Equipment for digging a pond

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I'm under the impression that a tractor with a bucket or even a blade won't be enough to dig a pond. Only something on tracks can do that. Right?

How much does something on tracks cost?

Anybody know of some web sites?

-- Paul Wheaton (paul@javaranch.com), April 13, 2001

Answers

To dig a "real" pond that will have enough water to see you through a dry spell you almost have to have a dozer. I guess if time is no problem you can dig one with about anything. Here in the Ozarks rocky ground, I can go about 18" with the tractor bucket then you hit the hard stuff. If you keep at it you will sooner or later bust your loader all to pieces from beating on the rocks. I have a smaller dozer and even it has real problems tearing loose some of the stuff. Needs a ripper on back to concentrate the power to just a small area. You can visit an older dozer site at IBDOZING.com Don

-- Don (dairyagri@yahoo.com), April 13, 2001.

Our 1/4 arce was dig using an excavator with a 22 feet arm. It was a wet area to start so a dozer would have been underwater in 10 minutes. We hired a contractor to dig it for us during the winter. The hole fills in slower in the winter, so the digging is easier. A machine the size we used has no problem going through 2 to 3 feet of frozen ground. Once below the frost line, it's like digging in the middle of summer. It cost us $75 per hour with an operator and took about 5 days. So about $3,000 total. This may sound like at lot to some people, but you have to keep in mind that this is a $75,000 peice of equipment. To rent just the machine in our area is $350 a day, plus delivery charge of $125. Pretty much impossible to get around the delivery charge, because the machine weight approx. 15 tons. Not the type of equipment you are going to tow with your pickup truck.

-- David in NH (grayfoxfarm@mcttelecom.com), April 13, 2001.

What you need is a called a track hoe. You won't want to buy or even rent one. These things run in the range of $30,000 to $40,000 used. I strongly recommend you hire a machine with operator. They are tricky to learn to use and at the hourly rental rate, you will be wasting money trying to become proficient in its use. Normally, heavy equipment is rented by the eight hour day. They have clock counters that look like odometers, but really measure engine hours. I've used a mini track hoe before, but an experienced operator could have done the work in half the time.

-- Skip Walton (sundaycreek@gnrac.net), April 13, 2001.

Depends on what type of soil you will be digging in. You might be able to dig a pond with a dozer or a backhoe. I agree with Skip, if your soil is like most, rock hard concrete after about 2ft, then you need a trac-hoe. The bigger the better. My pond is about 5 ft deep and about 50 ft. diameter, so not too big and only took about a hour to dig. They were running a road into the 12 acs next to my place and I was able to get the guy running the trac-hoe to come up for 75.00 He said he had been running heavy equipment for 50 years and it really showed. If you've never run a backhoe or heavy equipment then hire someone to do it, but then again you can have a fun weekend playing with the real stuff!....:-)...there is a learning curve and you'll burn up the hours till you get the hang of it. It's really not that hard to learn. My next door neighbor had a trac-hoe in last weekend and it cost him 568.00 for 13 hours of run time. We have a United Rental in town, so the transportation was only 35 bucks. I'm thinking about digging another pond, but will have to wait till everything dries out here. Drought?....no lack of water around here east of Seattle. Everything is a swampy mess!

-- Kent in WA (kent@premier1.net), April 13, 2001.

My husband does farm construction for a living and they charge 75- 85/hr depending on the size of equipment needed for the pond. How much clearing, how big and type of soil will determine the number of days it takes to build the pond. They figure their days on 10 hour days.

You might check with your FSA office since in many areas they have funds to help build ponds. In some counties around here it is from 25% to almost 100% of the cost - varies greatly by county.

One of the biggest problems my husband sees when people build their own pond is that they shove the topsoil up to make the dam and it will leak (we have one on our farm built yrs ago by previous owner). The topsoil needs to be pushed aside and the core of the dam built with clay as well as the bottom of the pond. You then put the top soil on the top and outside of the dam.

-- beckie (sunshine_horses@yahoo.com), April 14, 2001.



ammonium nitrate+#2 fuel oil+dynamite= pond.

-- greg (gsmith@tricountyi.net), April 20, 2001.

I'm with Greg.

If you do a web search for 'Ukrainian physics equipment' you might find something handy...

-- Eddy's Byte House (friday@bored.com), April 20, 2001.


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