Changing an Excavator Bucket

Excavators are one of the most useful and most versatile plant hire machines that you can have on your construction site. Not only are they quite easy to use, but they are also flexible, which means that the machine can be used for a larger variety of tasks. This allows the person or company using the excavator to customise it according to whatever work needs to be done.

At Fast Pulse Plant Hire, we have a selection of fantastic excavators available for you to hire. These excavators come with the option of changing the bucket to suit certain tasks, although we do encourage clients to rather talk to us about how to change the bucket, or to come to us to do the change for them. If you own your own excavator or if you are just looking to learn how to change this part of the excavator, then this is the blog for you.

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5 Steps to Change an Excavator Bucket

Remove the bucket

The first step is also the easiest. To remove the bucket, you will want to make sure that the bucket is level to the floor or whichever surface you are working with, and then you should remove the safety pin and lift up the dipper. This should loosen the bucket and make it possible to do the next step.

Move the replacement bucket into position

The next step involves making sure that the new bucket is on a level surface. It would be ideal to make sure that the bucket is in line with the excavator so that the dipper can easily reach the bucket when the time comes to attach it. You can then align the dipper to the excavator.

Bucket Link

The next step is to drop the bucket link so that it is close to the bucket’s rear pivot. From there you will be able to align the pinhole with the pivot’s pinholes which are at the rear of the bucket you are attaching. You will now be able to insert the rear pin which will secure the new bucket to your excavator. When that is done, you can lift the dipper until the bucket is hovering off the ground and this will ensure that the pin is properly in place.

Insert the front pin

You can now position the dipper at an angle while retracting the ram. This is going to make the dipper end pinhole align with the front bucket pivot pinhole and from there you can insert the front pin. Once that is done, you should check that everything is secure and in place, and then give everything some grease.