I have a set of Berlon Class II forks, 48" length, step-through, #5,500 and the taper is on the bottom. Haven't had them very long or gotten real rough with them, but they work fine for what I use them for. They seem to roll back enough for me. I went with them because they had the best mix of quality and price ...I didn't need super heavy-duty forks.
I'd say around here Bradco, Berlon and Virnig are the most popular non-oem buckets & forks a lot of dealers sell, but Bradco and Berlon will laser-cut other company's names in their product as well, so you might be buying one of their products even if it has another company's name printed on it. Bear in mind, most of these companies have a "regular" product that dealers buy a spring shipment of (and stock), and they usually steer guys to what they have in stock. But these brands also have much heavier-duty and even industrial grade forks available, for order ...but you're going to pay a higher price, wait a couple weeks, and pay shipping too. Just go to, say, Bradco's website and you'll see all the different forks they make. I guess, between the 3 companies I listed, if you were looking at a dealer's stock product, I'd go with Virnig just because they advertise in their literature they use grade 50 & Grade 80 steel in their products, the others don't specify on their webiste (they *might* use a higher grade than A36, but I didn't see any spec sheets listing it). It's higher strength steel. It's pretty unanimous among dealers I've talked to around here that Virnig makes the better product, especially buckets and their price is higher as well. If you look at them, you can see they make a pretty good bucket. That's not to say Bradco's heavy-duty bucket isn't similar, but the dealers around here pretty much say Virnig is high quality and their buckets are the better of what they normally stock. I use buckets as an example because most of the dealers I've stopped in at, don't stock Virnig forks, but DO stock their buckets, especially their tooth buckets. I would think that CAT would have a solid product too as their stuff is generally used on heavy construction projects and their customers lose $$ if there is downtime (but their forks could just as well be a higher-end Bradco re-brand in yellow paint to for all we know). At one large dealer around here, that sells a lot of different brands including Virnig, Bradco, Berlon and a few others, they covet new and used CAT buckets like solid gold when they get them in. They claim they are top notch ....so there may be something to that. As for fork roll-back, isn't the roll back of forks a big function of how far your skid loader's attachment plate rolls back from near-vertical?? Good luck, let us know what you end up with.
