Skeleton Buckets - Everything you need to know
Excavator attachments come in all shapes and sizes, but one tool that stands out for material sorting efficiency is the skeleton bucket. Whether you’re tackling landscaping, demolition or recycling, this excavator attachment is designed to make your life on-site easier. In this guide, we’ll cover everything from what skeleton buckets are, how to use them, and the key features - especially focusing on the Rhinox Skeleton Bucket.
What is an Excavator Skeleton Bucket?
The skeleton bucket is an excavator attachment with a slotted back, designed specifically to separate different-sized aggregates, such as rocks, bricks, soil, tree roots and other mixed aggregates. A skeleton bucket allows excavator operators to sort and manage debris efficiently, making it ideal for projects that involve separating reusable material from waste.
On jobs sites, the skeleton bucket is known by several different names, including a screening bucket, riddle bucket or shaker bucket. The term “shaker bucket” comes from the shaking motion used to separate materials, where the slotted back - often called tines - allows finer material like dirt and small aggregates to fall through while retaining larger items inside the attachment. This separation process supports recycling and reuse while reducing expensive disposal and material handling costs.
5 Projects Ideal for a Skeleton Bucket
Skeleton buckets shine in projects where material separation is required, allowing operators to efficiently sort, screen and manage mixed materials directly on site. The skeleton bucket helps reduce handling time, minimise waste, and cut down on disposal and material replacement costs. Because of this versatility, these screening attachments are especially suited to a wide range of applications, including:
- Rock Excavation - Quickly sort rocks from soil for landscaping or construction.
- Demolition Debris Removal - Separate bricks, concrete and rubble for easier disposal or recycling.
- Drainage and Trench Work - Remove unwanted rocks and roots while leaving soil in place.
- Landscaping Projects - Collect larger aggregates and roots without scooping unnecessary dirt.
- Construction Material Sorting - Sort mixed materials on-site for reuse or disposal.
How To Use a Skeleton BucketUsing a skeleton bucket is straightforward but requires some technique to get the best results:
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Will a Skeleton Bucket fit my Excavator?
Skeleton buckets are built to suit a wide range of excavators, from compact mini excavators to large construction excavators. However, correct fitment depends on more than just your excavator’s size - your machine’s pin dimensions are critical too. To ensure skeleton bucket compatibility with your excavator, always check your excavator’s pin diameter, pin centres and dipper gap. If you have a dedicated hanger quick attach coupler, ensure that this is compatible. At Rhinox, we manufacture skeleton buckets for excavators from 0.75 ton to 25 ton, with bucket widths ranging from 24" to 60", depending on the machine.
4 Stand-out Features of the Rhinox Skeleton Bucket You Should Know
1. Heavy Duty Construction
The first, and one of the most important features of the Rhinox skeleton bucket, is the heavy duty construction. If you're looking to purchase a skeleton bucket then you're probably aware that they are usually used in rough or harsh conditions to dig through aggregates and separate out unwanted material like bricks and tree roots. This obviously means that the attachment needs to be able to withstand the harsh environment.
To ensure a robust structure, the Rhinox skeleton bucket has been designed with additional wear protection in the areas that take the most force and contact. These are the leading edge and the attachment side plates. The leading edge is 3x thicker than the standard width of a Rhinox bucket shell so that it's much more durable in harsh terrain - stopping it from wearing down as quickly! We also add wear plates to the side of the bucket to slow the speed of wear on the side plates.
To increase the strength even further, we manufacture our skeleton buckets with vertical tines as they're much stronger than the horizontal tines you may find on other skeleton buckets in the market. To strengthen these tines further, we have supported the vertical tines with horizontal tine braces to add additional strength and reduce the chance of the tines bending and twisting during use. The overall construction of Rhinox skeleton buckets are made to help prolong the life of your attachment to save you money!
2. Replaceable Bucket Teeth
Another stand out feature is the replaceable bolt-on teeth that are fitted to the edge of the Rhinox skeleton bucket. As mentioned above, the skeleton bucket is regularly used in harsh conditions that will cause the teeth to wear down over time. Once your teeth are worn, your skeleton bucket will be less effective at digging through the ground or through material as the serrated steel will have worn away to a dome shape, stopping it from being able to grip or penetrated material as effectively. The benefit of the Rhinox skeleton bucket teeth is that they're removable - so they can easily be removed and replaced with new ones once worn.
What teeth styles fit the Rhinox skeleton bucket size ranges?
Excavator Size |
Bucket Tooth Style |
| 0.5 to 4 ton (1,000 to 8,000 lbs) | Kubota style |
| 5 to 8 ton (10,000 to 16,000 lbs) | JCB style |
| 9 to 25 ton (18,000 to 60,000 lbs) | CAT style |
3. Removable Bucket Pins
It's inevitable that overtime your bucket pins will start to wear through use. This will happen on all skeleton buckets, regardless of manufacturer because of the vigorous movements. The best way to combat this is using removable dummy pins so that they can be easily removed and replaced when worn. If you don't replace your pins when worn, you can also cause the bucket links and tipping links on your excavator to wear, which is a bigger and more expensive job to replace. So, as well as manufacturing our skeleton buckets with removable dummy pins, we also supply the replacement pins for when you need to swap them out for a new set.
There are a selection of Rhinox skeleton buckets that are not manufactured with bolt in pins. These will be found on skeleton buckets manufactured to suit excavators with dedicated hangers for quick attach couplers, such as Bobcat x-change, Kubota quick attach and Deere wedgelock.
4. Bucket Transportation Hooks
The final stand-out feature of the Rhinox skeleton bucket is the bucket transportation hooks that are manufactured as part of the hangers. These only feature on standard 2 pin hangers and not dedicated hangers to suit Bobcat x-change, Kubota quick attach and Deere wedgelock. Transportation bucket hooks are the best way to quickly and easily move multiple buckets at once - no more unevenly stacking excavator buckets inside each other with the chance of falling. Not only do excavator bucket hooks make it easier to move multiple buckets around site or onto a trailer but they reduce the need for manual handling of heavy buckets, keeping operators and by standers safe from injury.
There are a few companies on the market that now manufacture their buckets with bucket hooks to help with site safety, but we have found that manufacturing our bucket hooks as part of the hanger is the safest way. We've seen hooks welded to the shell of the bucket but this has a risk of catching them on utilities, pipes or other objects in the ground while digging. This is why ours a made as part of the hanger so they are further from the digging area. We've also found that making them part of the hanger, rather than welding them separately makes them much stronger, so significantly less chance of the hooks snapping off or coming away while in use.
Shop our range of skeleton buckets for your 0.75 ton to 25 ton excavator online today! |
