Bob-Tach Attachment Mounting System

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Standard Bob-Tach™

Change attachments in less than a minute! You can replace a bucket with a landscape rake, auger, grapple, snow blower and dozens more Bobcat® attachments quickly and easily with the Bob-Tach™ mounting system. Bobcat Company invented this system over 35 years ago, and it comes standard on all Bobcat loaders. Simply line up with the attachment, lock the levers and go.

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Power Bob-Tach™

Change attachments in under a minute without leaving your seat. With the flip of a dash panel switch, the optional Power Bob-Tach™ mounting system engages the Bob-Tach wedges into the attachment you wish to use. The system provides continuous charge pressure to secure the attachment and keep levers in the locked position. Line up the attachment using the ergonomic joystick, activate the switch and go.

Wear Compensating Pins

When the Bob-Tach levers are locked down, wedge-shaped pins are engaged into the holes of the Bob-Tach plate of an attachment. Over the years, as the attachment sustains wear, the springs on the levers compensate by pushing the pins further into the attachment to always maintain a tight fit. View Closer

History of Bob-Tach

In the late 1960s, finding an easy way to switch between attachments became the Holy Grail for Bobcat. Engineers under the lead of Jim Bauer worked on the system. “The Bob-Tach was the single most important invention of my 26 patents,” Bauer explains.

The secret to the Bob-Tach design was the concept of triple-wedging design. Other manufacturers’ designs didn’t hold up as well and would become loose and start to rattle over time. With Bob-Tach, the more you use it, the tighter it gets.

The first wedge is where you stick the nose of the Bob-Tach under the lip on the top of the bucket. That’s the number one wedge. The harder you push up, the tighter it gets. Then there’s a slant on the bottom of the Bob-Tach and a slant on the bucket and when you swing it in, the Bob-Tach is forced even tighter against the top wedge. That bottom wedge is number two. “The Bob-Tach never touches the back of the bucket at the bottom, so no matter how hard you push on it, it always has freedom to get tighter. Then we put wedges down through the parts that mate there and put springs on them, so as you force the bottom in tighter and tighter, the wedges that are fastened to the lever would use up all the space. As soon as it has the opportunity to squeeze up, that wedge drops down even tighter. So the beauty of the Bob-Tach is that the harder you use it, the tighter it gets. And you never have a sloppy, loose attachment on a Bobcat loader,” Bauer says.

Prototypes were running by 1968, and by 1970, the Bob-Tach system was on the market. It endowed the machine with quick-change capability and interchangeability. With periodic updates, the principle remains the same. The system has been a Bobcat hallmark since its invention and standardization. The wedging action of the design was technologically ideal. And since Bobcat held the patent on Bob-Tach from 1972 to 1989, it helped the company steer the attachments business—to the point that competitors adopted the Bob-Tach fundamentals in their own designs after the patent expired.

The Bob-Tach system changed the industry. By creating a universal standard to which hundreds of devices could be attached, Bobcat had created something like today’s USB port—determining the hard points and letting smaller companies invent new products on their own.

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Bob-Tach Attachment Mounting System

Standard Bob-Tach™

Power Bob-Tach™

Wear Compensating Pins

History of Bob-Tach