Skid Steer Quick Coupler Attachment Tips

Neil from Messick's here to talk to you about the humble skid steer coupler. Spend a lot of time this morning thinking about all the things that I can talk about when it comes to this simple mechanism. We're going to breeze through a couple of them here this morning. Why you should want this on your tractor, how to use it, how to take those implements on and off the front of your machine. But my goal here this morning is really to focus on the things you might not have stumbled upon yet. The gotchas, call it, the things that sometimes when not used properly, it might cause some damage to your tractor or cause your implements to pop off. Going to spend some time this morning, talking about the coupler. 

Skid steer couplers are optional equipment on most tractors, but here at Messick's, we treat them basically as standard equipment. You are able to order through your loaders with pin on buckets where this loader boom right here, pins directly onto the bucket itself without this interfacing coupler here in the middle. But you would be selling yourself short by doing that. Being able to remove that bucket from your tractor and be able to put on, say, pallet forks or snow plows or grapples or brooms or hydraulic post augers. The world of attachments that's out there to go onto your front loader really increases the amount of things that you can do with that machine, helps you get more value out of your tractor investment. And for that reason, unless you're exclusively digging in the dirt and will never put anything else on the front, we really encourage you to add one of these onto your machines when you're buying one.

We spend a lot of time with people who haven't made that decision up front and are trying to add this on to an existing older used tractor before they were so commonplace and they're spending a lot of money to get it done because they understand the value in this thing. We are definitely preferential towards the skid steer coupler. There are other coupler systems out there be it Euro or Old Bobcat, or 30 years ago and some skid steers, you found a lot more proprietary ones out there. By and large, this coupler is going to be what you find on 90% of equipment anymore. Regardless of what color dealership you walk into, you're going to find attachments on that lot somewhere that are going to fit this coupler system. When you have a choice, we always want to try to stay with the skids steer one.

It's not perfect. We'll talk about some of those reasons why, but we do like it for its ubiquity that's out there. It is just everywhere. Real quickly, how do we do this? Lift up the handles on your coupler and then you're going to slide the top lip of the coupler underneath the bucket, roll the bucket back, and then pop off your tractor and push the arms down. This is not that hard to do. Probably the biggest challenge on it is on some tractors it can be really difficult to look down there and see the bucket itself, actually see what you're doing. And you end up kind of peeking up over the hood here in order to actually see your bucket. Once you've done that, you've slid that thing back here, we just take our two handles, push them down, and we have locked our bucket into place and can go to work.

As easy as that is, there's several places where things can go wrong. Probably the single biggest gotcha that I see with these couplers is people not attaching their implement properly onto their tractor. As full proof as this thing seems, really easy to lift up underneath this lip right here, roll it back so it's flat, push the levers down. There's a couple of places in here where things aren't lining up exactly right and the surfaces aren't meeting properly. You might get an attachment on the front here that's actually not connected or not connected well onto your tractor. And I'm going to show you some of the things here to look out for. You'll notice the backside of the bucket has this flat surface right here. And the coupler here has a flat surface as well. When all of these surfaces come together, they need to be free of debris, or they may not line up perfectly. 

If you are, say, out working in the mulch and as you're in there with your loader bucket, you're scooping things. You're rolling stuff out. You're spilling stuff everywhere. And a little bit of that mulch works its way in between the coupler and your bucket and starts to pack in place there. And you go watch your pallet forks. Pull your two handles, take your bucket off, back away, go to pull into your pallet forks, but not realize that you've got mulch that's caked back here on the coupler itself. And when you lock those forks on, that mulch in there, they can push that implement away from the coupler a little bit and cause a very specific problem. Now, when you lock your implement on, there's a lever right here with this tapered pin down here at the bottom that drops out the bottom of the coupler and grabs your implement.

This pin has got an angle on it. Now, what you're going to run into here is if you have this situation we're describing where you have dirt and debris in here and you move your bucket out away from that coupler, you might still have it held up here at the top. And you've got this extra little bit of space in here, but when you press this tapered pin down in, rather than that pin fully engaging the bottom of your bucket, you might just catch the tip of it. And when that happens, you don't necessarily have the full strength of that pin. You might think that your implement is locked onto the front of your tractor and you go out and you're pushing that pile of dirt and you start working around and you can actually go and shear off the bottom of this pin and have your bucket pop off the coupler because this thing wasn't fully engaged.

Another thing you want to watch for is making sure that your coupler is attached on both sides of the bucket. This could happen in a lot of different ways. It is very easy to go and put one of these buckets onto your tractor if it's sitting in some kind of cockeyed odd location. I keep all of my buckets and stuff stashed out in the back 40 behind my house. And that's totally okay. Things like your loader and stuff, they really need to be level for your tractor to drive into them easier. The skid steer coupler, though, is different, you can pick up just about anything. But what you want to watch is when you come into some of those odd sitting implements that you grab it in a way that you get positive connection on both sides of your coupler. 

We definitely see several people every year that only get this thing latched properly on one side. And that's maybe because they didn't drive into it right, maybe because they didn't drop the pins on one side, who knows. But ultimately what happens is that one side of the bucket stays latched. The other one comes off and it causes the quick coupler assembly then to be tweaked by the weight of that bucket, bending something here in the front. We sell a handful of replacement coupler weldments to people every year where unfortunately that has happened. They did not have a positive connection on both sides of the coupler. Some years ago, our dealership actually ran into some fitment issues with skid steer couplers on imported implements. We thought we'd save some money and ordered in a container load of pallet forks from overseas. But we were really frustrated when they got here and found that their implementation or their tolerances that they allowed on the weldments for the skid steer coupler were such that over 50% of them wouldn't drop onto our tractors correctly at all.

They required a lot of rework. That's something you're going to want to keep an eye out for. When they go through and they put in, say, the size of the holes and stuff down here at the bottom, little differences can cause those tapered pins not to drop in exactly in the right way or you'll definitely find differences in the companies when they go through and they build the top end of the coupler right here that your coupler slides into. If they don't do this exactly right, and they have this top weldment off say three eighths of an inch or so, it makes a big difference in how that implement rests on the coupler. The tolerances here are important. Imported implements that may not follow those tolerances as well can cause fitment and connection issues in your skid steer coupler.

Now, by and large, we don't see a lot of issues with that, but I would encourage you, again, you see what happens if one of these things pops off. Say your implement comes off your tractor. It can damage your load. It could hurt somebody, potentially. It could twist your tractor up. Take a really good look at how everything fits together on that coupler the very first time you put something on the machine. That's a couple tips for you on this skid steer coupler. Wildly versatile, should be on the front of every machine, but like anything on your tractor, taking a little bit of time, moving a little bit more slowly, watching how your implements and tractor come together could help prevent damage to you and your machine.