 With so many attachments on the market bearing XTREME and SEVERE XTREME DUTY labels it becomes necessary for this department to explain what these terms mean at Construction Attachments Inc. Many of you have probably noticed that no companies ever list an attachment as light duty or normal duty, and may be led to believe that xtreme duty indicates that equipment is light or less then what it should be. While that may be true of our competitor’s products, we can tell you for certain how we rate an implement and what the duty rating means at Cal. While there are no attachment standards like an NFPA to hydraulics components or a NEMA for electrical items there is a clear design intent with CAL products and we hope this helps you decide the best fit for your application.
The fact of the matter is, we do not manufacture any hobby attachments or attachments that are made to hold up fine if you are just using them once in a while. We manufacture Xtreme Duty attachments to work beyond the capability of the machines for which they are designed. We have trained sales staff and a clear product catalog to help you determine the correct fit for your machine and when the machine is matched correctly to the Cal Xtreme Duty attachment it is certainly meant to be used daily by professionals and novices alike. For example our compact line is obviously lighter than our xtreme duty skid steer line, but still bears the Xtreme Duty rating because mounted on an up to 50hp tractor it is perfectly suited to work everyday, the same as the Xtreme Duty skid steer attachments are suited to work on rubber tire skid steer machines up to 100hp and rubber track machines to 80hp.
Some of our attachments bear the label Severe Xtreme Duty. Large skid steer machines and rubber track loader machines are pushing 130hp these days with working pressures over 3000psi and high flow circuits producing more than 30 gal/min of oil flow. They are most often doing the same jobs as the smaller machines, but with more speed and greater force and with an attachment built to handle the stress they do the jobs more effectively. Every Cal attachment bearing a rating for this type of machine has a stronger hitch with heavily reinforced top rails, because without it these machines have enough hydraulics to separate themselves from an inferior hitch and top rail. The machines have greater weight providing them extra traction and obviously with the extra hp they have the ability to make use of the extra traction. Grading, digging and lifting bucket loads as well as breaking out loads using the powerful lift and tilt on these larger machines requires steel plain and simple.
"We manufacture Xtreme Duty attachments to work beyond the capability of the machines for which they are designed." Our Severe Xtreme Duty general purpose bucket for example, in addition to the most heavily reinforced hitch in its class has a beefy ¾” 1065 welded steel base cutting edge with the option of a ¾” 1085 steel bolt on reversible edge and a 3/8”x8” wear plate welded directly behind the weld in edge. By the way, we invite you to ask any of our competitors for a material specification on their weld in edges and bolt on reversible edges as 1065 on the weld on edges and 1085 on the bolt on edges is standard for us at any duty rating. The bottom is reinforced further with a series of broken out ½” x 4” wear plates that run from directly behind this plate all the way to the back of the bucket and are broken out around the massive 5/16” bottom reinforcement box section that runs the lower length of the back of the bucket. Compare this bucket on weight alone to comparable capacity buckets by other manufacturers bearing the Severe Xtreme Duty label and perhaps that will give you the best idea what Severe Xtreme means coming from Cal. Some of our attachments are only offered in a Severe Xtreme Duty class. We do this when the application calls for severe duty. A prime example is our stump bucket and the new stump grapple based on the same bucket. Here is an attachment made to be driven into the ground with as much force as you can come up with from the machine drive or hydraulics and then tilted back to break out a stump or pulled back to cut the roots over the plasma cut teeth in the side cutters or even broken off with the new grapple attachment. They are stumps and they don’t come out of the ground easily, so an extreme duty bucket won’t do the job or at least it won’t do the job for long. So we don’t build anything other than a Severe Xtreme stump bucket or stump grapple.
I hope this gives you our valued customer a clear understanding of the duty ratings for our attachments. The attachment features are tailored for the job to be done and the weight and design are engineered around the machine weight and hp to give you a long lasting quality product that will make you want all of your attachments to come from CAL. We start out any design project to build the absolute best possible attachment period. Some business models suggest design intent should focus on building the best value for the consumer dollar and that is where the idea of hobby products and light duty products for the part time users creep into the design process. At Cal we understand that whether you use your attachment every day or twice a year you need it to do the job. We just try to build the best and there is never any better value than that.
Contributed By:
Corey Sheets Chief Engineer
Construction Attachments Inc.
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