Quickthorn

:thumbup1:Another vote for 262xp In general, all those 2 series huskies sound pretty good.

Employer's liability if anyone's helping you - by law.

Anyone know what they can tow legally?

This is a fairly recent brief from the GLA covering how gangmaster licensing affects forestry. Home - Gangmasters Licensing Authority Third link under latest news. Any guesses on how to interpret this? I think there's a machinery exclusion if you're a contractor and you directly employ people to operate machinery that you own or hire. If you're a contractor and get subbies in with their gear, then you come under licensing.

Escallonia? Escallonia Hedging, Escallonia Hedge Plants | Hedging UK Flowers attract plenty of bees etc.

I'm just transferring from BT to Plusnet. It's near enough one third of the cost for a similar service, and there's a half price offer on at the moment - brings it down to £3.24 a month.

Yep,

Platts Harris, from my experience, are typical of these large agricultural machinery dealers who have chainsaw dealerships tacked on: they're more interested in selling multi-thousand-pound tractors and implements, and selling and backing up a chainsaw is small beer to them. Nevertheless, the exchange you had with them was totally unacceptable. They're supposed to be representing Stihl, and that means honouring warranty claims irrespective of where the saw was bought. I'd be seriously considering contacting Stihl head office to complain. Also, from experience again, buying the saw locally from this type of dealer doesn't really improve things. Yes, it's all smiles when you buy the saw, but that changes over time when you come back with problems, or want smaller parts - they make it clear they've got bigger fish to fry. Personally, I found the poor service thing a particular problem with Stihl, and I ended up going over to Husky stuff. DN22, for mowers, you might want to try Tony Halford in Retford. He's a small dealer, and I don't know whether he'll have what you want, but he's a decent bloke who may give you better service than some of the other grass machinery dealers around here.

The one in the picture is a Dovre 250. It's a 5kW cast iron stove, not the most popular brand, but has a good reputation. If you can get away with 4kW, I'd suggest a Charnwood Country 4. I know someone who has one of these, and it's pretty good value for money. Other than that, there's plenty of info on here on previous threads. lots of pictures on the "Show us your stoves" thread. Now's probably a good time to get it sorted.

Thanks for the replies. That's a good job there, hawthorn. That's what I'd aim for if I owned the place. Round here, the council want £300 to sign it off. Anyway, I've had a visit from the landlord - he wants me to get his builder mate in to do it now, then I'll have to sort out signing it off with building control. The old one was probably fitted 20 years ago, and never kicked out that much heat. I doubt if it was ever serviced or inspected. The outlet on this one was 20 degrees to vertical, and they connected it with a short straight flue and sealed it with a ton of mortar. The "joint" had fallen apart in places, and there was a lot of soot where there shouldn't have been. It sort of explains why it was so hard to light the fire a lot of the time, and why I could often smell smoke in the room.

I know some people on here have fitted stoves, and done a pretty good job judging by the pictures posted, so... I'm replacing the stove in my house with a new log burner I picked up recently - a Dovre 250. The old one was an inset type, and I pulled it out this morning, but the opening that's left is narrower than I thought it would be, and I'm wondering about clearances between the sides of the opening and the stove. I've been recommended 4-6" at the sides by the place where I bought it, but there's actually only 3" at the very max. Is this enough? It's all brick, by the way. There's a choice of flue exits on this one, top or rear. Any ideas which one would be best? The rear exit would need a costly adaptor, but it might be worth it if it throws out more heat into the room. Top flue Rear flue I won't actually be doing it myself, because I rent this house, and I've had to ask the landlord; he's said yes only if I do it "properly", which means getting it done by a HETAS installer. It would be good to know what's what before I get more quotes.

I interpreted it that you would be exempt only if you're moving forestry products from land you occupy to other land you occupy in order to store or further process that product. So, cord wood back to base for processing = exempt, processed cord wood (ie logs) to a customer = not exempt; also, unprocessed cord wood delivery to a customer = not exempt. It looks like there's yet more guidance come out on this recently. More guidance "VOSA's guide to drivers hours etc etc for goods vehicles" Unfortunately, I can't open this pdf, probably because my computer's too old now, so if anyone reads it, I'd be grateful for any new insights..

I agree. When I went to buy it, I was torn between that and the FZ45 for the zoom. However, the LX seems so well made, I ended up with that.

If you're hoping for 100% funding on anything, I think you're going to be disappointed. The only grants I've seen in the past 10 years will only match your funding to 50% maximum. These days, there seems to be a lot less free money about.

My deepest sympathies. I've used the micron before, with varying results. For drift spraying, it's very reliant on a constant breeze (speed and direction), with a very narrow range of acceptable conditions, so you have to pick your day very carefully. Trouble is, you never know if the day's suitable until you're on site.. I've found a knapsack's best, but it really needs to be done before bracken gets above waist height (this is a lesson land managers never seem to learn, in my experience; they always seem to put these sort of jobs out once the stuff's over head height !). If it's as high and as thick as you say, it'll be a struggle to get good coverage, and you'll get covered with the chemical. I think Highland Forestry's suggestion of strimming it down and spraying the regrowth is the best bet. If you can't do that, I'd suggest breaking down the area into smaller chunks and taking out some long ranging poles with flags or ribbons on the end, so you can navigate, otherwise you just get lost in it. It might be best to cut lanes through it before you start spraying, so at least you have easier movement once the sprayer's on your back.

I do a bit of woodwork, bits of furniture & stuff. All I've got is handtools, and most of the joints I use are mortice & tenon, chopped/sawn out by hand. I find these joints are ok, but they take a lot of time (especially setting out), and as I don't have a great deal of time outside of work, I don't get much stuff made. I'm looking at using dowells or biscuits instead of M&T, to speed things up, but how do they compare in terms of speed/accuracy to make and strength? It seems that dowells would be the cheapest in terms of new tools, but it looks like they have to be drilled very accurately to work well. Biscuits look better, but there's the cost of the jointer. As far as biscuit jointers go, can anyone recommend one? I don't think I can justify a Lamello, but I've seen a Bosch for £249, a Makita for about the same, and a deWalt for £184.

or "yooth"

Pretty sure second one's Wisteria

From what I've seen, what works best is one (or maybe two) experienced subbies you can trust helping with felling. I've seen a lot of problems with inexperienced helpers. They can absorb a lot of your time in supervision (plus I've seen a small minority seriously overestimate their worth once they think they know it all). General labourers (ie no saw) only seem to work out if you can find someone who will work hard for buttons, which normally means cash in hand. Site managers seem a lot more relaxed about lone running machinery, but more concerned about machinery and hand cutters in the same area. People I've worked for have either forwarded for a few hours in the evenings, after I'd gone, or come in at the weekend, or left all the forwarding until the coupe was down, cross cut and stacked.

Is it FC? Any idea how much per ha, or how old the crop is? Don't take this the wrong way, but I think this size of job is a bit big to be your first one of this type to quote for. You might be able to scale up from what you've done before, but a small error x 500 acres = massive loss. I'm speaking as someone who's done a bit of work for a contractor who had very little experience of anything forestry and took on a few jobs beyond his capability. Let's just say it ended in tears on more than one occasion. Not nice to see.

If the employer hadn't load tested the guard rail, how would they have known that it was safe? The first "test" would have been when one of the workers fell, and that's not good enough. Do you expect the HSE to only prosecute people once someone's been killed? HSE were quite right to prosecute, in my opinion.

I wish we could have our old regional electricity boards back, rather than the cartel that's developed thanks to privatisation. One thing you need to remember with comparison sites is that they're in league with the energy providers to a great extent, because they get paid when they switch you to one of their affiliate providers. They may not show all the options you could have, and one of those might be the cheapest for you. Tip: on the Uswitch site, there's a question asking if you want to see the plans they can switch you to today. If you click yes, you'll only see the providers they have the switching arrangement with, but if you click no, you'll see more options. In my case, my cheapest option only appears if I click no. I use Ebico, supposedly the only not-for-profit energy company in the UK. There are just a few straightforward tariffs to choose from, no standing charge, and the rates are clear and stable.

I've found external circlip pliers (ie squeeze and they open) a good tool for this job. This is how I do it if the clutch is off: using the pliers, open up one of the springs, but don't take it off, just wedge it open (combi spanner is just the right size for this). You can then open up and take off the other spring without the first spring interfering. The rest is straight forward.

They tried that on an estate near me some time ago, probably to save money. The loadall went over like in that video, but crushed and killed a bloke stood next to it.

Normally, people get rid of the people with less than a year's experience, because they have fewer employment rights and they are not entitled to statutory redundancy pay. have you worked out how much redundancy you're entitled to?