diggin under water

might have a job comming up scooping some muck out of a pond and was wondering if there is anything to keep in mind when bucket pins and whatnot are under water. more grease than usual? anything else?

thanks

Grease more often and make sure all the water is purged from the joints with grease before you park at night.

Some body told me they use marine grade grease when they work in water for extended periods of time. Im not sure what the difference is in the marine grease but maybe it has more corrosion resistance properties?

eianewb, is there anyway you could pump down the pond before u dig ?? and lf not like the other guys have said just grease more often during the day. If u could pump it down it always better to see what u are digging if not then just go by feel ???

I've done some digging under water(dredging) and i found that if the silt is sandy it gets in the bushes and pins and tends to wear them but if you purge them every night with plenty of grease should do the trick, also drain the pond down as much as you can helps you to see what you are doing. Does it have a clay bottom?...

I have done one under water job and we switched to marine grade grease while still on the previous job so that by the time we got to the water all the bucket pins would have only marine grease in them.

A new hotel was built on a lake shore and a dredge was brought in to dig the a channel to the hotel and dig a harbour right at the hotels edge. The dredge can only cut vertical walls so we were brought in to slope the 300 yard long underwater bank on each side of the channel and then place rip rap along both sides from top to bottom.

The whole area was 2-3 feet deep water with the 15' deep, 100' wide channel and 400' x 400' harbour cut into it. We had to go out by row boat and flag the edges so that I didnt walk the excavator off into the channel . I had to slope the whole thing with our Cat 330 blind. Then the dump trucks dumped the rock at the edge of the hotel parking lot and I had a 977 trackloader packing the rock out to me to be placed by feel ointhead after it was all said and done divers had to go down and inspect the entire bank on both sides to make sure we didnt miss a spot.

Uderwater digging definately takes some getting used to but it is alot of fun.

I've done rip rap work on the Red River here in the winter as its the only time of year you can work from the shore without sinking into the gumbo. We had to place two feet of rip rap twenty feet into the water or as far as the machine could reach which ever came first. It was quite cold when we were doing it about -30C so as I always do in the winter I kept the grease gun and extra tubes in the compartment with the hydraulic pumps to keep it warm and easy to pump. With all the splashing around everything on the boom and stick and a good part of the house and tracks got covered in ice. So at the end of the day I had to use a screwdriver and a hammer to chisel off the ice off of all the grease nipples and pumped grease till it was coming out all the joints. I dont know about other makes of excavators but the Cat 325L I was running has a chamber in the bottom of the stick that holds grease for the bucket pin and it's suppose to continually "grease" as the machine works so as long as you keep it full it works pretty nicely. I've never used marine grease before but it would of been pretty nice to have.

diggerdave1958 said:

eianewb, is there anyway you could pump down the pond before u dig ?? and lf not like the other guys have said just grease more often during the day. If u could pump it down it always better to see what u are digging if not then just go by feel ???

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Wow, My Bad. I was told not to use "u" and i see i did it 3 times in this post i am sorry but all i can say is that its a hard habit to break. again i am sorry and will try to not do it again :Banghead

Make sure the fastners that hold ur bucket teeth on are in good repair as the constant movement thru the water will erode all the crud that tends to hold the teeth tight and pretty soon the teeth will be rattling on the bucket like ATCO'S false teeth rattle in bed. Enough rattling and you will lose some teeth just like atco!

I would use a aluminum or calcium-sulfonate complex thickener base grease it will not wash out with water like a lithium will.

I do a lot of pond dredging/ excavation and I just keep plenty of grease in the bucket pins. Sometimes you may use a tube a day just in the main bucket pin. The water will no hurt your pins, its the sand, silt, and mud that will eat your pins and bushing.

grandpa said:

... pretty soon the teeth will be rattling on the bucket like ATCO'S false teeth rattle in bed.

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:lmao (Sorry ATCO but ya gotta admit that was pretty damn funny.)

thanks for all the responses! no, there is no way to drain the pond. it is more like a lake, damed up right next to a river with only a couple feet difference in the 2 water levels.

how long does the muck you dredge out take to dry? how soon can you drive on it? i gatta dredge some silt out of the water and put it on top of the dam. there is a wash out we are goin to fill in about 2-3ft deep, but i can not reach it all with my 130 cause it is about 30ft across. i'll prolly have to do part and let it dry until i can drive out there more, as getting to the other side is bout impossible.

it is hard telling what is down there for dirt... it is in a river bottom which is sandy, but then the silt wouldnt be all sand, so theres gatta be a mix of stuff in there.

lol i dont want my teeth rattling off, but thanks again for all the comment so far.

Well it all depends on what kind of soil you have there. You keep saying silt so that stuff is pretty miserable to work with when wet, if you mean silt as a generic term like mud and its actually clay it can take longer but it depends on what type of clay. If its like the gumbo we have around here it can take forever to dry out, the stuff we have here is 30% bentonite but once dried out works great for dams and dikes. But if the stuff your dredging is true silt truck it away and haul in some dry clay to fill in the washout. Silt will just wash away with the next downpour.