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Around the middle of June, we finished the
homebuilt trailer and the rebuild
of the dredge, now we're ready!
June 17th; About 18 months after we took delivery, we launched her! |
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The fall before we finished the dredge,
we realized that we needed water to launch the dredge into. So we
had a local guy push out a 50' x 50' pit for us to launch into. We tried,
but our dozer got stuck... oops
We thought we could chew our way into the lake with the dredge. |
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My dad walked along side as we prepared
to launch the dredge into the waiting water. It was the last few
moments of the first phase of the project.
A million things could go wrong, would it float was my biggest worry! |
| We attached a manual winch to the front and tried to winch it down slowly. It didn't slide real well, so we jacked the dredge up a bit and spread some axle grease on the rails to make it slid better. |  |
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That made all the difference, we launched without a problem. She slid right off the trailer into the puddle, high fives! |
| With a little pushing we slid it right off! I have a rope tied on, but really, how far could it go? |  |
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We fired up the engine to check things out. We engaged the pump to see if the pump works okay. |
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Everything worked as planned, but with some simple math, we will show:
*an MC-10 needs 2 feet of water to float. *can pump well over 2,200 gallons a minute. *will have about 20 minutes of run time in this puddle. So silly, please refer to the lessons below |
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An important lessons that apply to everything:
"The less you know
about something, the easier it seems to do it" and "Reality sucks, deal with it!"
Remember these lessons! They really hammered home the size and scope of this project. On our way home from the weekend at the lake, we discussed our options. We have a ton of money in equipment we can't use without water, so we decide to get more? I can't believe my wife Carol said that! What we really need is a dragline! That same Sunday I searched on "Equipment Trader Online" and found one. |
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After several weeks of negotiating, we sealed the deal.
The crane was located 10 miles from the house, but Bloom Lake is 250 miles from there!
It's a good story if you have the time.
We call our new toy, Helga! Here she lumbers through the woods to the shore of Bloom |
| We leveled the piles of sand from the hole we had dug. This made a nice pad to set of for digging. |  |
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We've never operated a dragline before, there are plenty of levers and pedals to push and pull. We got the hand of it pretty quickly, any mistake caused the cable to tangle, and plenty of manual work to untangle. |
| We started digging a hole, It's not so bad driving Helga |  |
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We got pretty good at it, well.....we did
okay.
This hole is about 8 feet deep and 30 feet wide. It's nice stuff to dig, a heaping 3/4 yard per bucket. It was just moist enough to hold in the bucket, the perfect conditions for digging We where cruising! |
| Then I hit a vein of clay. I dug a bit deeper, pulling out a little clay at a time, when I thought I saw the water swirl? The water started to fill the bottom, then as the water rose higher, the sides of the hole started to slump. With daylight fading, we decided to call it a day and go eat dinner. |  |
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The next day, we returned to a hole that was filled to the brim with water! It was very hard to dig this stuff, I couldn't see where the bucket was, and the water washed the mud out of the bucket. Slow going but we made some progress. |
| We worked at it a bit each time we had a chance throughout the summer. |  |
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Here as we neared the end of the season, we had a nice pile on shore. |
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With winter here, we had to move the crane
from the point we made, drop the bucket and drag the dredge onto shore
where we could prepare it for the winter freeze.
There are some issues with what we did. Not really knowing that we where in violation of about every rule the DEQ had, we felt we had a very successful year, until disaster in the spring of 2001 |
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The story to come. |
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