Buying Guide - Excavating Buckets

Excavating Buckets : Heavy-duty and versatility

Excavating buckets are one of the most popular and polyvalent accessories you can use on any type of excavating machinery. They exist in a variety of sizes and shapes and are designed to the machine that will carry it and environment it will work in. Finally, they are engineered to provide optimal performances in all digging operations. We are proud to provide an extensive selection of brands such as Cat, Case, John Deere and so on.

Gentec Equipment provides you with a buying guide of buckets that will help you choose among a vast array of excavating jobs and find the one that is right for the job.

Digging Bucket

Most of the time, excavator buckets are made for digging in a medium; this capacity is reflected in particular features of their design. Whether they are made for digging loam, rock, or frost, buckets generally adhere to the rule that form follow function. First, digging buckets for soft soils have short, blunt teeth. On the other hand, for rock or frost, teeth are pointed and longer, to offer improved concentration of force and leverage for prying. Bucket width also tends to vary. In hard ground, a narrow bucket concentrates its ground penetrating forces along a shorter cutting edge. Another variable is the distance between the tooth tips and the stick bucket pin boss. Called the tip radius, this distance is generally shorter in buckets made for hard ground excavation. The shorter distance provides increased mechanical leverage for filling and curling the bucket.

Our recommendations :

• EXCAVATOR BUCKET 24" (DB2424)
• EXCAVATOR BUCKET 38" (DB3338)
• EXCAVATOR BUCKET 30" (DB2430)

Rock Bucket

The rock bucket is a variation of the digging bucket, with some design modifications for a particular application. Extreme service in ripping and prying rock needs a sturdy, heavily built structure generally equipped with longer and sharper teeth, mounted on a straight or V-shaped cutting edge. The rock bucket needs to have sufficient strength to focus power for prying and ripping rock loose while maintaining its structural integrity. Most of the time, these buckets appear narrower with a short tip radius, as compared to a general purpose, digging bucket used in softer materials.

V Bucket

The V Bucket is a digging bucket with a design that can afford energy savings and productivity gains in some applications. Instead of the square or rectangular geometry of the face of the standard dig bucket, the V-bucket has (as you have guessed it) a general V shaped digging face. The particular V-shape is comprised of three ground engaging surfaces, which are the bottom and two sides. The bottom cutting works on increasing the depth of th dig, while the side cutting edges shape the sides of the excavation. The bucket’s cheeks taper away from the cutting edges to make a bonnet-like shape to the scoop, which significantly reduces side drag as the structure moves through the excavation. With the angled sides of the V bucket, the operator can efficiently slope the ditch profile as the excavation goes on. This type of bucket is generally used in pipe laying excavation

Hardpan or Frost Buckets

Also called hardpan buckets, frost buckets are another great example of a specialty digging bucket that employs a part of the rock bucket’s design. However, it has ripper teeth mounted on the back of the bucket. Much like the rock bucket, the frost bucket is heavily made with pointy, sharp teeth, mounted on a straight or V shaped cutting edge.

Those ripper teeth added to the back of the bucket are built to loosen the compacted soil as the bucket is curled through the dig/load cycle; results the material being loosened by the ripper teeth can be pried out and scooped up in a subsequent pass of the bucket.

Cleanup Bucket

Most of the time, the cleanup bucket is essentially the digging bucket’s scoop portion, but without the teeth. Because this type of bucket is used in soft or well-loosened materials, it generally has a bigger capacity and is straight edged at the point of ground engagement. You may equip the ground engaging edge with a bolt on hardened plate steel blade to reduce wear and maintenance.

Finally, you can use the cleanup bucket in a variety of tasks, including sloping, leveling, ditching, backfilling, and sometine excavation where the softness of the material allows it.

Skeleton Bucket

The skeleton bucket is a specialized digging bucket modified to be like a grizzly bear mounted on an excavator. The width between the bars allow only a certain size aggregate to fall through, leaving the larger sizes parts in the buck. This particular bucket allows for a versatile and portable method of separating coarser and finer materials.

How to choose your excavating bucket

An excavating bucket represents quite an investment, so you have to look upon different factors prior to your purchase. Here are the main features you must look into :

• Machine’s purpose : Digging, backfilling, ditching, clearing ;
• Composition and density of the soil : Loams, clays, rocks, ice, sand.
• Machine’s design : Weight, configuration, power, etc.
• Bucket width, teeth, guarding, tip radius