bx24 homemade thumb

[sawmill]

I built a thumb for my bx24. I just wanted something light duty, mainly to pull up small saplings and pick up piles of limbs, etc. and take them to the burn pile. (save a little work on my old back). I did take it out back and picked up a log approx 600 lbs, the thumb didn't brake off. I guess that's a good thing.
The piece I welded onto the boom is a piece of seamless reciever tube 5" long.
the 'stinger' is 1/4 wall 2" square tubing 16" long. The diagonal brace is 3/8 x 2
flat bar. The piece with the teeth is 5" channel 5" long. I drilled a series of 1/2" holes then cut through the center of the holes to make the teeth. When I pull the pin, the only thing on the boom is the reciever tube. As you can see in the pics, I didn't weld across the boom. I think it will serve my purpose.
The paint is Rustoleum Lobster Red. Pretty good match.

 

[bxray]

Looks nice and handy!
Are you going to make another arm at a diffrent angle?

Ray

 

[sawmill]

Looks nice and handy!
Are you going to make another arm at a diffrent angle?

Ray

Yes, I have a couple of drop hitches for my pickup that are both the same size. I'm going to take one and put some teeth on it where the ball goes. It will fit right in the receiver tube on the backhoe boom. I figure that way (depending on what I'm doing) I will have a couple of options. It might be a couple of weeks before I get to it. I'll post pics when I get it done. Gotta work on the honey-do list first.
Gotta keep my priorities straight. It's not very comfortable sleeping on the Bota.

 

[doug7153]

I just built a thumb for my BH92 backhoe. Works great, but I'm planning on changing it to a hydraulic thumb instead of set link. Only cost was the link and pins the rest was scrap metal I had around the house. Used some 6x6 inch by 1/2" angle iron for the jaws and cut up some 3" tubing to make the clevis's. Works pretty good but it's kind of a pain in the ass manually setting it up when I want to use it, so I'm going hydraulic.