds. That’s the cylinder hoses coupler and the complete grapple. Now this is our prototype. It’s still bare metal and it hasn’t been painted or anything, we’ll eventually paint it after we’re through testing everything.

I cut a 10-inch treat down yesterday and with no problem, grabbed it with the front, and was able to pull it up a hill. It’s about a 45, 50-foot tree here behind us. Pulled it all the way around the house and didn’t have to touch, it was great. We also just because it’s on a smaller tractor and hopefully you won’t be using 20 or 24-inch trees as far as trying to pull them out of something. So we lowered these teeth down to where a smaller tree will still get a good grip. And because it only has one cylinder and it’s meant for small tractors which the smaller the tractor normally has a smaller gallons per minute of hydraulic flow. And with the one cylinder it really opens and closes super-fast. So the one lid deal, I’m liking it more and more, the more I operated it.

Everything I moved here I did in about 30 minutes with this thing the day before. Picked up all these railroad ties that were from the rim of my father’s garden here. This house reminds me of the movie “The Lake House.” It was a father built and designed when I was 10 years old. This is where we came for the summer, me, and all my teenage friends used to come to have a good time. Dad said, all I did was burn the gas out of the boat and mess the house up. So now he had sold it a few years ago and I bought it back, and now I’m glad to have it back as my house and this is where I’m gonna continue to live on Lake Norman. But it’s a small little house and I wanna get some pictures of it because this particular house was hit by a tree and we’re actually gonna tear it down and rebuild. So it’ll be a lot of memories it’ll go away eventually here.

But this one has the standard universal quick attach on it so to go in anything with a quick attach. We also are making it with the John Deere hitch and that’s the two hooks at the top. The dowel pins that come through your faceplate where you put your lynch pins to hold it down. And just because of popularity, we’re probably going to have to come up with the two or three main pin on connections for the smaller Kubotas, they weren’t offered with the quick attach. That’s one of the things…this is one of the smallest tractors they come standard with a quick attach, I really like the quick attach almost Bobcat.

This is a CT 122. And it’s not all about horsepower when it comes to the rating your grapples and stuff. It’s really about weight, in other words, this is only a 22 to 23 horsepower tractor. But it outweighs a 33 horsepower B Series Kubota. So weight is probably the ultimate pulling factor, horsepower is gonna be your ultimate PTO power you got out the back. This is our utility grade box blade which outweighs our compact box plate by a little bit. Now this tractor surely doesn’t need that, the compact blade would be fine. But because I knew we were gonna be lifting some heavy stuff, I wanted the heavier box plate just simply for ballast.

So a couple of the guys on TractorByNet, I’ve heard then say, “Well I’ve never been able to pick up the back end of my tractor when I’m using my grapple, it’s not a big deal.” And then the next guy would say “Well then you’ve never fully loaded your grapple because that’s gonna happen to you.” And the truth of it is, even if your loader won’t pick up the back end with the strength, if you get up the load, that’s even close to the lift to your loader, at some point you’re gonna hit a dip or a bump or something where the load is gonna get a shock, and it’s going to pick up the back end.

Now the one thing you don’t… if you’re up high and you’ve got your button that that releases the grapple, you will never outrun this thing turning over by releasing your load. If you’ve got a load in this and your back end comes up, the first thing you need to do is try to see how fast you can get your loader back on the ground. Because what most people don’t understand is, even though a tractor does have suspension, the front axle is hinged on a pin. And so as soon as the back end comes off the ground, you’re now on a hinge that wants to go one way or the other. Once it starts to go and your loaders is high enough off the ground, you’re gonna go over. So the only thing you can do to save it is get the loader back on the ground, and that’ll bring the rear end back down and bring back tractor straight.

I’m not ever gonna say it’s a good practice to be howling enough that your rear ends coming off the ground some, but I’m sure you’re gonna see that today in some of these videos. And I’ll either drop the loader or drop a little of the load out of it. But it happens and you just gotta be aware that when it does lift, it’s a real good possibility you can turn your tractor over. So we’re gonna do some grappling, we’re gonna move some stuff. All four of these trees here, we’re gonna take out. So let’s get some grappling going on and just show you. A lot of people sometimes they want these times to overlap but after using this, where I can get a pinch on to any log, a railroad tire, a stick three inches, pick it up like a toothpick. This is the way to go in my opinion, I really like it.

So we’re gonna pick up some of this railroad ties out of here, probably just one at a time, we’ll get a couple out, we’re gonna get them loaded on that truck over there. And we’re gonna slowly clear this out right before we start taking out these trees.

So the 10x tree that we cut down first on the other side of the house and pulled up out of there with no problem, it’s buried in the bottom of this pile but that’s what we’re gonna try, as a good test, to pull it out of here. And then we’re gonna cut it up with some electric chainsaw from Oregon. And I’ve got two of them here and they have been amazing. A lot of people think an electric chainsaw doesn’t do much but you’re gonna be surprised.

It’s got a lot of stuff on top of it. On top of it here.
We’ll get rid of this heavy piece right here. I’m on the tree. You gotta remember, this is less than 1000-pound lift capacity tractor.

We’re gonna put all of the rough…the main wood here on the trailer and we’re gonna put all the brush and the pile for now, till I bring out my dump trailer.

So this is a lot more tree, then this little tractor won’t [inaudible 0:08:53].

See now there’s not much left in that pile, I can get pretty easy. The truck is in my way. And you can just see how fast this thing opens and closes on this little tractor, with the single lead, it’s great.

That’s actually as high as this little loader lifts, I’m gonna push everything over a little. Hey Peanut, get rid of this one rim here while I’m hitting it on the top. I’ll go ahead and grab it.

Oh, well maybe I’ll just grip it off. Oh yes.

And that’s where the Oregon electric chainsaw and they are really quiet for your neighbors.

And that battery will cut rims like this for a solid hour or more, and I’ve got several batteries here and I just keep the batteries charged and keep on going.

And we’ll do a couple of things here on this rims before we cut them, just to see what we do on…if this thing will tear up or not, if we really try.

For a little 24 horsepower tractor, the weight of this tractor is really good. This is really the same as…it is a Bobcat but it’s very similar to a coyote, I think it would be a DK24. The South Korean tractor just because if the money exchange over a Japanese tractor, and we are Kabuto dealer. I love the quality of the Kubota but they have really lightened them up a lot to try to stay competitive, since our dollar is not very good against the Japanese yen. I’m not sure what I gotta hold up here, maybe nothing.

I gotta get this other big tree off of it.

See, now that’s an example of tipping over and having to get it down to keep safe. I’ll grab it a little further over. I’m up under some other stuff, on this other end, all that stuff.

All right, go ahead and cut it, Peanut, right there and we’ll cut it right there.
I’m gonna get this on this one side just because I don’t wanna get in my neighbor driveway there too much.

Try to keep the load, especially when they are uneven like this and you’re on uneven hill as low as possible. If I have to I’ll drop it into this truck. I’m gonna tilt it down and see if I can get it to shift that log a little bit.

I’m gonna get rid of some of these railroad ties here.

This is not gonna get through.

I’m able to drag it right under the ground there to make sure I get at the bottom…go around. I wish I had more height on this little tractor.

I see a big railroad spike in this one and I don’t wanna get a hold of it in my tires.

I’m sure as me doing it by hand, each one of these are railroad ties, they are old and soaked up moisture here, they weigh a few 100 pounds apiece. Once we get all this debris out, we’ll start cutting these trees down.

Mr. Peanut armored all my seat for me last week and it kind of sleek. All right now, come on out of here.

like this don’t have the height to lift up out there, once I got it piled on there, it’s making it a little difficult. The [inaudible 00:21:38] has about seven-foot lift or something on the loader. I’m not really worried about this trailers side rails.

Come on man, get up.

We’re gonna make all this, loose rims here stay in our brush piles up in the dump trailer.

All right. Just to see if it’ll do it. This is the last thing, this is how grapples get bent but were… since this is just a prototype, it will bend it, we’ll make another one and learn from it. I’m just gonna see what it’ll do here.

I can be a little hard on things sometimes.

I’m gonna get it off there.

There we go. And we’ll just simply check the tongs and stuff in a little bit and make sure they are all straight.

Okay. So even after tearing of that eight-inch rim and you shouldn’t do that, and that put a lot of twist on a lot of things and that’s what bends grapples, with this grade 80 steel, it still opens and closes perfectly. All the teeth are fully matched up. So far we hadn’t bend a thing. That’s not that I recommend to do what I did but it’s just something we’re doing to see exactly how strong we are are here.
We’ll do single opens. Come on, really?

That’s the way you get it.
All right. So we got rid of this whole pile, that took me a good while to get here, except for the one tree after I went and got my grapple done in about 10 minutes. And we’re gonna start cutting them down and hollow them out. Now that is that hard.

There went my fiberglass top too, special. We’ll trim that off with the chainsaw a little bit.
Do as I say not necessarily as I do.
So today we came out here to take out all these trees. I got about seven trees I’d previously cut of similar size. We got them loaded up. I’ve used it a few times on this cherry tree here just tearing off eight-inch rims. And that’s a lot to ask even of this little tractor. In fact, the grapple held up without a scratch no bends, no nothing, we did blow hose on the tractor on the lift of the loader. So for right now we’re bend with the water with the tractor. We’re gonna finish cutting these trees down with chainsaws and then we’re going to come back tomorrow and start at it, and our trailer is about full anyway. Looks like we’re gonna have three trailer loads out of here to get these four trees out.

But so far, between what I did over the weekend when I didn’t have my guys come work with me, and what we’ve done here today I think you can tell that you can give these things a little bit of abuse with this 80-grade steel in it and it still will survive.

A lot of people wanna put this on bigger tractors, I kind of…this tractor would hold up for most people on a 50-horsepower tractor with no problem. But what I really try to do when we make different grades, a small compact to medium, a utility, a heavy, what I’m really trying to accomplish is, if you use it on what I recommend, I try to build it where I don’t care what you do, it won’t bend.

So if you keep going bigger on the tractor, at some point, of course you can bend it but you were gonna be way over the recommended spec when you bend this grapple. Because I don’t think any tractor under 35 horsepower, a class two or smaller is capable of bending this grapple. I think the grapple stronger than your tractor and withstand any of the loads that you may… it’s not just the horsepower of your tractor, “Oh, I messed up, I was running eight miles an hour and I hit that whole tree,” things like that.

So with a 35 horsepower tractor, unless I say this grapple survives it. With a 55-horsepower tractor and used properly, it’ll be fine, but my goal is to just not let it tear up. So when you keep it to the recommendations, it’s pretty much indestructible, past that I think it’ll do most anything but it’s up to you after that.

We hope to be getting that. We hadn’t been in the field doing a lot of videos lately, we’ve gotten past spring, our factories in full production, and we’re definitely going back to making videos for you. And for us to show off our products, all the gardening products and stuff that we’ve done, the videos that have been on YouTube for the last five years are mostly from other manufacturers. We have made a lot of attachments in the last year, and we just simply have not had the time to show off on how to use our new attachments.

So that’s where we’re gonna start, and from the box blade to how to plow, to everything, but it’ll be done with our equipment and our grapples instead of other manufacturers grapples.

We’ve just simply tried to make a superior product for you and without the reps and the dealers and the distributors and everybody that’s in between it, we can simply buy better steel, make a better product and deliver to you cheaper than any of the major manufacturers. And that’s where you win and I win, and it’s a joint venture together.

Everything Attachments loves all its customers that have been so loyal to us, we’ve really had a great year this year and all our YouTube videos, we really wanna get some back up for you to watch. Thanks a lot.