wills-mill

Not arb plates but round our way are 2 (new) Minis.... One's called THE 60S and the other P155 WEE Then there's quite a big groundcare firm called Burleys and it seems all their vehicles have got a STR 1M or G9 BUR oir similar...

Mill your own if you can, definitely.... 50p a cu/ft roadside sounds optimistically cheap for sensible timber. I'd expect to pay from £2 upwards if access and felling is going to be reasonable, so by the time you've felled and extracted it's closer to £3-5. With Oak weighing in at about 28cu/ft per tonne, that would mean your 50p sawlogs are costing £14 per tonne, which is cordwood money There's a fair bit of wastage by the time you've milled the sapwood away, and the smaller the oak is, the greater percentage you'll be losing. I'd reckon to get between 60 and 80 sawn cubic ft from 100 hoppus cubic ft measured, depending on size and wobbliness of the butts.... Milling costs I'd think should work out at between £2 and £5 per cube produced, but obviously the costs are more or less the same if you are producing dreadful rubbish or prime timber! All in all by the time you've priced everything up, there's a very sensible saving to be made over bought-in fresh sawn timber. I would say that round here (South East) Oak tends to be priced at between £18 and £22 per sawn cube depending on lengths sizes and quality, and nice air dried I have seen at anything from £35 to £65.

I have And so have the people that sharpen my blades

I had a fairly new 357 that wouldn't idle and would die when it warmed up. It sat in the naughty box for a year or so.... Sorted out 2 issues- Husky dealers will throw the auto decomp away and fit a blanking plug for pence, so you can eliminate that problem easily. I had an new old pattern carb (262 spec) fitted and the saw is now fantastic. Like quite a few new 020's the 357 has a rubbish carb... replacement is your best bet. (as long the piston isn't knackered)

Exactly. I reckon the willow won't care whether the cuts are neat and tidy. Trees react to pruning in the same way they react to grazing. They haven't changed their ways since the dinosaurs (or at least woolly mammoths) were giving them a munch so they're not really fussed if some herbert in a digger is causing a tiny bit of carnage and removing next year's leaf area over any other type of damage.

There's a firm called 'PLG loaders' that are based out East, either Lincolnshire or Norfolk I think. Weidemann's seem to be the weapon of choice for Bernard Matthews and the other turkey barons.....

http://www.retrobrick.com/ How about these boys...... Robust phones with buttons for stubby outdoor fingers, real aerials for decent reception, big batteries and small screens for massive life between charging Cheap too.

[ame]http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=lNYl3ecihEY[/ame] [ame]http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=J9sRxWvXHTk[/ame] Ouch.....

Citroen C15D van, loads of room Then a tired but tough as nails Vauxhall (Isuzu) 4x4 pickup- lower slung than most, and gutless for towing but a sweet truck. The Vauxhall and Chevvy's are still around, a good way to get a cheap Japanese truck

Lamberhurst- They're not keen to get involved in scrappy old Italian tractors (don't blame them really) They've told me to sort it out with Lomardini who want about £400. They did give me a Bosch part number which my local auto electrical wizard sourced a similar model, but that didn't fit, so somebody's made a mistake. Ebay- if the Bosch number doesn't work?? It's a Bosch 0001363113 http://www.woodauto.com/Unit.aspx?Man=BOSCH&Ref=0001363113 Like that but cheaper I really need to find a second hand lump from a dead machine Edit: the motor is an LDA 673

Thine hound shall not scoff the sarnies of another http://www1.br.cc.va.us/murray/Arboriculture/tree_climbing/r_r_rope.htm

Got to dry the wood first so it doesn't mould and compost in the bag, then soak for an hour before cooking to stop the chip turning into a towering inferno. Did you ever see the 'Jack Daniels' branded chips in Tesco, allegedly made from their old oak barrels. I always reckoned it was joinery offcuts and a splosh of Tesco value whisky for flavour Not bad for 6 quid for half a cereal packet!

Apologies for discriminating against the hard of spelling.

"Welcome sexyamateurs" Spamtastic I assume?

It's got to depend on your soil really..... Hazel and hornbeam don't mind a heavy cold damp clay. Alder loves wet patches where springs and fresh water flow out of hillsides. Willow will sit on stagnant plop. Chestnut won't grow on damp at all, it will struggle on anything other than really free draining sandy soils. Ash is pretty good all round, and Sycamore would be pretty bomb proof as well. As a timber, Alder dries extremely quickly, but I reckon you need to split soon after cutting or it'll turn to mush and cardboard like birch tends to

Tea Bacon Sarnie Tax Refund

I've saved a very rough Ferrari 4x4 pivot steer tractor from the scrapheap, but a few parts have been robbed off..... I want to get hold of a second hand starter just see if we can get if fired up, and then it'd be worth bothering to tidy up the other problems. I've got a photo of the starter on an almost identical Ferrari of the same age, the engine is a 3 cyl Lombardini aircooled LDA 573 I think....

http://www.thehds.com/events/walker.html

There was a guy who spent years of his life in heavy duty old diving kit, shuffling round in the flooded crypts under Salisbury Cathedral, setting sacks of cement in zero visibility to underpin/ prop up the foundations. A statue was erected for him after he died.... sadly the wrong photo got to the sculptor and so it's not his face very sad. Edit: cobblers! It's Winchester Cathedral, not Salisbury http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4158/is_19961004/ai_n14087492

This is quite handy as well: Smallwoods magazine has had some very good articles on woodland workshops and buildings over the last couple of years. http://www.smallwoods.org.uk/200_Planning-Legislation-Article.asp

http://www.communities.gov.uk/publications/planningandbuilding/farmersguide Quite a useful starter for anyone looking at building for machinery storage or fuelwood or other basic processing. The regs for forestry buildings are slightly different to ag buildings (you're allowed to go large with forestry) and for both categories a lot of buildings are allowed under 'Permitted Development' rights, which is dealt with by notifying the local authority of your intentions but not having to obtain a full planning permission. W

Apologies for de-railing the thread!

All in quite different situations: Pic 1- The guy doing the ripping had done the treework for the timber and has been a very good mate to me over the years. Sadly the tree had been topped and messed about with over the years, and was in a bad way. I helped him out with the milling in return for a percentage of the timber. With the treework+milling +handling +transport +stacking he's out of pocket but the timber was magnificent, as good as you could hope for in a relatively domestic tree. (End product: planking for joinery and some big chunky slabs and lumps for coffee tables, benches etc) Pic 2- That's me in the helmet, the saw's mounted on a Logosol 'Big Mill' rail system. This was a job for a customer who had had a huge oak very close to the house felled. He wanted to floor a big sitting room in the house, we cut out enough timber to do the whole of the downstairs of there very large house. A very satisfying job (few more pics below, including an old file that had been banged into the tree ) (End rpoduct: flooring and posts and beams for a complete garden building) Pic 3- A very large London Plane in a square in Knightsbridge, W London. Pretty serious white and brown rots in the base, had to come out.... Was asked in to do the milling by the firm that was doing the takedown. At the end of the milling, the boss man reckoned we'd saved him money over standing there ringing it up, as well a saving of about 2 Transit loads of sawdust and sweepings, AND he's got a lovely collection of Lacewood boards tucked away for a rainy day. (End product: planking for joinery and flooring, chunks for bowl blanks and turning) The mechanics of it are quite simple compared to chainsaw cutting- 45hp of Kubota diesel driving a bandsaw blade about 2mm thick vs about 8hp of chainsaw driving a chain that's nibbling out about 8 to 10mm waste! At the end of the day I reckon the Woodmizer's got through less fuel as well

The smaller mills tend to be the ones that were set up to take big individual butts cut to different specs with a sawyer's eye and experience, and the big mills are there to blast through almost identical softwood product with decisions taken by the milliecond by computer. Both are impressive! Speaking as a local mobile sawmill that's the kind of wise advice that should be spread about a bit more We manage to get through 5 and 6ft butts after quartering them up with a big saw and a ripping chain.

One of our local rangers had 8 tonne disappear overnight (from Holmbury area of the Surrey Hills) and I think 80* tonnes of good cord disappeared from a site on the South Downs in West Sussex *(yes eighty)