An Idiot's guide to Ancient Woodland management

[Lucan]

On 05/12/2019 at 21:01, the village idiot said:

Sycamore is not considered a true native species of the UK. It made the mistake of arriving onto our shores a little too late to appease the boffins who came up with the classification. A lot of woodland managers cannot abide Sycamore and will pull out any saplings that dare to poke their head above the humus. Personally I don't have any particular grudge against it. Sycamore has been around long enough for many species to have become adapted to make use of it, including us humans. Sycamore is a good firewood, a nice carving wood and is highly sought after as a veneer. Rippled Sycamore is used to make violin and cello backs and commands an extremely premium price.

 

Sycamore does tend to get a little dominant if not kept in check. It seeds prodigiously and casts a dark shade which inhibits the growth of other species. Managed well though it can form a welcome part of your woodland mix, and we might well be very glad of it once our Ash populations are decimated.

 

 

If you want some bedtime reading on the biodiversity value of sycamore in UK woodlands: The ecology and biodiversity value of sycamore (acer pseudoplatanus L) with particular reference to Great Britain

 

[the village idiot]

40 minutes ago, Woodsman1967 said:

That's a sturdy looking piece of kit ,  been thinking about getting one for a while now , can the winch be used to drag a stem into reach of the log arch or is it only for lifting ?

I reckon it would be capable of a certain amount of 'winching in' especially if you orientated the arch to the log.

 

It might need a few design tweaks if you were planning to do a lot of this.

 

I'll see if I can get Tim involved in the thread to give his thoughts.

 

Without wanting to do him out of a potential sale, you would be more than welcome to borrow the arch to see if it fits in with your operations. It just about fits on the back of a pick up, (and easily onto a trailer) if the wheels are taken off. It's been out in one of the Suffolk Wildlife Trust woods to extract some truly mighty Oak stems.

[Stere]

Never understood the OTT anti sycamore hatred seems irrational and based on emotive ideas about being a non native. Esp now with ash dieback in some woodlands where  if they remove all syc won't have much else left.

[the village idiot]

38 minutes ago, Lucan said:

 

If you want some bedtime reading on the biodiversity value of sycamore in UK woodlands: The ecology and biodiversity value of sycamore (acer pseudoplatanus L) with particular reference to Great Britain

 

That is a fantastic study, thanks for putting it up.

 

If anyone else has found any similar stuff about any woodland tree species it would be great to see them. In a few posts time I will be moving on from forestry activities to ancient woodland ecology. It might well be most appropriate to put them up when we get to this point.

[tcfengineering]

Good to see the log arch working hard and being put to the test !

 

I personally much prefer using arches to skid timber out of the forest. If you get it right you can extract a lot of timber with just an arch and a quad bike or small tractor and damage to the ground is really minimal. If you think about the size of equipment required to pick up those pieces of oak, you would definitely know it had been there

 

We have built several hundred log arches ranging from very small hand pull ones up to really very big ones to transport ships masts. We build a lot of custom made stuff so you are welcome to come to us with your ideas and we will turn them into real life metal things. With the standard arches and trailers, we recognize that our customers might occasionally exceed the manufacturers recommendations (Probably every time !) so we purposely make everything a little stronger than required.

 

Feel free to contact us any time with your requirements. I think its better to do this directly so as not to derail this brilliant thread.

[devon TWiG]

50 minutes ago, Stere said:

Never understood the OTT anti sycamore hatred seems irrational and based on emotive ideas about being a non native. Esp now with ash dieback in some woodlands where  if they remove all syc won't have much else left.

A big woodland near me was cleared of its dead Elms in the late 70s and is now a stand of perfect tall straight Sycamore and looks great  and  cost nothing to plant !!  

[Gary Prentice]

1 hour ago, Lucan said:

 

If you want some bedtime reading on the biodiversity value of sycamore in UK woodlands: The ecology and biodiversity value of sycamore (acer pseudoplatanus L) with particular reference to Great Britain

 

 

58 minutes ago, Stere said:

Never understood the OTT anti sycamore hatred seems irrational and based on emotive ideas about being a non native. Esp now with ash dieback in some woodlands where  if they remove all syc won't have much else left.

Maybe because it's like a weed, growing where it's not wanted or planned? 

 

Maybe we all have a role to play, reading and understanding the research that @Lucan has provided to do more in educating others?

[the village idiot]

THRILLING MILLING II. THE BANDSAW MILL.

 

Very early on in my woodland exploits I was contacted by the International Boatbuilding Training College which is based on the Suffolk coast. I have no idea how they came by my number! They had recently resurrected their old Wood-Mizer sawmill and were scouting around for timber that they could convert into boat building materials.

 

I had come across several windblown Oak and Ash stems in the Wood, and as it is easier to transport sawn timber than big tree trunks, we decided that it would be fun to bring their mill to the Wood for a few months to section up the stems.

 

Sawdust Sam (as he became known) and his assistant Justin set the Wood-Mizer up on one of the open areas of concrete within the Wood. The college funded the purchase of my log arch in return for timber, and I used this to bring them their raw material.

 

 

 

A bandsaw mill is essentially a sliding carriage composed of an engine or electric motor driven horizontal saw blade. A log is positioned on the tracks, it is then clamped in place and the saw carriage is propelled along, sawing through the log at a height set by the operator. There is much more detail on some of the excellent milling threads on this forum.

 

 

The Wood-Mizer is particularly good at cutting slabs of timber, but it can also do beams and battens by turning the log through 90 degrees and re-sawing. Some bandsaws have built in hydraulic (?) assistance for turning the log. This particular machine did not, so Sam and Justin brought with them a metal gantry to assist with the heavy lifting and turning.

 

 

As the mill was on site for a prolonged length of time the sawyers put up a temporary canopy to keep the elements off the sawn product. This also doubled as a makeshift pot noodle fabrication chamber.

 

 

You can see the first few planks off the mill stacked at the back with little spacers between each slab to encourage a bit of air flow.

 

By the time their stay in the Wood was up this wood store was full and Sawdust Sam and Justin could take a well earned coffee and dog petting break.

 

 

I am no milling expert so these basic introductions will be short on detail, but from a woodland managers perspective it is great to see larger timber being converted into useable product. It can be a useful additional income stream as well as a way to provide material for your own construction projects.

 

In the case of the boat building college the Oak was used for the hulls of the boats, and the less durable Ash for the interior fittings.

[Gary Prentice]

46 minutes ago, devon TWiG said:

A big woodland near me was cleared of its dead Elms in the late 70s and is now a stand of perfect tall straight Sycamore and looks great  and  cost nothing to plant !!  

I was surprised to read that sycamore, on suitable soils, outperforms almost every other species. 

[the village idiot]

THRILLING MILLING III. THE ALASKAN MILL.

 

You may remember from a previous post that my arrangement with my volunteer group (Orchard Barn) required that I provide them with timber for their various projects in return for their hard graft. 

 

One of their ongoing projects is to restore a centuries old longhouse on their site, and for this they needed some substantial Oak beams. I had some large Oak stems available from one of the early coppice compartments, the Oaks had to be thinned out in order for enough light to get through to encourage the coppice regrowth.

 

I was once berated by one of the shooting syndicate at the Wood for deciding to take out some Oaks. His argument was that it was criminal to cut down Oak trees as they were a symbol of our all conquering naval heritage. It didn't appear to have occurred to him that our galleons would not have been much cop had the ship builders at the time decided not to fell the trees that made the boats!

 

People can get overly emotionally attached to trees, Oaks in particular. Whilst it is true that Oaks provide unrivalled habitat services, veteran Oaks especially so, there are absolutely cases where they are best removed from a Woodland stand and processed into useable product. Much more on this in the ecology sections to come.

 

As I was saying, Orchard Barn needed Oak beams, they couldn't afford to have them milled with the Wood-Mizer so we called in Alec (agg221 on Arbtalk) with his Alaskan and Mini-Mill set up.

 

Alec is a flat out genius. It is my suspicion that he was born with two brains rather than just the one that is our usual quota, although I have no empirical evidence to back this up.

 

The Alaskan mill is a very small and simple metal frame that you clamp a standard large chainsaw into. The chainsaw (often fitted with a specialised ripping chain) makes the cut whilst the frame keeps the saw at the desired depth. There is a bit more too it than this but hopefully you get  the basic idea.

 

The Alaskan Mill has the benefit of being extremely portable, with no particular need to extract the log first. On the down side it is very slow and especially tiring work.

 

 

 

 

Once the Oak stems had been broken down into thick slabs with the horizontal Alaskan Mill, Alec set to with the vertically operated Mini-Mill. This device also takes a chainsaw (usually a smaller one) and can be used to section up the slabs into beams.

 

 

 

 

By the end of a day's chainsaw milling we had created a respectable stack of construction beams along with some ridiculously sturdy table tops. The Alaskan mill is a good option for those on a tight budget who have very strong arms and maybe do not see milling as their full time occupation. 

 

Next up my personal favourite, the Lucas Mill.