Skeleton buckets and grapple buckets both deal with material that a plain bucket cannot sort out – demolition rubble, rock, root balls and site waste. They are often confused because both leave the fines behind, but they work differently and answer different questions on site.

Skeleton bucket: sort in place

A skeleton (sieve) bucket replaces the solid back of a bucket with spaced bars. Shovel, shake, and the soil falls through while rocks, concrete lumps and stumps stay in the bucket. It is a screening tool: the output is a cleaner pile of oversize that you can load out, and a screened bed of fill that stays. Choose it when the job is separating – topsoil from rock, rubble from fill, logs from dirt.

Grapple bucket: clamp and carry

A grapple bucket keeps a solid floor but adds a hydraulically clamped top grapple. The bucket gathers loose material like any bucket; the grapple then clamps down so you can carry mixed, unstable or oversize loads – brush, pallets, scrap, storm debris – without it spilling out on the way. Choose it when the job is handling awkward loads rather than screening them.

Which one fits your site

Land clearing with mixed brush and root balls: grapple bucket first, skeleton second.
Demolition cleanup where concrete must be separated from fill: skeleton bucket does the sorting, the grapple handles the slabs.
Farms and recycling yards handling bales, scrap and pallets: grapple bucket.
Production screening of topsoil or compost: skeleton bucket, or a dedicated screener above ~10 t machines.

KaiVoy grapple bucket

We build the GBPS36-A grapple bucket (900 mm) for compact loaders, with a twin-cylinder grapple and replaceable cutting edge. Full geometry is on the specifications page; for skeleton buckets and other sizes, tell us your machine and material and we will quote accordingly.