I clean out several ponds a year and I am curious if anyone has used a large tractor and scraper set up to scrape the muck out instead of pushing all that slop with a dozer. Some feedback would be appreciated!
If possible drain water.Long reach excavator and small lgp dozer works good on small pond.Muck needs to dewater and dry after thrown out.Possible to load scrapers with muck but I have never been a fan of running tires and tracks in watery muck.Pond would have to be pretty dry to scrape with a pan and tractor.
Ponds vary so much by location, you might get away with it in TX, I don't think many would though. Everything is on Youtube, the Australians have a unique way of desilting, with cable and a scoop that gets pulled through the slop.
I've done them with a track loader. Cut right up the middle and back out with buckets of mud. You have to keep it cut to solid ground when doing it. Once a slot is cut all the way you can push a hell of load of mud down the slot. It doesn't work on all of them. The problem with ponds full of mud is all the sides taper to the middle. One wrong move and you are stuck from sliding sideways. I've done it with excavators and dozers or loaders pushing to it if it's to muddy to get in and out from the bottom side. These days I avoid muddy ponds at all cost unless it's a real good customer.
Around here, it usually takes years to get the muck to dry once its out of the pond. I've never actually seen a pond before that could be loaded onto a scraper and ever the get the muck out of a scraper unless the pond has been broken open for years or the muck isn't very thick, say less than a foot thick. But that depends a lot of the soil type, sandy soils dry a lot faster a lot deeper and some can be loaded onto scrapers in as short of time a few months after the dike is broken open. Most of the ponds we do, we scoop them out, spread out the much be best we can, wait till the next year, then use the scraper and move the mostly dry muck to where the owner wants it after its somewhat dried first. If its for a farmer, who wants the stuff spread out on his fields in the fall, we use dump trailers and dump it out, then use a dozer and spead it out, then in the spring the farmer tills it in the best he can, but we spread it thin, like inches thick not feet thick and let the winter help freeze it and break it apart somewhat.
If the pond isnt too wide to reach out into ,Find a dragline or even a clam on a crane. I just did a small pond this summer with 90'of boom and the clam on my 40 ton . Took out about 1200 yd.s of sloppy silt and loaded it direct into a gravel truck.A dragline moves more material but churns it up a lot more if you are in slop.Pumping is the key to a successful cleanout.
We just cleaned a pond three weeks ago and there was absolutely no water in it all year due to the drought that area had this year. There must have been about 10 feet of good black dirt in it, then pure clay muck under that. The first 3-4 feet we used the scrapers to self load, after that we loaded it all with an excavator, the sides were too steep to pull the loaded scraper out with a 350 hp front wheel assist attempting to pull a 8 yard scraper. But the upside was, the black dirt was dry, I couldn't believe it, no slop, no muck, no wet spots, nothing till we hit the clay layer, that was bottomless to say the least. I tried to tell the farmer to keep going and do the whole pond because it would probably never be that good of conditions ever again within his lifetime to get it done, but he had enough dirt for his building project that he needed so we ended up quitting and just leaving the rest in the pond. Not sure but I'd guess maybe a few thousand more scraper loads and we'd have had it cleaned out and back to full water capacity again. We attempted this pond cleaning a few years ago and gave it up, nobody could even get close to the pond with an empty scraper before they got stuck.............then to this fall where they self loaded the first few feet out of the pond?? Quite the fall, in the morning we'd work in water and slop, winching the trencher through putting in tile till the lines we put in were so overloaded and beyond full capacity and had to quit to let the lines catch up and drain down, then in the afternoon we'd go clean ponds that were dusty dry and if the wind got too bad we'd have to quit because stirring up the dirt while loading it caused so much dust, nobody could see and in the valley we were working in the dust just hung and swirled around so badly after about four hours or so, even with lights on, the tractor drivers couldn't see to avoid each other, truly unbelievable the diverse conditions less than 20 miles apart.
I expanded our pond with my JD590D back in 2014. It had a layer of organic muck about 3 feet thick on bottom. Nice solid clay under that. Had to make steps and move the dirt multiple times into a pile beside the pond.