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Cat® excavator attachments help owner-operators get the most out of their investment in heavy machinery, providing valuable tools to maximize productivity, minimize efforts and ensure adequate safety on the job.
This excavator attachments guide covers the top work tools that help excavator owners get the highest performance out of their machines. We also offer some tips on how to choose the right attachments for your line of work and detail the steps to safely change your work tools. You’ll also learn why Cat attachments give you a competitive advantage by providing you with a total systems solution.
Excavators are highly versatile, rugged and high-performing pieces of construction equipment, relied upon for digging, trenching, grading, drilling and more. Though excavators are impressive machines on their own, the key to leveraging the productivity and versatility that the excavator provides is choosing the right work tool to attach to your excavator.
Operators can swap out excavator attachments depending on the nature of the work they’re performing. Excavator attachments range from simple tools like a standard material bucket to specialized tools for gritty work, such as demolition, shearing or pulverizing. Excavator attachments also come in a variety of sizes, configurations and power ratings, allowing equipment owners to match work tools to their excavator to get the maximum performance possible.
Though excavators are primarily used as earthmoving machines, thanks to the variety of work tools available today, they can tackle a host of jobs across a range of industries and settings. From demolition to concrete cutting to landscaping to utility installations, excavators can do it all once equipped with the right type of attachment.
Before investing in new work tools, explore the following attachments for Cat excavators to ensure you select the most useful one for your needs.
A bucket is one of the best attachments for your excavator because of its multi-purpose abilities. With excavator buckets, you can take on the following range of light to severe duties:
Caterpillar manufactures several types of buckets designed for specialized applications. From digging buckets to ditch-cleaning buckets to clean-up buckets, excavator buckets help you accomplish various tasks with ease.
Excavator thumb attachments provide operators with precision control when hauling material, loose debris, rock and other bulky items. Thumbs are an opposing attachment that work with the excavator bucket to allow operators to pick up and hold working materials better. Use a thumb whenever working with material that doesn’t fit securely into an open bucket.
As with excavator buckets, thumbs come in a variety of configurations designed for special applications. Thumbs can either be mechanical or hydraulic. Mechanical or stiff-link thumbs are set manually but are compatible with other hydraulically powered attachments. Hydraulic thumbs provide superior control and precision, allowing operators to grab materials of different sizes and adjust the grip accordingly.
A material handling alternative to a thumb attachment is the grapple attachment. Grapples are particularly useful in demolition work, where operators need to sort through vast amounts of material and debris. When you need to load vegetation, brush and other material after lot clearing and site preparation, grapples make the job much more efficient. Grapples are also used in forestry to move logs, as well as in industrial applications to carry pipes.
Grapples work like a jaw, with a rigid main structure and two moving jaws on either side of the frame. The frame itself is typically mounted to another component called a rotator, which allows operators to turn grapples in the optimal position for picking up the working material.
When you need to break through solid material, such as concrete, rock or steel, hammer attachments for excavators are up for the job. Delivering high-impact breaking force, hammers come in different blows-per-minute capacities, depending on the material you’re working with and your production needs. High-capacity hammers can deliver 1,000 blows per minute.
Hammer attachments offer a way to break up materials in tight spaces, delivering precision when you need to reach a particular area of a structure for renovations or upgrades. They’re also useful when preparing a site for new construction or in quarry and mining operations.
Compactor attachments provide a way to build solid platforms for construction, including roadbuilding, trenching and embankments. With a compactor attachment, operators can compact soil and other loose materials quickly and efficiently.
Cat compactors come in a vibratory plate or drum configuration. Vibratory plate compactors act as a large stamp, delivering high-impact blows to one small working area at a time. Vibratory drum compactors roll over a working surface like a rolling pin. A third type of compactor is a wheel compactor, which uses the machine’s weight to apply downward force that compacts the soil.
Shears are high-performance ripping and shredding attachments used in demolition capacities. With high-powered jaws, shears can cut through solid materials like structural steel, rebar, scrap metals and other building materials. Equip your excavator with shears during primary or secondary demolition applications, whether it’s during building demolition, in junkyards or for automobile or aircraft demolition.
Cat shears come in different lengths and configurations, with some providing 360-degree rotation for further precision material shearing.
Multi-processor attachments act as powerful jaws that cut and break apart materials during demolition. Multi-processors provide a set of interchangeable jaws that offer extreme versatility, capable of performing numerous types of demolition tasks.
Use multi-processors for cutting, shearing and pulverizing to get a convenient all-in-one work tool. When equipping your excavator with a multi-processor, you can maximize your machine’s performance by increasing its utility. The result is greater productivity, reduced downtime and minimized operating costs.
Pulverizers are another high-performing demolition work tool for your excavator. These attachments crush up demolished materials to make them easier to separate from other salvageable material that gets preserved or recycled.
Caterpillar manufactures two types of pulverizers — one for primary demolition and one for secondary demolition. Use primary pulverizers for the initial demolition of buildings, bridges and other structures. Apply secondary pulverizers when you need to strip out usable materials or when processing previously demolished parts.
Couplers for excavators make it easy to change between work tools to save you time and energy. Quick coupling reduces costly downtime, makes production efficient and improves worksite safety.
Using a quick coupler is ideal for projects where excavator operators are performing different types of jobs frequently. When you need to shear a building for demolition and hammer out its concrete foundation, a quick coupler allows you to transfer between these two applications seamlessly.
Quick couplers range in features from simple mechanical coupling and pin-grabber couplers to hydraulic couplers, offering varying degrees of speed and efficiency.
Knowing which attachments are available and how they each work is only part of the decision-making process. It’s equally important to consider the