January/February 2003
From preventive maintenance to operator training, here’s how to grab more uptime and productivity from your grapples.
By Robert L. Reid
Robert L Reid is managing editor of Scrap.
Grapples are such a basic tool for handling scrap that it’s easy to take them for granted. Easy—but potentially expensive, especially if you don’t take care of your grapples by selecting the right tool for the right job, by training your operators how to use the equipment properly and productively, and by performing regular maintenance.
To get the best performance and longest useful life out of these essential attachments, scrap processors and equipment manufacturers offer the following advice.
Getting the Right Grab
At first, it might seem that a grapple is a grapple is a grapple. In other words, what’s the big difference between the various versions of this tool? And indeed, some processors do find that a basic four-tine, orange-peel grapple will meet nearly all their needs. This is the hydraulic, rotating attachment that hangs down from a material handler’s boom and encloses the load of scrap on all sides with its four finger-like tines.
But that basic grapple is hardly the only kind. Indeed, orange-peel units are available with either four or five tines, with four-tine models more common in North America and five-tine units often preferred in Europe, one manufacturer notes. There are also contractor-style grapples that can either hang down and rotate just like an orange peel or remain fixed to the boom of a material handler. Contractor’s grapples feature two facing jaws that open and close like a clamshell, with generally two or three tines on each jaw.
In any style, grapple capacities range widely, usually from less than 1 cubic yard to 3 or 4 cubic yards, though some especially large attachments can grab as much as 20 cubic yards in a single bite.
Thus, “the key to grapple use is to determine the grapple’s role and how versatile it has to be,” suggests Harry Garber, plant manager for Grossman Iron & Steel Co. (St. Louis). For instance, if the grapple will be loading or unloading railcars or barges, he says, “then you want the biggest grapple you can put on the crane and move the biggest amount of material with each grab.” For such bulk material-handling tasks, he adds, a five-tine, orange-peel grapple often works best.
Yet “bigger is not always better,” Garber notes, because that same large-capacity, five-tine grapple might not fit easily into suppliers’ vehicles, which include a wide variety of irregularly sized conveyances, from pickups to homemade trailers. To unload scrap from those vehicles, a smaller four-tine, orange-peel grapple can be the better choice, Garber says.
Likewise, it’s important to consider the “workability” range of the grapple, a term that refers to how tightly the tines close, Garber says. If the grapple is loading car hulks into a shredder, the tines don’t have to close nearly as tightly as if the operator is trying to carefully sort small I-beams from a pile of other scrap, he explains.
Choosing among different grapples is exactly what Garber had to do recently when he purchased two new units—one to feed a shear and another to both feed processing equipment and unload suppliers’ vehicles. “Two different specifications, two different roles,” he says, “and we ended up going with different grapples from different manufacturers.”
Getting the right grab can also mean replacing an existing unit, as OmniSource Corp.’s plant in Lima, Ohio, discovered when it switched from a cable-operated four-tine, orange-peel grapple to a hanging contractor-style hydraulic model. In addition to feeding “a tremendous amount of bulky material” into the plant’s baler and shear, the contractor’s grapple is used to grip and rip light-gauge material such as control panels and sheet iron off bulky scrapped machinery, notes David Dray, manager of OmniSource’s Mid-Ohio Group. This method not only reduces the plant’s torchcutting work, Dray explains, but it’s also about 30 to 40 percent more efficient than using the cable-grapple to do the same tasks because the hydraulic attachment works faster and more accurately.
Operators at Andersens Sales & Salvage Inc. (Greeley, Colo.) also prefer a contractor’s grapple because they can drive the fixed version of these attachments into a pile of scrap—something they couldn’t do with hanging orange peels, says Dean Andersen, vice president. Moreover, operators can grab a car hulk from either the side or a corner with the fixed contractor’s unit rather than having to maneuver a hanging orange peel directly over the hulk, Andersen says. This allows the company to install the attachment on a smaller excavator than an orange peel requires, he adds.
At Stanley LaBounty, which manufactures orange-peel as well as both fixed and hanging contractor-style grapples, customers seem to like the orange peels best when handling lighter or smaller pieces of scrap, especially shredded material, notes Uwe Kausch, product manager. In turn, processors prefer the hanging contractor’s style when loading material into a stationary shear or baler, in part because the tool tends to easily align the scrap so that it fits better into the equipments’ hoppers, he says.
Contractor’s grapples are also popular with some processors because they seem to require less maintenance than orange peels, which, according to Dean Andersen, can be plagued by “all the hydraulic lines and cylinders and stuff that are forever getting torn off.”
Indeed, even orange-peel advocates say the issue of damage to exposed parts is critical in choosing the best tool. “All grapples are only as good as the hydraulic oil feeding them,” notes Harry Garber, “so look at how the manufacturer hides the oil lines that feed the grapple cylinders. Are they well-protected? Are the cylinder rods protected with covers, and will the covers stay on?” Garber says he’s seen some grapples that did protect the cylinder rods with covers, but the covers came off when they were struck by a stray piece of scrap.
Protecting the hydraulic cylinders and lines was also key in feedback that Caterpillar Inc. (Peoria, Ill.) gathered from scrap processors in designing its new line of four-tine, orange-peel grapples. As a result, Caterpillar decided to physically enclose its cylinders, hydraulic lines, and fittings inside the attachment’s tines, explains Neil LeBlanc, a Cat marketing consultant. This design—somewhat unique in North America but more available in Europe—helps prevent downtime that would result if flying scrap damaged any of those essential hydraulic components, LeBlanc says.
At Carolinas Recycling Group L.L.C. (Lyman, S.C.), the specs for any potential grapple must include a sturdy midsection—the point where the tines and cylinders attach to rest of the unit. “Anybody who’s got a new grapple to show us, we want to see how the center of that thing’s built,” explains Ted Davis, vice president of operations. “We look real hard at the manufacturing process and how ‘beefy’ is this central core. We’re going to wear out tines, we’re going to wear out rotator motors, we’re going to wear out gears. But the center of the grapple is where you do not want to be welding. You do not want that to be breaking up on you.”
The “geometry” of the tines is also key in choosing a grapple, notes Ron Szpak, a territory manager for grapple manufacturer Young Corp. (Seattle). Geometry refers to the design of the tines—the shape and size of the individual blades. If the tines are too wide, Szpak says, they could meet resistance trying to penetrate a pile of scrap. If the tines are too narrow, they might let smaller scrap drop out and be lost. At Caterpillar, the issue was important enough to redesign its tines after initially testing wider tines for its new orange-peel line, explains Poul Rosengaard, an applications specialist for Cat Work Tools.
Instructing and Inspecting
Once you’ve got the grapple you need, the next step is making sure your operator knows how to use and maintain it properly.
“The operator can make or break anything,” notes John Anderson, vice president and an owner of Northshore Manufacturing Inc. (Two Harbors, Minn.), which produces the Builtrite line of attachments. For instance, if the operator rotates a hanging orange-peel too quickly or too slowly, he’ll put wear and tear on the ring and pinion as well as the rotator motor, he says. So operators must understand the “speeds and feeds” of their equipment—in other words, the gallons of hydraulic fluid and proper pressure needed to give the grapple its optimum speed and strength.
This is especially critical when a grapple from one manufacturer is coupled with an excavator from another firm since material handlers today are increasingly made with more powerful hydraulic systems, notes Ron Szpak. As a result, operators can unwittingly damage grapples by setting the hydraulic pressure higher than the attachment is designed to handle, he says.
Making sure operators don’t use their orange peels like a battering ram, slamming the attachments into piles of scrap or large pieces of processing machinery, is also a critical training message, various processors and manufacturers report. Operator training certainly helped reduce grapple damage at OmniSource’s Fort Wayne, Ind., division, notes Michael Richmond, the site’s plant manager. There, a roughly three-year effort that combined classroom learning and hands-on experience with both grapples and magnets cut down grapple accidents such as broken tine tips, torn hoses, and other incidents to such an extent that grapples that previously had to be fixed every three or four weeks can now stay up and running for as much as four or five months before needing repairs, Richmond says.
The Fort Wayne plant also helped reduce grapple downtime by requiring operators to use a special checklist to examine their grapples before each shift, Richmond says. The operators look for signs of wear, cracks, and leaks as well as loose parts or other problems that could damage the unit. Going through this checklist and adding grease as a preventive maintenance effort takes operators only 5 to 10 minutes per grapple but helps the plant add weeks of productive use before key components need to be repaired or replaced, Richmond says.
At Schnitzer Steel Tacoma (Tacoma, Wash.), operators inspect and clean the “pocket” where the tines mount to the grapple head on a daily basis to make sure that scrap material isn’t building up in those areas, says Jay Rabinovitz, general manager. “When you’re folding the grapple into the open position,” Rabinovitz explains, “it often binds against the material and slowly compresses it into that pocket. This either puts stress on the pin-to-grapple mount location or, in the fully extended position, strikes the upper section of the grapple cylinder and causes it to negatively impact the cylinder itself.”
Meanwhile, Carolinas Recycling has found an almost guaranteed incentive to make sure its operators handle their grapples with care.
“If you break a hose on your grapple, you have to fix it,” says Ted Davis.
As a result, Carolinas Recycling’s operators watch out for their hoses “because they’d rather be in the machine operating it. They don’t want to be fooling with hydraulic oil—they don’t want to be the one down there changing the hoses.”
But Davis also knows that when grapples don’t work as they should, “it’s easy to blame things on the operator, even when in some cases the grapple was either too big or too small and we were just supplying the wrong tool for these people to work with.”
Sometimes, Davis notes, the wrong tool is any grapple at all.
Though Carolinas Recycling has mostly switched from magnets to grapples to handle its scrap, the company did discover that it was causing too much damage to its hanging orange peels by using them to pack material into railcars. So the firm switched back to magnets for that single task and saves its grapples for the jobs they do best. The result is less downtime and as much as 15 percent fewer maintenance headaches, Davis notes.
Maintaining Tines and Other Things
Preventive maintenance is another good way to keep grapples working at their best, though not every scrap processor seems to realize this.
“At one operation, it really baffled me,” says Young Corp.’s Ron Szpak. “Before each shift, the crane operators did greasing on the crane, but they never touched the grapple—they never thought of greasing the grapple.”
So when Young Corp. opened up that unit, Szpak says, it was “bone dry, so dry that you almost couldn’t get grease in there because the grease from the factory had hardened in the grease holes.”
Processors often feel they don’t have the time to do preventive maintenance, Szpak says. “They’ve got a constant flow of material coming in, or the shredder never stops so they’re always throwing something on the belts or down the chutes to get product,” he notes. But if processors let the grapple run dry and end up wearing through the bushings, the result can be a rebuild so expensive “they almost might as well take that thing and throw it away and buy a new grapple,” warns Szpak, who strongly recommends greasing the attachments before each shift.
Moreover, though the grapple itself is far less expensive than the hydraulic crane to which it’s usually attached, that crane can’t move much scrap if its grapple isn’t working. “You want to make sure that the $700,000 piece of equipment isn’t down because of a $20,000 grapple failure,” states Jay Rabinovitz.
That’s the thinking behind an aggressive preventive maintenance effort at Schnitzer Steel Tacoma in which all the hydraulic cylinders on the facility’s grapples are numbered and tracked to make sure they get removed and reworked before a cylinder fails and forces a crane to sit idle, Rabinovitz explains.
Though Schnitzer Steel Tacoma used to perform all the maintenance work on its cylinders in-house, the firm found it was experiencing too many premature failures on those units. “We found we were doing more and more reseals but getting less and less longevity out of them,” Rabinovitz says.
So the plant negotiated with a local hydraulic shop to remanufacture all its cylinders on an ongoing basis for a fixed price. This gave Schnitzer Steel Tacoma the benefits of cylinder specialists who’ve managed to extend the life of remanufactured cylinders by more than 30 percent, Rabinovitz says, while simultaneously freeing up its in-house machine shop to handle other maintenance projects.
Schnitzer also switched from weld-on tines to replaceable teeth, a move that “significantly” shortened the time required to replace tines, Rabinovitz says. Though he initially feared that replaceable tines would be weaker than welded ones, “the technology has come far enough along that they can keep those replaceable ends in place quite satisfactorily and cost-effectively.”
Overall, Schnitzer’s various efforts have cut in half its grapple maintenance costs, he notes.
At Carolinas Recycling, a computerized maintenance system helps the company perform a detailed failure analysis on grapple problems. A key discovery, says Ted Davis, was how many cylinders were damaged by overstroking. This occurs when the tips of the tines wear off, which causes hydraulic fluid to leak and eliminates the “stop” that keeps the cylinder rods from striking the end of the cylinders.
To prevent overstroking, Carolinas Recycling went back to the original specifications for the tine tips and began maintaining them according to those specs, Davis says. This involved methods such as hard-facing tips and adding rods to provide extra wear-capacity.
As a result, the company turned “a real nightmare of maintenance” into something routine that has cut maintenance costs as much as 60 percent, Davis says.
Reaching Into the Future
Don’t look for any major changes in grapple technology in the near future, many processors and manufacturers note. Sure, there are some innovations in the works, such as a grapple with magnetized tines, but for the most part this tool will likely continue in its present forms for years to come.
What users can look for—and work toward—are new and innovative applications for grapples.
For instance, though the contractor’s grapple has been around for a long time, “I don’t think it has reached its potential by any means,” says Kevin Bakke, CEO of Genesis Equipment & Manufacturing Inc. (Superior, Wis.), who believes that such attachments, just like orange peels, can be used to sort scrap.
Likewise, LaBounty’s Uwe Kausch points to one processor who devised a makeshift “broom” by using a hanging contractor’s grapple to pick up a nearby bundle of wire and sweep an area.
And while many processors seem to prefer using their grapples and magnets as separate tools, there are attachments that combine magnets and grapples into one unit. Moreover, a number of processors have improvised their own version simply by attaching some kind of holding device for a magnet to the arm of the grapple’s material handler.
In the end, the grapple in all its various forms is so useful a tool that the time and resources a processor devotes to selection, maintenance, and operator training should keep the attachments he buys today grabbing scrap for years to come.
Getting a Grip on Grabs
A large number of manufacturers offer grapples. Here’s a partial list of some that specialize in either orange-peel or contractor’s grapples for the scrap industry:
Allied-Gator Inc., 330/744-0808, www.alliedgator.com
Anvil Attachments/Hawco, 281/480-2300, www.pro-line.com
Caterpillar Inc., 309/675-5038, www.caterpillar.com
FLECO Attachments, 239/283-6139, www.attachmentprice.com
Fuchs Terex Inc., 910/332-8562, www.schaeff-cmt.de/wwwfuchs-terexcom/english
Genesis Equipment & Manufacturing Inc., 715/395-5252, www.genesisequip.com
Gensco Equipment (1990) Inc., 416/465-7521, www.genscoequip.com
Iron Ax Inc., 478/252-0022, www.ironax.com
LaBounty, Div. of Stanley Hydraulic Tools, 218/834-6741, www.stanleyworks.com
Liebherr Construction Equipment Co., 757/245-5251, www.liebherr.com/us
Mack Manufacturing Inc., 251/653-9999, www.mackmfg.com
Northshore Manufacturing Inc./Builtrite, 218-834-5555, www.builtritehandlers.com
Pemberton Inc., 407/831-6688, www.pembertoninc.com
Rotobec USA Inc., 418/383-3002, www.rotobec.com
Young Corp., 206/624-107, www.youngcorp.com •
From preventive maintenance to operator training, here’s how to grab more uptime and productivity from your grapples.