An Extensive Guide to Excavator Mounting Options

What does this mean on the attachment side? 

Quick couplers make it slightly easier on the attachment side for building a mount. The pins can be welded/fixed in order to prevent more movement/slop from having loose pins. However, we can still provide loose pins in case the attachment ever has to be manually pinned on another machine, or the coupler has to come off the machine to be fixed etc. 

Manual couplers tend to be specific to the excavator and pick up the OEM pin dimensions. The distance in between the ears on the attachment isn’t as crucial as long as it is wide enough for the coupler to drop down and grab the pins. A wider space between the ears or bosses isn’t too bad since the coupler will lock the attachment tight in place. 

However hydraulic quick couplers usually pick up a range of pin centers and pin diameters on the attachment side. This means that you can usually pick up some attachments that are actually built to suit other machines as long as the dimensions fall in the pick up range of the coupler. And again providing the boss spacing or distance between the ears is wider than the coupler. 

For this reason, to try and create faster lead times, we have created a universal standard for each pin diameter. This will allow for faster shipping of machines that are manually pinned and also for machines with a hydraulic coupler (since they pick up a range). For a machine with a manual coupler we will still have to build the mount to suit the specific dimensions. 

We have looked at all the machines with a specific pin diameter and made a standard stick width dimension that suits the machine with the widest stick. For machine’s with a narrower stick, we will provide a shim kit in order to achieve a slim fit. 

For the pin centers, we have averaged all the pin centers measurements for machine’s with each pin diameter. This means most hydraulic couplers will be able to pick up this center to center measurement. Also manually pinned on attachments will be able to be pinned on normally. The pin center will be slightly different from the OEM dimension, but the difference shouldn’t make much of a difference in most cases. 

This will allow us to keep a stock of these standard/universal hitches that we can then adapt to suit the attachment that you need, and ship with a shorter lead time.