Turbo21835
Senior Member
A lot has to do with application. House demo, yes a grapple will work. You will need a bucket to finish up though. So you dont have to switch to that with a thumb. If you have to switch to a hammer, you still have to take the thumb off, so there is no difference between a grapple and bucket/thumb there.
The kind of demo Demoguy324 is doing is heavy industrial. I know, We worked for the same outfit for a while, he got laid off and went out west. Few months later i got laid off and im still sitting at the house. Thats a whole nother story. A lot of the applictaions for a grapple cannot be done with a bucket/thumb. A lot of times you use the grapple to grab a hold of a beam, push, pull, twist and drag that iron off the building. You really cant do that with a bucket.
A lot of the time you are on a concrete slab. A big part of the job is using an I beam as a bulldozer blade. Rather that pick things up and throw them around, You push them into a pile. My job was sorting non ferrous metals and preping them for shipment. I would sit in front of the pile i was going through. Pick the various metals out and put them in a different place in my swing radius. Then with that beam, I would push that material to a bigger pile of that corrosponding metal. You could do it with a bucket/thumb. It would be a lot slower. You also have a hard time pushing a beam with a thumb, it doesnt hold stiff like a grapple does.
I can do anything with a grapple that you can do with a bucket/thumb. As long as i have a lot of material I can load debris out just the same, until I get down to the last 10 yards of material. Someone said something about concrete block. We would track over it with the hoe, them pile it up with a beam. Leaves us good crushed concrete for fill.
As I have said, the both have a place in demo, but a bucket/thumb doesnt have a place in heavy industrial demo.
The kind of demo Demoguy324 is doing is heavy industrial. I know, We worked for the same outfit for a while, he got laid off and went out west. Few months later i got laid off and im still sitting at the house. Thats a whole nother story. A lot of the applictaions for a grapple cannot be done with a bucket/thumb. A lot of times you use the grapple to grab a hold of a beam, push, pull, twist and drag that iron off the building. You really cant do that with a bucket.
A lot of the time you are on a concrete slab. A big part of the job is using an I beam as a bulldozer blade. Rather that pick things up and throw them around, You push them into a pile. My job was sorting non ferrous metals and preping them for shipment. I would sit in front of the pile i was going through. Pick the various metals out and put them in a different place in my swing radius. Then with that beam, I would push that material to a bigger pile of that corrosponding metal. You could do it with a bucket/thumb. It would be a lot slower. You also have a hard time pushing a beam with a thumb, it doesnt hold stiff like a grapple does.
I can do anything with a grapple that you can do with a bucket/thumb. As long as i have a lot of material I can load debris out just the same, until I get down to the last 10 yards of material. Someone said something about concrete block. We would track over it with the hoe, them pile it up with a beam. Leaves us good crushed concrete for fill.
As I have said, the both have a place in demo, but a bucket/thumb doesnt have a place in heavy industrial demo.