John Shutler

yes i can sort that out for you when do you need them? you can come and collect from my yard later in the week

what sort of size steve? im near sway

What would you do to enjoy your Saturday?

in your opinion, and once again your basing all your comments on your own dislike for things, the same runs true in your comments about devon, housing and the uk in general i’d challenge you to find a tidier shoot than ours, we have 4 pens that are all maintained to a high standard, ive been on commercial shoot shoots that release 10-20x the amount we do and the pens are a state. the ground our shoot is on has little to no forestry value, infact the money the estate collects each year for our rent is it’s only potential income. we manage the squirrel population and there is certainly not an abundance on the site, certainly no more than you’d expect on a holding of that size. i think you’d find it hard to call our little shoot destructive if you actually understood the ins and outs of it

so your better informed to comment on subjects that you know very little about il let you know about game shooting for the common man. Ours is a working syndicate so 10 guns all pay the same amount of money (£1400 a year for 10 shoot days plus one tenants day) we rent a few hundred acres from a larger estate comprising of several thousand acres for about 3k a year. the greater majority of that land is mixed woodland surrounded by arable land with a small barn in the middle that is the base for the shoot. we have 4 release pens that we built and maintain annually that eventually feed 8 drives. we release 1600 poults into the 4 pens around july time then try to keep them alive till when mid october when we start shooting ( pheasants are like sheep in the sense that all they want to do is die) we buy growers pellets for the birds then as time goes on corn from the adjacent farm. we all share the workload so i’m usually up there a couple of times a week as a minimum all year round. non of us are gentry, infact ones a teacher, another a welder, i’m a tree contractor and my mates a butcher. one of the guys does admin type work and another is a boat day skipper. gardener, retired cnc machine operator, building site manager and school caretaker make up the rest. we all chip in for the food on a shoot day and my mate who’s the butcher and runs a small farm shop provides the grub. it’s a stand one/beat one type affair so there’s two teams of 5 and on each drive 5 are shooting and 5 are beating. we also have about 20 people who turn up to beat. no ones paid anything but all the additional beaters are fed and take a brace of birds at the end of the day. the beaters are mostly fiends and family who come for the day out and enjoy the day and the exercise plus they enjoy working their dogs if they have one. most of the beaters have been going for as long as i can remember. one of the guns of one of the 5 man teams couldn’t make it today so two of the beaters got to shot two drives each for the day, it’s pretty relaxed. we have a beaters day mid season. the shoots been going about 30 years and generally we will shoot around 40-60 birds on a shoot day. any birds that are left at the end of the day go to my mates shop. the shoot doesn’t usually have much money left at the end of the season, it just about covers all the costs. myself and another guy usually shoot 30 foxes a year off the ground, most of those are town foxes that come across looking for an easy feed. we also manage the deer on this section of the estate. its a lot of work and no ones there for anything apart from the enjoyment of it, guns and beaters alike

@Mick Dempsey ive had a quadchip since they first came out (8yrs?) great little chipper that doesn't go out often but its handy to have

Hi line?

much better now mate

taking out a couple of knackered Ash for a guy i used to do a bit of climbing for 10 - 12 years ago. nice easy couple of hours for a friday morning. roto really coming into its own on these sort of jobs

I felt like it summed up the day

Looks good josh. I bought a used woodland mills a couple of years ago for the same reason. Mines been mounted on a 6m long RSJ frame so that all the sections that bolt together to form the track cannot move. mine now sits on some railway sleepers in a open fronted building

miserable ivy infested ash made a lot more bearable with the roto and grapple saw. IMG_4919.MOV

just use an rsj held in the grab, you can tidy up pretty well with it and no chance of damaging the lawn with prongs but again it’s down to the operator

a lot of it’s down to the operator

why would you save the client £1100 and take on all the risk yourself? ive CPA hired in the past but would only ever contract lift these days. it’s refreshing just turning up onsite and dealing with the tree rather than worrying about the crane. on a contract lift if the crane company turns up, doesn’t make you sign anything, doesn’t check for drains or suitability of surface etc or a multitude of other things it’s not your problem edit I also own and operate a 26m merlo roto so have my own lift plan/ method statement/risk assessment which i do for each site

i usually just gather it all up and put it in a pile on the patio or garden path

rescuing a mates tseries a couple of weeks ago with gear box issues. we had to push it up onto my low loader with a telehandler IMG_4440.MOV

no different i don’t even think about the VAT these days just work out what i want for the job and add the VAT. One of the biggest things things i found was going over the £830 plus vat for a 2 man team as the total inc VAT is £996 which keeps it just below 1k which i thought was important physiologically for clients but when i put it upto £890 plus vat i didn’t see a down turn in accepting quotes

just because you disagree doesn’t mean he’s wrong

ive been registered 8 years or so now. the back VAT i got from hmrc gave me a enough for a 50% deposit on a new pickup. no idea how much vat ive claimed back over the years must be getting on for 200k. it’s a huge encouragement to invest in equipment

I was terrified of going VAT registered when it was happening but it’s one of the best things I ever did for my buisness.

i can’t comment on the semantics of how to hitch a trailer to pass a trailer test, or infact how to reverse a trailer to pass a test. however just because it is the “approved” version it doesn’t mean it’s better imo. thankfully il no longer have to pass a test to carry out something i’m perfectly capable of doing. my main issue is with the lack of common sense applied in these situations, I know plenty of 16-18yr olds who I wouldn’t trust to boil an egg, likewise i know a couple who id trust implicitly to run my tractor and grain trailer.

i’m in exactly the same position as you matty just because you’ve not done a trailer test doesn’t mean you don’t know how to load a trailer or how to drive sensibly.

out with the tree shear on my jcb today. the tilt rotater really transforms the shear as you can double or triple cut if needed. I went through today and took the tops out and il go back for a couple of hours with one of my guys to cut the thicker timber with a saw and stack on the chip piles IMG_4449.MOV