wills-mill

If that lovely old girl does the job and is nice and simple, why not put a sensible lump of money into a bit of a rebuild; rather than turning it in for an unknown machine (high hours Valtra?) which could give all sorts of issues. Has anyone been down that route?

The benefits of working for a shopkeeper who wears a fez

Perhaps we should look at keen householders as an asset, rather than putting them down? Plenty of countries on the Continent will allow householders access to marked stems for thinning in government owned woods. After a bit of training and a very mild licensing fee, I believe? Basic woodland management gets done at no cost to government, timber quality and the community benefits!

Yesterday. Customer's Boxer dog ate my sarnies As if by magic, replacement bacon sarnie appeared Win, win, win. living the dream

Just had one today, 5 failed logins trying to get into my account. I googlified the IP address and it put it in Santa Ana, California. Most odd Apart from pestering Steve, if any of the mods are keen please send me a message and I'll let you know the address. Ta

I'm fairly certain that the briquetters don't like green material

That's a brilliant looking setup Oaklay, well done!

Ariel Rescue

Festool Sword Saw....

There are very few folk who could weather a 12 x 12, especially your average joinery shop that now deals mainly with veneer covered MDF. Depth of cut on most hand held circulars is pretty woeful, you'd need way over 6in depth of cut by the time you've tilted the blade. We did have a demo session with a Festool 'sword saw' which is a chainsaw bar grafted to a circular saw. The chain runs the 'wrong' way which is a bit weird, the depth of cut is great (8in?) and the price is a relatively sensible looking £700 (especially compared to Mafell kit). Sadly, it was a bit of an awkward/ dangerous nightmare when trying to weather a gatepost- the bar and chain tilt the opposite way to a circular saw, and so you have to try and balance the saw on the triangular waste portion that is being cut off. Not good in that respect.

Don't mess with angles and degrees. Choose how much 'drop' you want (maybe 4 inches) then mark all round the post at 4in spacing, then mark to a centre point for your cuts. Generally much easier that way. A 45 degree point is actually pretty steep and quite tricky to hand cut.

Start with an 11ft post then you've space for a cock-up or two! To be honest, with careful marking out they aren't too hard, and in some ways you are best doing them slightly over the line with a chainsaw and finishing them off after a couple of days surface drying with a grinder and blue sanding discs. Handsaw is fine, but you start to regret doing it when you're a couple of cuts in. Zirconia Resin Fiber Grinding Discs

I set the Mizer up completely the wrong way round this morning and had a miserable day getting completely filled in with Wellingtonia dust, it's about time I was a bit more grown up about dust and stopped holding my breath and jamming my eyes closed. I've tried a few different cheap masks and tried goggles and glasses over the years but they are always a bit of a mess and something always leaks or mists up, so I've never stuck with them. I bought one of the Trend air helmets, but the battery life isn't up to a day's work and I found it heavy and really, really cold. I had a bit of a poke around the 'net this evening and found these little beauties- JSP FilterSpec Pro™ Black with FMP3 Valve Filter They seem to tick a lot of the boxes- not too dear, very light and disposable filters, so hopefully they do the job and are a bit robust as well. I shall report back when they've seen a bit of action. W

I rescued an Ariel. 1956 sidevalve. Just had to sell the old girl

Would love to help, I've got some thick Ash (3 1/4) but I think it's probably a bit past it I'll have a quick look

I've just had some bands from Wood Mizer, it's been a while and so I was impressed with the price at £17.50 each before VAT. I tend to run them till they get very thin, which is probably a false economy given the price of them. I find I start to get snappages if the bands are sitting too close to the back flanges of the blade guide rollers. With a bit of space to move they seem to behave better.

I'm afraid this is the lightweight, namby pamby 'skimmed milk' version... Creocote rather than Creosote.

Morning all. I've been bolting some untreated softwood to a concrete framed barn and have given the timbers a coat of dark coloured 'Creocote' to give them a bit of lifespan. It claims it's oil based and by the smell and look of it I can't help thinking that I've bought a pot of mildly filtered sump oil. I can manage that myself for less than £8 a pot Have I bought a lemon?

That's fair enough, if you've got them, then use them, I bet rectangular plastic conduit is great! It's really easy to get hung up about 'the perfect sticker', but it probably makes more difference to timber value,board flatness and quality to spend time and materials/money on getting the bearers built up sturdily and really nicely in line with each other. I've seen too many stacks with only 2 stickers per board that are horrible saggy messes fit mainly for firewood. A bit of a waste of time and effort for everyone involved. I borrowed some samples of machined posh stickers recently, I'll get them together for a photo when my naughty Land Rover gets back from it's holiday with the spanner man.

I was just wondering about toxicity- Wikipedia seems to think that it has low toxicity for mammals 'similar to table salt'. But then all you have to do is think of the nasties that have happened to people working with Lead, Phosphorus and various other lovely elements. No doubt the Boric Acid is not very nice depending on the strength.

Larch on Larch wouldn't hurt. If the boards are going up as cladding then you won't have any issues with any minor sticker marks- they would soon weather down. 3/4in thick sticks work well for most timbers, you can go thicker if you want to dry softwoods faster or down to 1/2in if you have Oak in a place where you think it may dry too fast- lots of wind or exposure in a dry spot. As your cladding is probably quite flexible but is going to be fixed surface, you can use a wider sticker spacing than if you were trying to dry boards for joinery. For thin boards most folk would use around 16in spacing between sticks (anyone?), but your cladding wouldn't hurt at somewhere between 2 and 3ft spacing. Make sure the ends are well supported and that there is a bearer directly under each set of stickers. Pop or any bland white wood without resin is great, sticks will air dry really quickly, so a week or two stacked in a 'log cabin' style (plenty of air flow around them) and they are ready to go. Timbers like Thuja or Giant Redwood used as sticks can bleed a bit of red colour into whitewoods. If you only need to store them for a month or so in the current cold weather, then I think your Larch wouldn't come to harm if it was piled up without sticks. Hope some of that helps. W

One of our local chainsaw shops uses this garage package (Garage Assistant) for their jobs, machine servicing, stock ordering etc. They sing it's praises and say it's really easy to use, very flexible and UK based with no silly fees. I guess it would be dead easy to set up for fleet management, you can set all sorts of reminders. SWS Solutions | Free Downloads - Garage Software and Garage Invoice System by SWS Solutions.

Woodweb.com has a massive resource of different types and sizes of solar kilns, very useful and informative. Search Results from WOODWEB's Site Search Engine I'm interested in any more feedback about the Sauno/ Logosol kilns, sorry for the derail.

The angle of dangle equals the heat of the meat? Anyway, you could do it the via the Roger Day method? [ame] [/ame]

Just looking into this- which product from APC? Boron Decahydrate or pentahydrate? Amazon seems to have lots of people selling Wykabor- how does the price stack up with your previous buys? [ame=http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_2?url=search-alias%3Ddiy&field-keywords=wykabor]Amazon.co.uk: wykabor: DIY & Tools@@AMEPARAM@@http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41WzgKGiaVL.@@AMEPARAM@@41WzgKGiaVL[/ame]