Tom D

8" PTO Wood Chipper on eBay (end time 22-Jun-09 21:16:56 BST) Interesting, an 8" chipper with an 18Hp requirement:scared1: Wouldn't want to have to get parts for it.

Good thread this, IMO you cant blame folk for having a go themselves if they've been made redundant, even if the effects on the overall industry could be bad. I'm not sure about all these colledge leavers starting up streight away, could end up giving the whole industry a bad rep. One thing I don't understand is how if you sign on you can't work at all. If a lad gets £300 housing benefit and £200 dole a month, why can't he work 5 days for me for £300 and still get £200 from the government? The present system means that he either does no work costing the taxpayer more or he works on the side and defrauds the taxpayer and undercuts ther rest of us.??? On the plus side I'm busy again and now have at least £16k worth of work ahead of me, so there is work out there.

They do sit right in the film, i have tried the parachue wing also but this seems more effective and is quicker to tie, I have had sucess tiying the cdc the other way, vertically over the eye as a suspender buzzer and taken rainbows in stock ponds near here. But TBH I find fishing for stocked rainbows boring, even if they are three times the size of the brownies.

Dou you tie your own flies stevie? If so try this, I came up with it a few years ago and in scottish water it is almost always sucessful. I have had folk scowl and say that I'll have no luck with dry fly and seen everyone else fishing wet only to come away with several good fish, and all the same sneering anglers coming over to ask "what fly is that?" honestly these really work. Someone else has probably made one before and named it as its so simple to tie, so I'd better not call it a tommy d or something lol. Its a longshank hook size 14 - 18 with a black head with a peakock hearl body and a CDC wing tied back. ( I understand that if you don't tie flies thats all gibberish) Here's a pic,

Go for it Stevie, I have a light weight 4 piece fly rod and a waist bag for all the bits n bobs, you can wear this with a rucksack and then dump the sack when you pitch camp but all your fishing gear is still to hand and separately portable. Now that I live near the sea I have bought some sea fishing gear and have had a few goes lure fishing for pollock and coleys over the kelp beds, no real luck yet, but then I've only been a few times since we moved here. I have caught some big wrass ledgering with lugworms but you can't eat them. I thought that when we moved back to the country I'd go fishing loads but work seems to have taken over. Any opportunity for a little "me" time should be seized IMO. Enjoy.

I did this a while back, for thos that haven't seen it. I chickened out at 55m. [ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DlMeIHejZk]YouTube - big firs 0003[/ame]

Is that CE marked Baz?

Interesting they've dropped the price, they wanted £400 last year. Huge waste of money IMO. I'd think very hard about it if it was £30 never mind £300:001_smile:

I think I may have cocked it up actualy, just didn't do enough revision, been really busy this last few weeks and was away last weekend. There's still hope though, If i failed it wasn't by much, if I passed it wasn't by much either. Hope everyone else did ok.

My brother was told by a traffic cop that he could drive for eight hours with a loaded trailer and the tacho switched on then unload it bringing him under the 3.5t limit and drive streight home again!! That was in his old navara which had a tacho fitted, all new tachos have to be digital, he has been told by the tacho fitters and by Nissan that these can't be fitted to the new navara so he no longer has one.

In these circumstances I usually start by saying "i'm not going to talk myself out of a job ,but..." And then go on to persuade them to do something else. Having said that I do think we can get a little precious about our trees sometimes, and if they really want to fell it they will get someone else to do it. Just blindly doing what the customer wants is a mistake IMO, It devalues the service we offer, if you go the doctor / accountant / lawyer you expect them to advise you what to do. I see us as offering a similar service, we advise and they have the option of taking our advice or not; if they choose not I'll still do the job, I'd be daft not to.

Something that I thougjht would be interesting would be if the council didn't bother with the legal side of the prosecution and just slapped a fixed penalty fine on instead. This could work in the same way as parking / speeding fines where the onus is on the person breaking the law to take action if they believe they have been unfairly treated. Here's my suggestions: Cutting in a conservation area without consent £150 Pruning TPO without consent (not life threatening to the tree) £500 Felling / ireversibly damaging TPO £2000 Interested to hear what any of you LA boys think.

I thought you were getting a 4x4 Steve. I have a mate who has a canter, it weighs 3ton empty:sad:

Was working on a large TPO'd oak today, we've deadwooded it twice before, this was another deadwood. On previous occasions the neighbour who's garden it overhangs has come out to have a moan about it, I have always explained that because of the TPO we can only really remove dangerous stuff. This time however I discovered that he had taken things into his own hands and ringbarked a couple of limbs, one of which is about 18" thick and supports around 30% of the canopy. Fortunately he has done a crap job and not gone quite all the way round, unfortunately the part he has left is on the underside of the limb. For good measure he also drilled a large hole and then painted the whole lot with creosote. While I was working he came out to have another moan and said that he was going to cut the limbs off anyway, he said that he'd got someone in who had "marked" them where he was going to cut. I pointed out that as a protected tree he could be liable to a fine at which point he said that the guy had just "come and done it" and that "he didn't know who he was or why he had done it"! Like there's a guy who goes around doing it for fun. The really sad part is that the council are not really that interested and will only send out a stroppy letter and the owner of the tree is unwilling to rock the boat as he plans to sell up soon. So he will get away with it. I am recommending that the limbs are thinned a little to reduce the weight and possibly braced to allow time for the wound to heal over, so the poor owner ( who is a pretty concientious sort )will probably have to fork out for this leaving the perpetrator to enjoy the results of the thin and pay nothing. Really makes me mad this.

Tony's right, people are alowed to smoke because any government that tried to stop them would be voted out soon after, same goes for the fat, discrimination etc, the numbers of people injured in dangerous sports are minimal compared to wrok related accidents anyway. The real issue is, to control / ban the above things would be an infringement on peoples personal rights and freedoms, when you are at work however, even if you are a one man band these rights are different. Personally I'd like to see a situation in which the victim of an accident or the company that he is working for at the time pays for the emergency and medical care afterwards. This way the ****heads who climb mountains and get lost causing the navy / coastguard to risk their lives to rescue them would have to pay for the rescue. And likewise companies who have accidents would claim on their insurance to cover these costs. This way the insurance industry would police the people they insure and there would be far fewer cowboys out there. This nearly happened a few years ago but sadly it has now reverted to how it was before.

Just to muddy the waters a little more, I am reliably informed that the latest guidelines say that the rescue climber must be on the ground and immediately available, ie not up the next tree. I have a real problem with this, having a rescuer on site is fine but making him wait at the bottom of the tree is a step too far. IMO so long as the trees are within shouting distance of each other and can be seen from each other then it should be ok to climb. I'm not having 2 good climbers on site and only using 1 of them.

How could three climbers not rescue you? If you could get to where you were why couldn't they? I think like Skyhuck said earlier unless someone is a regular climber then just doing a 1 week course and then going back to your groundy job is pointless. A rescue climber should be as good as the guy he has to rescue. These days I almost never climb without a backup but when I first started I did on occasion, one thing I have noticed is that there are kids coming out of colledge with quals who are pretty useless. I once asked a newly qualified guy to rescue a guy who was working, he was only around 30 foot up and easy to get down, it took him 45mins!! Now having spent nearly 2 years training my second climber I have someone who not only could rescue me but can also do most stuff that I can do, which is priceless. If he keeps improving at this rate he'll be better than me soon:blushing:

I know someone who makes "rustic" bowls like that, he gets a lot more than £60 for them. Nice job, a gallery would sell that for £300 no prob.

Now I think I understand, the whols system has been tested as one piece and is certified as such. It may be useful for big employers who can equip all their guys with the same gear and cover their asses that little bit more. However What happens when some bright spark at the HSE decides that all kits need to be like this? Then smaller manufaturers may pull out of the market and larger ones will put prices up in order to cover the cost of testing. It seems a little ott to me since if you tie a hitch incorrectly then it is irelevant wether the system is certified of not. Are only certain hitches tested? afterall I can think of at least 10 different ones, thats a lot of rope / cord combos to break. Imagine if they tell people that they can't us their favourite hitch anymore because it hasn't been tested with that rope / cord.

Utterly pointless, surely any dealer would'nt sell non CE marked kit anyway? why limit options to a few preselected kit combos? Does this mean that if the hitch cord wears out you have to chuck the whole lot? and if not why not buy all the components separately anyway for less £££? All this appears to do is complicate LOLER inspections and record keeping. Is this one item on a loler inspection? or do all the pieces appear individually, in which case whats the advantage?

Some buildings do have eyes, however they have to be periodicaly load tested, I have seen this being done. I was working near some flats in Musselburgh the other day, they were probably build around 1900, each one had some quality iron ladders from the roof down to the first floor so all you needed was a one story ladder to get to the first rung.

Uploaded pics are just as good as my 8mp camera, I was also impressed with the way it can take a decent pic indoors with the flash switched off. Only got it yesterday and already got all the features sussed out, ( I was worried i'd never learn to use it having been a nokia man for years) so far i'm well impressed. Having said that I'm not a technoplile gadget freak, so there may be better out there. Here's a pic I took last night. (It'll get resized while its uploaded though)

Ice tail is a pretty good cord, I like it, its very hard wearing although it does get grippier and grippier as it wears which can be a pain. Thanks to Jamie I can now splice it short with a brummel splice.

Why bother, I just got a free upgrade on my phone, which has 8mp camera with image stabilisation and really good camera featurtes. Its also a phone of course and a satnav and mp3 player etc, I got it because I was sick of wanting to take pics and forgetting the camera, whereas I always have my phone. this is the one, I'm sure there are other good camera phones out there too. Tocco Ultra Edition Overview - Samsung Mobile

Spent a week there deadwooding, about 6 years ago, The midgies only came out when it stopped raining, which wasn't very often. Beautiful place though. Enjoy.