I am going to build a pong roughly 130X100 give or take and about 10 to 12 feet deep a swim pond. I would like to do it soon. My neighbor has just put one in two. I would like to use a dozer to start with you hit ground water down at three feet right now maybe four. The neighbor is contractor he said I should wait and dig the pond after I build my house which is going to be in about eight month. I need a lot of fill for the house. Roughly 1500 yards because of the high ground water which sucks because I cant go with a full basement I can only go with crawl space. Sorry to get off track. My idea is get it dug and let the spoil dry out I got the space for it and use it for fill. he said it will cost me more to dig the pond then to just have the fill truck inn now I have access to the equipment I need I might just have to rent excavator if I cant get the cat 325 from a guy I work for on the side. I can rent for 28 days for about 5300. Another thing he said it would take me 6 or seven weeks to do. I can run the equipment so like I said I do it on the side my normal job is I am an Aircraft mechanic. Like I said I need some inputs thanks for any help anyone can give. :bouncegri :usa
By your numbers, 130X100X12, that's about 5,800 cyds of material. While I have never dug a pond, I have done my share of digging/excavation/site work. Why would it take 6-7 weeks to do this? Part-time perhaps, but I would think you could do this relatively quickly, sans any large obstructions...
What you really need to nail down first is the cost of trucking in the fill. If you need 1500 yards, and (for the sake of using nice, round numbers), you have it hauled in 15 yard tandem dumptruck loads, then you need 100 loads. That's simple enough. What really makes it hard to figure, is how far away the fill is coming from. Obviously, if the trucks are running 5 minutes each direction, that'll add up to far less money than if the've got to run 20 minutes each direction. That 15 minute difference will multiply out to a four fold increase in the cost of trucking. Something else to consider is that given the dimensions of the pond you've described, you'll need to truck the dirt you dig out of there too. That applies even if you're only going to lay it out to dry for a few months. If the water table is as high as you say it is, I doubt you'll be able to get very far with the dozer before you start sinking in the mud. It would take an awfully big excavator to swing around and dump your dirt all the way outside the limits of the pond. Even then, you'd have a big pile of dirt. Big wet piles of dirt don't dry out very fast--the moisture doesn't migrate out from the center of the pile. It just sits there, and waits. Honestly, to get wet dirt to dry, you have to spread it out in the sun and let it dry, and then compact it again before it gets rained on. Otherwise, it just gets wet all over again. So now, you're talking about both the excavator and the dozer, plus a site truck. Unless the trucking is going to be awfully expensive, I think your neighbor might be right on that part. I have to agree with John though, that it shouldn't take six or seven weeks, unless you're doing it strictly part time. I'm sorry if that wasn't what you'd hoped to hear. (And I am by no means the definitve authority on dirt work. Hopefully some of the other guys will have more thoughts to add.) Good luck, and let us know how things turn out.
My neighbor say he would charge me around $15000 to haul in fill the gravel bank is 3 miles up the road
I would NOT recommend a track hoe, nor dozer in muddy soil, even though they are great machines, what you'd want is either a few pounds of dynamite or a dragline which is WAYYY more pricey. if you want to, you could ALWAYS shovel the dirt out by hand and wheelbarows but that would take YEARS of work to get very far. :Banghead go with the trucking fill dirt in from somewhere else. I'm just kidding about using explosives, its not exactly legal in residential areas, and I HIGHLY doubt the neighbor would wanna see a crane going all night long.