Does anyone have an affordable, relatively easy method for constructing a dock with water in pond?

Covered extensively on the site.. Use the search feature for some ideas

Maybe.

The easiest method that I've used to put a dock on a BOW that has a relatively constant water level is this:

Wait until the ice is strong enough to support a few people walking on it in the same area. Drill holes thru the ice and install 2" Galvanized pipe in the BOW. Attach brackets to the vertical pipe that allows horizontal pipes to be attached. Rest the joists on the horizontal pipes and build the dock.


This dock is 68' long.....

If the BOW has fluctuating water levels, go to http://www.dockbuilders.com/ and buy all the floats and hardware from them. They will also help you with the design of the dock. Buy the treated lumber locally.

A number of people have used plastic 55 gallon barrels for flotation instead of the floats that dockbuilders supply. But, that takes more work on your part in regards to engineering and design of the dock. You have to figure out how many to use for flotation, how to build the dock frame, etc.

A lot of us have done floating docks, which I really like. The suface is always the same distance from the water -- during floods or droughts.

If you get a contractor who knows what he is doing, and has a post hole digger on the end of the arm of a small excavator, he can dig holes in the pond bottom 15-20 feet out from shore. some people use trash pumps to suck out holes. Concrete will cure underwater.

Esshup not likely to have stong ice in Miss.

wbjdmd welcome to PB ! It can be done as we have had it done several times but I did not do the work. Send me a PM and I can get you a name.

I figured that after our Miss. winter here, you were going to get our winter next year and have plenty of ice to stand on!

There are other options, like what people use in lakes where piers have to be removed every year. Flat plates on the bottom of posts to support the pier, or the end of the pier on a large set of tires so it can be rolled in/out of the water. Either could be placed in the pond and left.

I'm in the process now of building a floating pier at my place, using 4"x6" posts for the fixed portion of the pier.

Great advice! I have been leaning to the floating idea. I have some aluminum floats from catfish pond areators. they are 8' long and about 2' in diameter. I am having trouble figuring how big to make the dock so that I won't overload these floats. Is there a calculation to find out how much weight they will support? How big should my dock be on top of 2 of them? Thanks for the help!

Get out your math book. Figure out how many gallons of water they will hold. Each gallon of water weighs 8.3#. If you have them half submerged, then they will support roughly 1/2 of the weight of the gallons of water they will hold. (i.e. if they will hold 200 gallons, then 50% submerged they will support 830#). You need to figure out how much your pier will weigh too, plus the maximum # of people you expect to have on the pier at one time.

I built this one 3 years ago and it has been a great floating dock.

http://www.canadianfishing.com/dock/index.htm

I took away alot of good info from this site as well when I was researching how to build a floating dock. One of the things I did a little differently than this website is to leave the deck off until I got it on the water. You "help" will appreciate not having to lift all that extra weight, if you're moving it manually.

Good idea. We had to put it on pipes and roll it into the water. Even that took 6 guys to budge it. Pressure treated lumber weighs a ton.

Captain1,
thanks for the feedback. I found your site about a year ago and had book marked it. I like the way you constructed the brackets for the corners.

Nate herman (N8ly) and Allan, plus a local carpenter built a small dock Five' 4" wide, 16 feet long, on my small pond yesterday in four hours. Nate has Herman Brothers Pond Management Company out of Peoria Il. It was built on dry land and floated into place on my brim full pond. He has it down to an art within a science. Very cost efficient.

What kind of floats were used?
Pictures?

Loretta:

http://thediaryofalakenerd.blogspot.com/2012/03/southern-illinois-morels-docks.html

The float was a simply styrofoam filled black plastic one, probably 8 inches thick, 24 x 30.

Thank you! This is exactly what I'm going to build this summer. I was hoping you were using the commercial floats, that's what I'm going to use. Are you sure they are 8" thick? I was trying to decide between the 12" and 16" thick float, 8" seems like it would be too small for a couple of adults and 3 large dogs.

Loretta: This is a stationary dock not a floating one. The float they used was only to float it out into the lake before they placed the poles that make it stationary. Both of my ponds have very stable water level and I don't need a floating dock. I greatly prefer stationary docks to floating ones.