Shansen

You need to straighten that woman out.

Heal up quick Brother. I know the police usually don't come up with anything but having an eye witness has got to help. Plus they have an assault case instead of burglary which raises the stakes quite a bit.

Very creative.

They were free, they were almost the shape I wanted, and they are made from spring steel. They seem to work pretty good. If the wood is small we still have to load the bucket by hand, but on large logs (18") it will grab them. It will also grab brush, which we do occasionally. The down side is that it gives the unit the apperance of being made from junk. Which it kind of was but you just don't want it to look that way. The tractor, the pickup, and the trailer I put together with minimal expense, the bucket and chipper, not so much. A little history on the tractor. It was my father's and he was looking to get rid of it but the motor was on it's last legs and would probably cost about 3-5K to rebuild. And with a 25 year old rig that was just too much money, so he gave it to me. The motor lasted about a year and a half and I was wondering what I'm going to do now. It sat around for about 6 months and then a mechanic friend of my cousin's said that he had done a CARB replacement on a john deere pump motor for a guy I know and so he had the scrap motor that had been replaced by a govt program to replace older diesel motors with newer ones that have less emissions. They are supposed to destroy the old motors by breaking the block with a sledge hammer but they had neglected to do that and instead gave it to me. I then bought the loader for a thousand and modified it to work on there.

We did this job on Wednesday. The tree had been pruned a long time ago and I think the cuts were branch collar cuts but they didn't heal and there were cavaties into the parent limb whereever a large limb had been removed. One of these failed at the cavity a week ago and the tree is at a campground host site with a motorhome or trailer under it most of the year. Three loads of wood in my trailer and a truckload of chips in my forestry truck.

My nephew plays the pedal steel guitar and the dobro for Josh Turner, and they were playing at our local county fair on Friday. I took a couple of videos and if you guys don't mind here they are. [ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1dbk-Y_ufo]YouTube - justin 002[/ame] [ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUvn-qxhWFQ]YouTube - justin 004[/ame] By the way the people around me were extremely drunk.

Here is a job from quite a while back.

We're all kind of toughened up to the heat now after 7 days of over a hundred in a row and today is supposed to be 99. Might take a little more than a couple of hours:001_smile:

Here is a tree I bid on this afternoon. It's a live oak.

I trapped a bunch of ground squirrels once using a live trap. I used bird seed on the recomendation of the guy where I bought the trap. It worked great. The squirrels would only live for about a half hour or a little more and they would die from overheating trying to get out of the trap.

The knives don't seem to last much time at all. I chip maybe two truck loads and I start touching them up with a grinder and one of those carbide knife sharpening things. And keep that up for another 7 or 8 loads and then it's time to change them. It costs me $38.00 to have the four of them sharpened. My chute wore out in the curve of course and I replaced a section of it. I have hit the chute on the truck several times and ran it into a telephone pole once buggaring up the end of it. I really should fix that up better and paint it. I learned my lesson about chipping large stuff and now I have the tractor to load wood anyway.

They don't get much respect in the Treehouse. I've never really used another chipper so I can't compare. I chipped a bunch of cedar firewood chunks one time and I sheared all the rivets off of the clutch centerplate. I've replaced the main bearings and the shaft on the disc. I don't think it's been a lot of trouble. That's been the bulk of my repairs over the last five years.

I drove my Dad's old farm pickup, which was a 1964 Ford F-100 with a 262 ci straight six and a four speed on the floor with the granny first gear. The only thing I ever did to it was one time we were driving through this creekbottom and you could get about a foot of air coming out of it and I sheared the bolts to the motor mounts. I fixed it in auto shop class in school. I finally bought my own pickup about 5 years later and my dad reposessed that one and traded it to my uncle for a brush chopper. My Uncle used it for another 15 years before it finally got parked. Everything was rusted out on it by then. One time I was going to the fair to show this project pig that I had and a tooth broke on the distributor gear and went and seized up a crankshaft bearing. My uncle's mechanic helped me (really I helped him) and we took it out disassembled it and sent the block to be machined and the head to be checked for cracks. We installed all the new parts and he even had the tools to install new valve guides, seats, and valves in the head. It cost me a little over a eleven hundred dollars and that included a new clutch, which seems kind of expensive now. This was in 1971. It had a bench seat and so was adaquate for those other type activities that boys like to do in their cars.

It has the 236, 4 cylinder turbocharged Perkins. Sunny is an understatement. From April to October I'll bet there is maybe 30 cloudy days here. We take it for granted and whine about the heat. It was about 101 degrees F (38.3 C) when those pictures were taken. I had a bid to do about 30 miles away when we were doing the cedar, so I just got back and they were all sitting around waiting on me. Perfect timing huh? I don't know what kind of retardeness was going on that stump cut, but they got it done. None of them have a license to drive the truck.

Here is a couple of jobs we did on Wednesday. An italian cypress next to the house and a dead cedar deodora. The last picture is back at the first job blowing the roof off.

I did this one about a month ago. Sorry, no finish picture I had a brain freeze before we left the jobsite. The second pic is of a berry vine that was growing out of the palm.

They seem to live forever here. I've never removed one.

It's a dangerous job even in peacetime. My thoughts are with their friends and families also.

Here is some alder tree removal photos. Check out the fence posts in the trunks. My guy cut the wood away from the post while I was taking down the other trees.

I killed one of my walnut trees with glyphosate once. I sprayed some weeds around it and then irrigated it a couple days later. If I remember right the leaves on the walnut turned a real pale green and kind of curled up.

The neighbor who is across the fence that is in front of the truck is the one who wanted the tree gone.

This is pretty lame but it's all I got lately. Removal of a couple of tree of heaven trees.

Call them cool? I hope Squishy doesn't read this.

So what do you guys call a Canadian?

I don't think they trust him, they have sent another agent to keep an eye on him. Make sure he doesn't get distracted by some unguarded rations and forget his mission. [ame] [/ame]