Spent nearly 6 hours on the LX today mulching a large natural flower bed and undoing a mess I started nearly 20 years ago. Cleaned out a bunch of old punk and debris from a wash that goes across the property with the grapple. I've been dumping all the leaf waste and limbs and non-firewood trees in it just trying to keep it from eroding any more. SO, basically I cleaned up a mess in an afternoon that took me 20 years to make. Picked out the larger unrotted chunks and piled them farther back in the lot, and just raked the rotted stuff down to blend it with the soil. There were night crawler worms in that stuff that looked like small snakes. The soil under that stuff is fantastic after all the years of composting leaves, grass clippings, and anything I couldn't give to someone to burn in their fireplace.
My grapple is one built for/by LS tractors, model MCG-1154A. Not a heavy duty grapple at all, but it's doing everything I ask of it. It'll hold more than my LX can pick up. I moved two 14 foot logs from a tree with a 30 inch stump, so I'm not complaining. Bent the outside tines on the clamshell four times today while picking up heavier logs (which this grapple CLEARLY is not designed for). It normally happened when I grabbed something sort of end on and it twisted out of the grapple with the tine embedded. So when I knocked off for the day, I welded gussets on each tine to prevent them from bending again. I looked one time, and the right most tooth was pointed straight out to the right. Beat it back with a hammer each time, and decided if I was gonna be so rough with it, I better improve it before I broke it. Used 1" x 1/4" bar stock to make the gussets. Rubbed a little more paint off with a flapper wheel and used my little cheap wire welder to put 'em on. Not a professional looking weld job by any stretch of the imagination, but it'll keep the teeth from bending. Got the top jaw done, and may do the bottom as well, but the tines aren't as long as the top ones and they don't tend to bend as easily.