Pond Boss Forums POND CONSTRUCTION Selecting a site Drone footage of pond build - Livingston Co., MO

I received an 80,000 lb. early Christmas gift December 19th, 2017 in the form of a Cat D8N dozer. You could not have beat the smile off my face after waiting for so long to get the project started. The excitement I felt was the culmination of every hour I'd spent as a kid excavating with Tonka toys in the back yard and riding with my grandfather who ran a dozer for a living his entire adult life.

It wasn't all without a catch, though. We'd had a mild winter thus far, but normal temperatures were less than a week away and the dozer was moving to another project the end of the month. On top of that, I'm a school teacher and we still had two days of school left before winter break! This meant I would have to push through the night to optimize time, which wouldn't have been a big deal if the dozer had operational lights! I spent a couple hours rigging up led flood lights onto the hood and back of the cab of the dozer and hooking them to a deep cycle battery with an inverter. My other grandfather, king of the bush fix, would have been proud.

Here are a few pictures. One is from the first night rigging up the lights and the others are from the next day, continuing to stockpile black dirt on the ends of the dam. In one of the pictures, you can see the stockpile near my shed. As that pile grew and space got limited, I could easily see over the top of my shed as I climbed it with the dozer. I had never run a dozer of this size before, and getting the feel for it in the dark that first night was a bit unnerving, but they really are very simple machines to operate.