Has anybody ever build a pontoon/barge setup to float a mini excavator? Got a lake that has a serious reed problem and can’t get a long reach out. Water has been lowered and is only 2-4’ deep. ive cleared about 15’ from shore but now have islands of reeds that need to go... was thinking about rigging some pontoons to a platform and floating out. is that just too crazy of an idea? Too unstable? Would have to anchor to dig I guess
Sounds like a good job for a rental machine
Cobble up a drag line bucket, even if you pull it with a little ford tractor it will be easier than a floating excavator. Where's Scrub Puller when you need him? You need a barge with ballast to work with an excavator, a pontoon has the physics all wrong.
Ahh... good call !
Search "tank cleaning heavy equipmentforums.com" for some discussion from those who've done it. Very interesting stories.
We unloaded really heavy materials at the nuke from barges, the barge company was set up to semi sink the barge at the offload ramp so as NOT to do as noted above. Boats floats pontoons all are Unstable empty. Best bet break the lake levee at the spillway or convenient location and leave it to dry out, as in NO Water level for a year or more then can use most any machine to clean it up.
This is what Scrub Puller strongly recommended
There is a company down in LA that manufactures all terrain buggies that have cutter systems on them just for vegetation control. I think that this might be the same one I looked at for a specialty job a few years back: https://lakeweedharvester.com/wp-content/uploads/Mobitrac USA.pdf Hiring or renting one of these would be much better than trying to make and design your own barge system if all you have is a vegetation problem.
A mini-ex on a barge ? Anchoring the barge/pontoon won't work. You need spuds on it. What is your plan for for getting the crap onto dry land ? Unloading the slop would be another challenge. That would be a mess. How big is the pond ?
Just like Tones' video...
Better choice, dragline service or bust the levee and shove it out. Floating will do you no good.
Guess one thing that I did not see mentioned was how big a lake is this? I'm just saying one person's lake is another person's farm pond! I recall back in the 1970's visiting relatives in Minnesota and harassing them a bit when I saw signs on more than one "lake" that I would say covered less than five acres and I think I'm being generous at that. But to my way of thinking if reeds are growing in the middle I would call that more of a swampy patch than a real lake! I suppose draining and cleaning might not be an option during a drought where you hate to loose any water you do have.
I am guessing that there are fish and critters he doesn't want to kill and it may be a drinking source for animals.
Hard not to kill fish clearing reeds, either poisons or mud stirred up and they croak. Livestock watering may be a bit difficult but if stir it up to rid reeds will be awful muddy for livestock.
Back in the 70’s, people I worked for had a pond, maybe 100 feet across. They decided to clean it. When they built it, they were thinking ahead and had a pipe through the breast works with a glass plate attached on the far end. Shoot a gun up the pipe, break the glass, pond drained! After a year or more of drying time, they still stuck every piece of machinery they put in there in the silt. Luckily they owned a towing company and it didn’t cost a fortune to pull the stuff out. I’m thinking build a new one below it, use that one as a silt catcher. But that might not be possible with the environmental regs. of today.
Silt is silt no matter how you play it lakes silt out. Where used to work had four out ponds from construction days, they silted up, had 6' concrete pipe standpipe overflow outflows with steel plate Weir Gates, on 3' pipe at the bottom. Used those to drain the majority of the quickmud out thru three standpipes but still took a contractor with a dragline and a long reach nearly a month to regain bottom point. The plant machine shop also had to re-stem the weir gates as they had corrupted so heavily over thirty years.
I guess I have been generous with the “ lake”... it’s a 2 acre pond and homeowners don’t want to drain as they don’t want to totally kill all the fish and crawdads... and it’s in commie-fornia so water is an issue
A long reach excavator is about your only choice with a skeleton bucket. Do have ONE local outside of here that drags a old horse drawn style hay rake by chains thru the reeds and cattails to rip them out, uses a old 4230 deere
yep, plan was to rent a long reach but haven’t been able to find one... Anyone know where I could find one near Nevada county, Cali?
http://i5rentals.com/330-long-reach-excavator/
I don't know if they make a more industrial sized one but I just bought a weed razor that is basically a couple razor blades attached to a rake and a rope that you throw out and drag back to remove any crap growing up in there. It's a fair amount of physical work but seems to work really well in my small pond. It may depend on how thick the reeds are and how much access there is but you can throw it a pretty good distance. I've used the backhoe to try to clear out my pond weeds and it probably caused more problems than it solved, perhaps also by lack of reach but I now have some weird shelves that are in there and the weeds are just as bad as ever.
How about a couple machines dragging an I beam with chain attached up and down pond?
If you put a mini on a pontoon barge all I ask of you is to please have someone videoing, you know for educational purposes On a serious note I don’t have any useful advice but I’m interested in your solution. I think I would personally drain it down enough and use mats and an excavator but then again mud scares me lol
On second thought a mini could work fine. I'd be comfortable putting the swivel at water level, and making it work through the hole in the middle of four pontoons. It's the height and working over the edge without ballast that would get "educational"
I’m not a fan of mud either... but this seems like the easiest idea. What kind of mats would hold up over mud tho? Maybe fab some steel and expanded metal onto beams?... wondering what would work without getting bogged into the muck
Soup like pond silt won't support much of anything, more water than mud. We had holding ponds for MO River mud we flocculated out of our cooling system water, wondered a long time how long until solids up until a Deer ran out on the crust of Pond one some twelve years out of service and we had decanted as much actual water off the sludge as feasible, crust broke, she disappeared in a blink of an eye, not a chance in hades of walking on that mess.
You can buy mud mats made just for this purpose, just have to find a local place to buy them from or if thr to heavy for your set up I would think you could find a small lumber mill and have some adequate sized timbers cut and build your own. Do you have any pics of what your up against?
This but pretty much all around the perimeter... its not that bad tho as far as mud goes. I’m liking the idea of partially draining and using mats to track out you can see the water level is already low... draining a couple more feet would be feasible
How big is the pond?
Where do you guys source your mats? I can go to Sacramento or San Fran if needed
~2 acres... it’s not wide but pretty long...(that’s what she said) long reach would be the way to go but it’s 3 hours away and they balked at 2 days rental... and I don’t mind if I can figure out a solution to keep me here working... things are slow
We used to frequent a local island. The marina / bay area would always get congested with heavy allgy (sp.?). One time during a not busy weekday I saw the machine used to cleanup the area. It was a barge/pontoon structure. In between the tunes it had a wire belt conveyor that dipped beneath the water. On the front it had what appeared to be a homemade sickle bar mower blade operating below the water level. It was putting around the marina with a small outboard motor. The mower blade would trim the growth and the conveyor would lift the clipped weeds out of the water and deposit them on the deck. It was 100% homemade and pretty cool! I'll see if I can find a picture.
I’ve seen something like this locally at a park... pretty cool contraption
I couldn't locate a picture too many common searches. I think my brain was turned off I meant sea weed or sea grass not allgy. Drrr
You could make one without too much effort I imagine. Post videos / pictures of you do. I'd much rather go this direction than risk getting my excavator stuck. Oops didn't see the size of what we're dealing with until after all my ramblings. Sorry, didn't mean to steer your thread off course.
Get one of these and clear dams for a living
I've driven two wheel drive backhoes into worse than that. The problem is the reach, you can pile it but you'll have to reach it from the other side and handle it a few times. And the slop doesn't pile very well either. If you do it with a mini I'd cut up some fuel barrels and have a tractor to pull them out, roll them over and bring them back. And if you do that, you might as well use a tractor like the desilting method and skip getting into the mud.
Looking at your picture there the weed razor may actually be a decent option... You could definitely throw it over the growth and slice it all down. They make another rake that floats to pick up the junk you just cut down but a ton of money could be saved by attaching a pool noodle to a normal metal-tined rake to accomplish the same thing.
Dewater the whole thing and go in there with a wide track dozer. You can make it deeper and eliminate the swamp like condition it is in now. IMHO.
It looks like it wouldn't be too hard to drag something from one side to the other. A toothed skid steer bucket with pull points near the bottom front to act like a dragline bucket could work. You could put some holes to drain the water like they do with excavator buckets. A used skid steer bucket would be $500 or less.
Okay, don't know the legalities or the amount of room available but have one somewhat different idea. What about just moving the "lake"? Dig a hole off to one side a short distance away a bit deeper than this one then cut a channel between them. After the water has moved to the "new" hole use the dirt from it to fill the old "lake" in.
Now that is thinking outside the box.
Are there any of these left around your area? Mine works great for ponds with the dragline bucket or the clam
Search for an old Dragline! There are still some around. Remember you can sit back on the Dry, and never have to take the machine in to the muck and water !!