Tom D

It's nothing to do with greasing, the original cast bearings simply weren't up to the job. Get the new ones on and that's it job done.

Looking for a small economical van for our consultant ecologist to run about in. I know nothing about these things. Any recommendations or ones to avoid? Cheers

I have certainly accumulated a lot of kit. That's the problem when you start making money. The temptation to spend it.. Anyone want to buy a chipper?

I've got 6 chippers mick lol. That's one too many.

In the days of social media its very easy for a brand to get trashed. The reality is all machines can and will break down, and IME customer care is just as important as reliability. Machines don't have to break down to cause problems, you might end up breaking one through operator error, accidentally feeding something nasty through the chipper, or being in a road accident. Then you need the backup badly.. If you charge 800 a day for a squad and a chipper and it goes down for any reason its the 800 you loose each day that will be causing you grief. When we picked up our big bandit the other day we smashed 2 bearings on the bottom of it due to a comedy of errors involving not cutting enough off the PTO. (too many cooks). so when I rang the dealer and discovered that the bearings in question were not in the shelf and would have to be ordered from america I was seriously worried. I'm not having a go at Global here BTW I love bandits and I think Global are a good dealer. But stuff like this matters. In my experience service is vitally important, and redwoods is as good as they come.

Out I think. But either way it's worth a call.

I'll bet they would if you asked them, it was a common fault on all the early 6" machines. Our first one did it too. They fixed it no problem.

I'm near Berwick. Where are you.

Buy my transit. It's an ideal starter vehicle. It's on Arb trader. I'm open to offers

A sad tale for sure. Don't know the full situation but it seems like another one where someone who has been doing the same job all his life makes a random error and pays the ultimate price. His employer has certainly taken a big hit. This is the problem employers face, I don't know what the failings in their risk assessment procedure were but would they have saved his life? He cut through his own lanyard.. it seems crazy that a piece of paper is all that can separate a business owner from jail and or a massive fine.

Thing is for most uk tree surgeons weight is an issue because they run 3.5 ton trucks, many of these have a gross train of around 5 ton. Since virtually every 3.5 tonner is running over weight adding weight to the chipper as well only makes it worse. The new cabstars can tow 3.5 but most are lower. This is why we've just bought a mog. If i had a 7.5 tonner I'd tow a bandit 90.

Don't get me wrong I currently have a pto TP160, FORST TR6, FORST ST8, BANDIT 250 PTO, TP200 PTO and a heizohack 8-400. The heizohack has the slowest rollers by far but it's by far the most productive machine. This is because it is fed by a crane though and can therefore take huge lumps, hand feeding it the bandit 250 would be faster. There comes a point where the amount you can carry becomes the limiting factor. I think for most urban tree work much of the material being chipped will be of a fairly small diameter and will have already been cut into a sensible size on order to be dragged out of the garden. For me the 8" size machines are the ideal for this kind of work. And the forst is a nice compact machine with really good pulling and crushing power. For the OP. Take everything you hear about machines on the internet with a pinch of salt.

I get what your saying here, however if you have 3 guys feeding a machine you need to wait for the brash of the last guys branches to pull through so that you can get yours into the rollers.

Oooh , broken legs? What did he do ? Unclip?

Stumpgrinding is hard on the machine. Any machine will wear, you need to allow for maintenance, breakdowns and repairs in your pricing.. to my mind the Carlton machines look spretty good, they aren't exactly light.

Forst backup is pretty good. any issues we have had have been dealt with pretty promptly. I think the ST8 is an awesome machine for its size/weight. The bandit 75 which I also demoed is a well built machine but the feed rollers are painfully slow. I love bandits, I just bought a 250 pto machine, but I wouldn't have a 75, it must be about 3'longer than the forst and probably 500kg heavier, and the rollers are too slow. Awesome crushing power, but then the crushing on the forst is pretty good and it really pulls the stuff through quickly. I'm really surprised bandit haven't put faster roller motors on the 75, the one I demoed was years ago and it sounds like they haven't changed. With faster infeed that machine would be a big seller. I've got a ducker / tp200 on the mog now though and that seems pretty good.... I have a forst ST8 for sale if anyone hadn't noticed. 6 chippers is too many, the yard is starting to look like Alan masons.

Some of my guys might be interested. We have a couple of big shots.. we're pretty busy at the moment though... pm me..

For a hydrostatic drive I'd use HV46 but it would be worth checking with the manufacturer.

do you get much interest in it?

Sorry Dean, I see it now.

Yep it's the same one. Did you work out the price for the winch kit?

I've just bought a bandit 250 pto machine, it's a big beast of a thing. I got it to get us through a busy spell but I'm thinking of keeping it afterwards to hire out, then if we get this busy again we'll have it available. Does anyone know what the going rate for hiring a machine this size is? I was thinking 300-400 per week... but nowhere round here hires them so I'm not sure. Also just to gauge interest would any of you think about hiring a machine like this? It's a 12" x 19" infeed. If you don't have a tractor they cost between 300 and 500 per week to hire....

The whole tax system is a mess at the moment, the economy has moved on and the gov has failed to keep up. When the employers contribution rate hits 3% it will be costing me £5k a year. Meanwhile I'm loosing work to small outfits who employ "self employed" staff to avoid all this hassle. This is why the numbers of self employed people are going up and up. The government needs to find a way to tax these people otherwise as the economy grows tax receipts won't, and lets face it they need to. With the deficit approaching £2,000,000,000,000 they need to start paying it off, the problem they have is they are pushing people into self employment so they can pay less tax, and pushing employers into using self employed subbies. This pension thing is just another reason not to create jobs.

TBH all the options I'm looking at are forestry spec, I'm just debating wether to go for the radials over the crossplys..

Yep it's redpaths who I use, Neil gave me the prices. It's the forestry spec that makes them so pricey. Problem with the Agni ones is the weak sidewalls. With all the site work that I do they need to be tough.