Tractor Brush/Tree Grapple

[Viny]

Hello. I have a Kubota M4700 tractor with a LA1001 front loader. This has been a great tractor and I have used it for many years. As I have many trees on my property, years ago I added a grapple to the bucket to assist with moving larger trees, etc to the burn pile. After that, I added some screw-clamp forks to the bucket to carry larger loads. I would typically stack many limbs on the forks and pinch them with the grapple and take them to the burn pile. I used this setup for years and it was fine.

Then I stumbled onto the Pat's Quick Hitch system for the 3 pt. hitch and added that and it pretty much changed my life in changing implements on the back of the tractor. Then I started thinking about doing something similar to the front loader. After some research, I found that I could remove the bucket, add a skid steer adapter plate and pretty much pick up any skid steer front end accessory available. Wow! I don't know why I didn't do this years ago, but I purchased an adapter plate, installed it and converted my bucket to the skid steer setup.

I then removed the grapple and the forks and decided to make a dedicated Grapple that didn't include the limitations of the Frankenstein version I had used for so long. Here is a picture of the grapple/fork combination mounted to the tractor.



Here's a picture of the grapple with a piece of tin wired on to catch the smaller branches that would fall through the larger openings.



Here's a picture of the grapple holding a large tree on the way to the burn pile!



I was happy it could carry this heavy a load without very much reinforcement to the points where the forks meet the vertical frame. I did, however, over stress it by digging the forks too deep into the ground before lifting a different log. I then took it back to the shop and welded some reinforcing angle iron pieces on the top and bottom (front/back?) of the lower corner. I believe this will do the trick for most of what I'm working on...