Unconventional Uses for Skid Steer Buckets (and Features to Look for)

Everyone knows you can use a skid steer bucket for excavation, which makes them ubiquitous on construction sites and among road crews. Likewise, it’s common knowledge that you can use bucket attachments for skid steers to load, move and handle loose materials. They’re also commonly used to clear snow and ice, making them popular attachments for snow removal crews.

But what else can you use a skid steer bucket for? Well, let’s take a closer look at some of these somewhat less than conventional uses.

Uses for Skid Steer Buckets

If you’re wondering about other ways your crew’s bucket attachments can pull their weight, here are some of the best of them.

Grading

Landscaping crews, take note. Bucket attachments aren’t just good for digging holes. They can also be used for grading and profiling that land, which makes them useful for re-working the lay of the land, for constructing earthworks and for re-doing the appearance of an outdoor setting.

Backfilling

While a dedicated trench backfiller attachment can be beneficial, especially if all your crews do is dig trenches and fill in old ones, a bucket can handle the job in a pinch. Working forward to push spoil back into the trench or dragging the bucket backwards to help backfill can both get the job done. A backfiller is faster, but a bucket will work in a pinch.

Compacting

Granted, with a bucket you can’t compact to the level needed to stabilize the soil prior to pouring footings or anything like that, but you can still get a lot of loose air out of the dirt and help it settle so you won’t have soupy mud the next time it rains. Just bringing the bucket down on earth can help compact it, just like a tamper. If you don’t have a vibratory compactor, a bucket is better than nothing.

Transporting Root Balls

Just as a bucket excels in materials handling, so too does it excel at transporting fairly large, heavy loads, and that makes it perfect for transporting root balls. As in nearly every other case here, there are better, more specialized attachments, for instance our tree spades - but a bucket can get the job done and once again is better than nothing. This goes for large rocks and boulders, too.

Removing Stumps

For this, you’ll need a specialized type of skid steer bucket, a stump bucket. These have narrower profiles and are deeper and longer, with cutting teeth along the edges, that make them perfect for digging underneath stumps so that they can be ripped out efficiently. If you don’t have a stump grinder or a skid steer auger armed with a stump planer bit, a stump bucket is a good second best. Plus, they’re also good at transporting root balls and large rocks.

Light Demolition

Need to bring down a small structure like a shed? A skid steer bucket is a great option. A bucket will allow you to push over or pull down small structures under control, and then when you’re done, will help with demolition cleanup, too.

Pouring Concrete

This is another application for which you’ll need a specialized skid steer bucket, specifically a concrete bucket. But with one of these, mixing and pouring concrete, precisely, with no splash back, will no longer be a chore.

Disaster Cleanup in Flooded Areas

Again, this is another area in which you’ll need a specialized bucket, specifically a root grapple bucket or rake with a slotted bottom. A tine bucket or a rock bucket would also potentially be useful here. The value of the slotted bottom is that it allows water to drain through, so you aren’t wasting energy lifting water (which is heavy and makes a mess anyway).

Sifting Soil; Rock Removal

Here’s another one in which you’ll need a specialized bucket attachment, specifically a rock bucket. These are basically the same in design as other buckets, but they have slotted bottoms and sometimes slotted sides, too, that allow sand and loose material to sift through the bottom. Dig in, remove rocks, let everything else drain through, and you’re good.

Features of Skid Steer Buckets

Need to be able to shop skid steer bucket attachments like a veteran? These are the features to look for that will improve the specialization of a bucket attachment so you can choose the right skid steer attachment.

Cutting Edges

Cutting edges are hardened, sharpened edges at the sides of the bucket that improve the operator’s ability to push the bucket into earth, boosting the bucket’s ability to excavate.

Teeth or Tooth Bars

Bucket attachments are generally available with either smooth edges, which are better for materials handling, profiling, and grading, and with teeth or tooth bars, which are better suited to excavation, especially into dense or compacted earth. Buckets with a smooth edge can often have a tooth bar welded or bolted on, if needed, converting them into tooth buckets.

Wear Bars

Many of our skid steer loader bucket attachments are made with wear bars along the bottom of the bucket. These help absorb abrasive damage and prevent the bottom of the bucket from wearing through prematurely, extending the lifetime of the attachment.

Powder Coat Finish

Many of our attachments feature durable powder coats which protect the steel underneath from corrosion. This doesn’t necessarily specialize the bucket to any given task, but it does protect the attachment from chemical attack and is a valuable feature to look for nonetheless.

Low-Profile Design

Low-profile design results in a bucket that has a lower volume, which gives the operator a better ability to see over the top of it. This makes these buckets less suitable for high-volume materials handling, but makes them good at grading, compacting, backfilling, and other landscaping applications.

Extra Volume

The larger and broader the bucket, the better it will be at materials handling or clearing snow, as in the case of snow and litter buckets. There’s a tradeoff here between volume and design; choose the profile that best suits your application.

Skid Steer Bucket Attachments That Never Surrender

Spartan Equipment skid steer bucket attachments are made in the United States with American steel. We never use cheap Chinese imports and our attachments are supported by top-tier customer service. For more information, see our skid steer attachment page or contact us directly at 888-888-1085.