Tom D

Hamadryad maybe, personally I think its gay.

Spot on there Mark never let them know, and never mention a day rate..

Point taken Mark, I am over simplifying here, the amount of kit required and haulage all have to play a part. The main thing you have to do is stop blurting out a day rate when you price a job, look at it and think about all aspects, like who else is pricing it, are they cheap or expensive? (know your competitors). will this guy pay more? is he going to be a pain in the ass? will there be loads of "can you just" jobs? (I always ask the client if they want anything else doing, pointing out any potential "can you justs" before I give them a price, that way I get paid for the can you just jobs.) you can also just tell the client that its £50 per hour for anything else that they might want doing..

not really, You price the job at an easy friday pace, so your 4 hour job can be done in 3 or even 2 if you have to, thats where you make the cash. I have done over 1k with a 2 man squad doing 4 or 5 jobs in one day, no effort and half a load of chip...

Trust me, pricing virtually every job at a day rate is crazy, I know, I did it for years, and while I did I turned over 60-90k a year now I turn 180-260k and am much better off. Ok I have a much bigger setup now and commercial contracts etc, however it was making the leap away from being stuck in the day rate rut that allowed me to expand and win these contracts. Try pricing 2 hours + hourly rate and see how you get on, unless you try you will never know.

Edit.. This is a response to post 30. Things have moved on as I write. Thats my point, you don't get £500 per day every day.. You get 350 one day and 750 another, forget about a day rate, learn to know when you can charge the good money and when to go cheap. When its "your job" here's how to price it: Look at the job carefully taking into account the timber and chip and how much of it there is, more than one load?, assuming there isn't look at the hours that it will take you to do the job, not rushing like a headless chicken but working at an easy friday kind of pace, you need to think of your £500 daily target and divide by 8, so you want £60 per hour, then you need a minimum call out of 2 hours... £120... Now, £120 for the first hour + 7 hours at £60 makes you £560 for the day, too much perhaps? so charge £120 for the first hour and £50 per hour thereafter. I suspect you have got into the bad habit of just slapping your 360 day rate on most jobs, some will be easy and you will feel that you have done well some will be hard and you will really earn it. With my system you will earn less on some jobs but way more on others, and its a fairer system of pricing for the client too. You will get days where you can string 3 little £250 jobs together and these will be your £750 days. Try the above system and stick with it for a month at least, let us know if it works.

He will charge the client for all parts, cable , fittings etc, and he will make 20-30% on all of them if he's any brains. As for his tools, a few grand, compared to the bare minimum setup for a tree gang its nothing, try buying 2 climbing kits, saws and a chipper for £3k.

You my friend are who I am talking about, see the correction above, you can't get top dollar every day, but you need to know when to charge more, and how to find the clients who will pay more. Stop thinking about a day rate and start thinking about a weekly or monthly target. You will be much better off. £1800 a week is a pittance for the kit that you are supplying and the work that you are doing, try and get your head round getting £2500 a week, you won't hit that every week but aiming for it will get you closer, even if it gets you to £2k then thats £200 a week more than you had before, and thats £10k a year!, which will make a big difference to you and your family I bet.

Whatever way you look at it I'm sure that like for like the trades get more, a PAYE qualified tradesman will get more than the equivalent surge, a self employed labour only tradesman will get more than his equivalent and a self employed tradesman with 1 van and all his own kit will be making way more than the equivalent 1 transit 1 chipper surge, especially when overheads are taken into account. There are climbers out there who will get 160 a day but many of them will have to provide their own ppe, climbing kit, saws and possibly even rigging kit too.

OK to clarify a couple of points, in the last 3 years I have done ok, I'm not pleading poverty, I just see many who are working for very little. RE the tradesmen, I am comparing a self employed joiner / plumber with own business and one employee with the equivalent surge, I recon the trades get more, much more, if you want to compare wages how many groundies get 160 a day? or even climbers for that matter...

Reading Dean's log burning thread got me thinking: Why haven't logs gone up in price in line with electricity and gas, mine are the same price they were 5 years ago, the same could be said for tree work, costs have risen but have your prices? Are us tree surgeons really bad businessmen? We all know the big businesses look after each other really well, like the energy companies and oil companies who only compete "in theory" while in reality prices remain high and they make huge profits. "There are only 6 of them" I hear you say, "and loads of tree surgeons", so we can't have a cartel.........yet the plumbers manage to get consistently high rates for their services, as do joiners and sparkys, are we alone in the trades as the only suckers who will work for peanuts. Why is this? do we like the job so much that its irrelevant how much we earn, we'd do it for free? Or are we secretly all hippies who are not into the money "thing" and would rather barter our services for nuts and berries, (or stella in Mark Bolam's case)? Perhaps we just don't have that capitalist gene? What is the answer? I do think that (generalising) as a group we are a little more aloof than the general public and possibly a bit more hippyish, or maybe thats just those of us who come here on AT. I also think that as a bunch we tend to have a much stronger work ethic and would have far more interest in doing a job well than being paid well to do it. In reality we should be paid well to do a good job, sadly thats often not that case. My theory is that a self employed tree surgeon who has a van, chipper and a decent groundy ought to earn 40k+ for himself, how many actually manage that? Its hard to compare self employed income with salaried income as there are many perks to being self employed and you pay a lot less tax too. However the point I am making is that someone in the above situation ought to have the lifestyle of someone on a £40k+ salary.... do you agree?

Ram pressure is a function of oil pressure and the surface area of the ram piston, so a fat ram with a wider piston will have much more power than a thin 'pencil' ram. the flipside is that a fat ram holds a lot of oil and therefore needs a lot of oil flow to fill it. This is where the cheap ebay splitters fall down, plenty of oil pressure and a decent sized ram but no flow, therefore painfully slow. I have a 30 ton posch splitter for exactly the use that you describe, it will split anything, it has its own pump and hydraulics so is reasonably quick too. nowhere near as quick as the 11 ton ram on the processor though.

Same here dean, prob cheaper on gas, we burn about 30 cube a year, so £1500 at my prices, that would buy me 2-3 tanks of LPG. Although as the price of gas goes up the logs seem a better bet.

I managed for years with just 3, 200t, 254 and 385. Still have all three too. These days 2/3 crews have 4x200t, 201t, 034, 254, 261, dcs7901, 357, 2x362, 385, 660

end grain maple, hornbeam or beech at a push I think is the way forward.

£50 ought to cover your costs, I have had this happen once, I billed them and they paid.

With most tractors pto revs will be towards the upper end of the rev scale as this is gererally where the peak power is. My valtra revs to 2350, pto is at 2100. for light duties such as a log splitter, saw bench you could run at 1000 speed but at low revs to give 3-500 revs at the pto shaft. But chipping is not light duty and will need full power unless you have a 200hp mog and an 8" chipper.

Back to the dealer, warranty or not thats far too early for a saw to fail like that.

I think you are comparing the old model makita with the new dolmar, the makita site now lists both the old and the new ranges. The makita spec: http://www.makitauk.com/Productinfo/temp/productinfo_EA6100P45D.pdf And the dolmar: DOLMAR - PS-6100 Same saw I think? the old models are different and I suspect the dolmar range has moved on faster than the makita..

So two questions, Are the dolmar and makita versions the same, apart from the colour of course? I can't understand why they wouldn't be.. Can I buy a dolmar in the uk? I'd prefer a red saw to a blue one.

We love our freelander2 but they are expensive and hold their money. The skoda octavia scout is a really nice motor and excellent value for money, not to many around second hand though...

Love it, should be easy to make by the looks of them

I have 4 200t's and a 201t, the 201 has been languishing unloved in the van for a while now, the guys just prefer the 200's. I have to agree, the 201 feels slow and gutless, its pretty disappointing that I am going to have to pay to mod a new saw just to make it cut as well as the outgoing model. Unless stihl will sort it out for free????

Beautiful stuff, I have always thought a worktop made from many small bits would be the way to go.

I agree on the 254, and the 020, not sure the 200t is an icon good though it is. My 385 has been brilliant since the day I got it, I think that deserves Icon status. And at 20 odd years old my 254 is freshly ported and running like a demon, cuts like a 550 without the software.