Tom D

???? I should have said what's wrong with turkey oak....

What about the 254? The transformation with mine was greater than with any of the others....

Could still be robur. There's plenty like that out there. Sapwood looks normal to me .. What's with turkey oak anyway?

Re clipping the saw up, we use micro grabs on all our lanyards now, you tie a stopper knot in one end so it won't drop right through then just pull the stopper knot right up and the saw is at your harness, squeeze the grab and it's back to working length...

Makes me smile thinking back 10 years, I'd work 2 or 3 days a week, work on the house a bit, go fishing , chill out. Then the kids came along. Haven't fished in a couple of years, and it's been months since I went out with the rifle.

The government don't make it easy to grow a business that's for sure, the vat threshold is the first hurdle, we've now hit another hurdle where I don't have any more time to manage everything. I started out part time, my wife had a good job and I spent a lot of time renovating our house, just using subbed as required. It was hard to get past the threshold by much, turnover was less than 100k for a few years. Then we suddenly lept forwards to the 150-200 mark and that was good. Now we have stagnated again at the 350-400 mark and we need to make some changes to move on again. YOu need to run the business that works for you, you can do quite nicely under the threshold if you are smart but there's a lot of guys busting their balls and still at or around the threshold, that's no fun... Likewise it's no fun turning over 300k if you have no free time and lots of headaches. We are about to go paperless with a new quoting and accounting system in the hope that it will free up a lot more time... Maybe it will.

I like that.. Looks very professional ..

I might take a welder to my bashlins.

I think this is a great idea, genuinely, having twin spikes hinged will make a huge difference to comfort and stability. Why they think it's ok to charge £2k I don't know. Still someone will be along soon with a cheap copy, probably stein.....

If you know how to charge then sure its better to work two days a week for £700 a day and take the rest off, but there's a lot of firms who work maybe 18 days a month and still stay under the threshold, these are the ones I don't get.. Round here I don't think i'd get enough small connie jobs to make a living on my own, the small jobs are the most competitive, as more people can do them. I don't work 250 days a year but when you have staff the company will be working that many days, different staff have time off at different times..

Its pretty hard to do tree work with no staff. you need a subby or an employee surely?

Not sure about the legalities of split companies.. Sounds dodgy to me, it needs to be remembered that it's not a a case of right or wrong, it's a case of how an inspector interprets the rules. And these people have so much power, freezing bank accounts for example, that it's not a risk worth taking. I'm surprised how many people manage to stay under the vat threshold (without doing a lot of cash). The threshold is 83000, that's only £318 per working day of the year..

I have 2 362's one of which is spudded. Neither of them are as good as a ported 357. I'd like to see that 362 against a stock 560. A stock 560 was just a whisker slower than a ported560 on .325. My latest ported 357 is running 3/8 and is probably faster still..

I think its bacteria feeding on the sugar in the sap, could be yeast. Try canesten.

By professionals I mean they probably are in the plant business, they will have a legit company with trucks and a depot etc, so they can easily get rid of stuff like that. You're not towing that away with a transit. And none of the gypo's round here run anything bigger than a transit. Was it on air brakes?

Looks brand new! Thats professionals, not travellers.

I use one of 16 Amp 110V Industrial IP44 Rated Plug - [HC-16AP115] You need heavy wire as if the trailer battery is flat it will draw its current from the main battery and thin wires can get hot... They are cheap as chips and work well, I have to replace min every 2 or 3 years as the amount of road salt they use up here takes its toll. Just mount the female end on the towing vehicle and the male end on the trailer, the terminals are guarded on both ends so it can't short out if it touches the trailer chassis when not in use.

Never seen one but I think a micro timber crane like the ones on the atv trailers mounted on a jake plate leaving the 3pl free for a winch would be a great setup. Or maybe a short king post version mounted where the rear roll bar normally goes... just need a bogey trailer then..

Great thread Reg, only just seen this, Lucky escape with the chopper! Whats the money like on these jobs?

FFS! why is it turning all my pics round now, it never did before!

A few more pics of the big limes.

Dismantled some big limes today, they were inter twined due to one having lent over to kiss the other. Genuine 100 footers, the blue rope in the pic only just made the floor, and its 50m..

Stevie knows I'm joking... I only picked him as he's a no nonsense wood cutter..

Quite right, but the same applies to rope and harness work too, how many falls have there been where the climber was doing everything by the book? tied in twice, LOLER'd kit, two handed saw use etc? Hardly any al all. The problem is that all accidents end up in the HSE stats, even if it was a complete cowboy climbing on a ratty 10 year old rope not following any of the guidelines. So the ICOP has been developed erroneously by comparing apples with oranges. I have used mewps a few times, on the right job they are fantastic and can save loads of time. My issue with the ICOP is that I don't believe that their use should be the default position as is currently the case. Use of a rope in preference to a mewp now has to be justified in the RA. I suspect that if all the tree work in the UK last year that was done with a rope and harness had been done with a mewp there would have been more not fewer accidents. The statistics used to prepare the ICOP are taken from all mewp use and compared with all tree work, I think that using a mewp to paint the side of a building or change a light bulb is no where near as dangerous as using it to reduce a large tree. Yet including the stats from 'safe' mewp jobs and comparing them with those from rope and harness tree work has led to a false positive result in favour of the mewp as the safer option. Unless we have solid stats for the number of days worked or trees climbed across the industry and compare the accident data factoring in the much lower rate of mewp use in arboriculture we will always end up in this position. Like I said at the top the thread, I'm not against mewps at all, but I think that our current ICOP is actually recommending the (slightly) less safe option.

Did you get those saws Spud?