Quickthorn
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Everything posted by Quickthorn
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Some good pictures there, Will. It looks like you've taken a few cuts with the bar totally buried. Do you get any kickback working like that, or is it quite safe? The good thing about the Logosol stuff is that you can start off for less than £100. I've got the tightwads version, where you make your own guide rails. I've had very little time to use it, apart from for a few hours on some small Western Red Cedar below, but I'm quite pleased with it. I can see me buying the extra bits to make up the proper Big Mill system.
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Xerxes, I don't have any closeups, just finished hedges. There are a few films on youtube. This one shows how a lot of hedgelaying is done these days by people who do it for a living. There's a bit from 2:24 which shows how I lay stems most of the time..chainsaw to start, then billhook to do the last bit. An axe would do, and would be better on bigger stuff, but the billhook can do this and can then trim off twiggy stuff as well, so you only need one tool. [ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZN2DcW0LwWQ&feature=related]YouTube - National Hedgelaying 2008. Part 1 Chainsaws.[/ame] My main billhook is like this one - a Yorkshire billhook..so if you're ever passing gransfors Bruks, ask if they can knock one up for me..
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I've got the Gransfors small forest axe. The steel seems really high quality, and seems to hold an edge so well. I like the look of that carving axe, Dave. I might have to start saving. I wish they made billhooks
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This is the bit that would worry me. They can impound your kit while they decide what to do with you, which can take months. They may decide to do nothing, and return your kit, but you'll get a bill from the storage company where your stuff was impounded, and this could run into thousands.
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That's the problem..on bushy thorn, it's the funnel that stops it, and you really need feed rollers that bite to pull it in; cutting it to fit would take forever on some jobs. Mind you, I think you're all on to something here. It's probably not for me, because all I ever chip is hawthorn & blackthorn with a bit of dog rose thrown in, but if I still worked in gardens, I'd definitely be thinking of getting one.
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I think it's a bubble as well. This graph's more to do with stocks and shares, but if applied to firewood, I'd say we're in the "mania" phase, somewhere between "enthusiasm" and "greed".
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More money for your waste product?
Quickthorn replied to Tony Croft aka hamadryad's topic in General chat
I know someone doing this..i think he's growing oyster mushrooms on birch logs. I'm told that you can get kits for it, which are basically plugs inoculated with the relevant spores. You drill holes in the log, bang the plugs in and put the log wherever the instructions say. -
How do these little chippers cope with blackthorn or hawthorn?
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Also worth checking that the impulse line is connected and sound.
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Have they all gone brown, or is it localised? How do the most recent needles compare to previous years'?
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Why don't you try the HMRC employment status indicator tool? I'm pretty sure your mate should be employed, from what you say, but you could change the answers on the ESI tool until you get the right result, then change your arrangements to suit. Things that make someone self employed: using own tools; choice of when/how the work is done; a share in the risk. The last one might be worth looking at..pay him a % of the job, perhaps, so if it goes well he wins, and if it goes wrong he loses - just like the boss. If you have to go the PAYE route, I'd look into getting a proper written contract sorted, including a grievance procedure, to protect yourself. If you don't have a contract of employment, the power is with the employee..
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I've looked at my copy of Forest mensuration from the FC. Except for pine, the figures are right if you mean cubic m per tonne..so 1.2 cubic m fresh larch (jap or hybrid) would weight 1 tonne. For pine, it's 0.98 cubic m per tonne, not 1.98.
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Calculating the carbon consumption of woodlands
Quickthorn replied to Arborist Sites's topic in General chat
If this helps, a typical yield class for a broadleaf wood would be 4-6, so the timber yield over a rotation would be between 4-6 cubic metres per hectare per year. You just need to find out how much carbon is in a cubic m. of green wood (half of it would be water, of course). From practical experience, I've been helping to coppice 1 ha blocks of broadleaf on a 20 year rotation, and we get around 100 cubic m. from that. The tree-shaped text forgets to mention that trees respire as well, and that gives off carbon dioxide. -
If you have to get into raising the stack, you might want to look into a chimney fan instead. As far as I know, they work, but it's an expensive fix, and probably a last resort.
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I think it depends on your existing workload. A day's assessing is a steady income with almost no overheads. The only problem I've found is that there's more assessing to do in Winter, when I'm very busy anyway. I have to sacrifice a day's work for a day's assessing, so I don't gain much really. If you're going for chainsaw or other forest machinery, you might find getting verified a bit easier, as the verifier for your region lives in Norfolk. People still waiting for verification have to be a bit pro-active; find out who your local verifiers are and keep ringing them until you've got a date out of them.
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Sounds like the overheating cable is the first thing to tackle..as well as poor connections, it might be an internal fault with the cable, especially if it's old. Copper work hardens, so years of vibration and other movement might have fractured a lot of the strands in the cable. If you're down to a fraction of the original cross section, it will get hot. If you've got a voltmeter, you could check volts from battery to earth, then volts from the solenoid (the post where the suspect cable connects) to earth, to give you the voltage being dropped over the cable. It shouldn't be that much, though couldn't tell you what a good or bad value would be.
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+/- 2mm would be for just the one Timberjig. If I used 2, I'd expect it would be as accurate as the Alaskan. besides, It's going to move during seasoning anyway, so that sort of accuracy is ok for what I want to do with it. I got the Timberjig because I might want to quarter saw stuff, and out of the two mills, it looks easier to do that with the Timberjig.
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On the Timberjig, they say 25" is the limit. It gets less accurate with longer bars anyway and also on thinner boards. You get the thickness you want at the saw end, but they say +/- 2 mm on a 15cm (6") board at the far end, so I'd imagine a 48" bar would give you quite an error. When you get to bigger dimensions, you have to buy more stuff for it. You can link two Timberjigs so that it works like an Alaskan, and that way you can use your 48" bar.
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Coppice & gap up would get my vote, but if they insist.. ..it might be time to invest in a power pole pruner. It's often difficult to control big stems as you lay them in - especially thorn - and what often happens is they'll spin, and that will rip them off the stump. The thing is, once they're down, you'd cut the top out anyway, so you'd be better off cutting the tops off before starting to lay them, just to get some weight out of them, and then tidying them up once they're laid in. The thorn might be quite brittle at the moment, especially if it's old, so you've got more of a chance if left to the end of the season, once the sap starts to rise.
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I don't know anyone who sells in cords - which is a great shame - but you'd get just over 2 cubic m of solid wood in a cord (assuming it was stacked so that 60% was wood). A common price for firewood at roadside seems to be £30/ton, which would be about £30 per cu. m for beech. So, your cord at roadside could be around £60. If it was all dead straight, you'd get more in the cord, so perhaps you could charge more..
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Thanks for the replies. I'm not running an Alaskan, it's a Logosol Timberjig. You only lose a few inches on bar length. The 390xp I can borrow has a 28" bar, so I'd expect a 25" cut from that. The Logosol thing is clamped to the saw using the bar studs only, so the nose of the bar is free. In theory, I could cut stuff larger than 25", but the nose of the bar would be buried..not sure if that would be a problem or not..
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It's mainly sycamore and ash, and they are less dense than a lot of softwoods when freshly felled. You'd get 1.28 cu. m ash and 1.2 cu.m syc in a tonne.
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I hear what you're saying about the 088, but I'm just starting on milling, and can't afford to splash out too much unless there's a future for it. Besides, aren't they a bit thirsty? At the moment, I'm using a 262XP with 18" bar on small softwood, just to get used to it all, but I quite like that saw for felling etc, and don't want to kill it. When I've got time, I can borrow a 390XP on a 28" bar to try that out. it's a good saw, from what I've seen of it, but I'd be interested to know how the similar sized J-red compares.
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You're right, it is the other way around !
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..to Husky 390 or 3120XP or Stihl 660/880. I'm thinking of getting something like a 90cc saw for milling, but I'm not sure whether a top of the range saw like the above would be best value for money. I'm not bothered about super responsiveness for milling, and a heavier saw wouldn't matter that much. I'd just like something robust, with grunt, that can stand up to milling, and perhaps there are other saws that would fit the bill at less cost than any of the above...?. I've got two saws in mind: I know someone on here went for a Makita DCS9010. How's that going? All the old posts I've found seem mainly positive, although I'm struggling to find a local dealer here in North Notts. The other contender is a Jonsered 2186. That's about the same cc and almost same power as the above, but I've no idea what it's like. Any opinions?
