muldonach

A technique well known to old woodmen, draymen and seafarers known as "parbuckling":thumbup:

We have an old 8t Botex which is built like a brick outhouse, it is perhaps a bit heavy for the Valtra (100hp) on anything but real good ground and reversing is to be avoided if at all possible - thr trailer tends to steer the tractor into a jack knife. dont be too impressed with trailer specs - it is difficult to get the rated weight on to the trailer - that load in the avatar was 5t and we just put another load of moxed hardwoods over the weighbridge for a customer and again it was 5t The Kesla trailers here look like good bits of kit but what tractors are folks using with them - I would reckon I would need 140hp for that fully loaded but whats the experience out there? I don't have a steering drawbar but have often wished for one, front weights on the tractor help quite a bit with traction. One weakness on the botex is that the stabliser rams are weak and liable to bend the ram if you forget to lift them:blushing: If you want to lift big sticks then there is really no option but a big crane although if you have removable bolsters you can lift big sticks on one end at a time, again a big crane adds a lot of weight and tends to lift the front end of the tractor. Cheers mac

comments welcome Home cheers mac

your arithmetic is a bit off I think the inverse of 1.2 = 0.833 25*0.833 = £20.83 per tonne I think Cheers mac

Rather than trying to build a seal around a moving object get some short lengths of guttering and place them inside the shed - catch the water and pipe it to back of shed and down to the palisade fence

Not having read this whole thread through I may be a bit at cross purposes. I do however own an area of woodland which borders a public road, the council very firmly take the view that the trees and any problems which arise from them are my problem to deal with. They will sort the problem if necessary but will invoice me accordingly. Cheers mac

Yep - at least 17 years old, had new front bars, new baffle plate and several new glasses but still functioning. Fire is never left unattended unless throttled down and whn we are in the house the pump is left running There is a lot of good advice and well meaning on this site but sometimes a loss of focus on heating a house as opposed to making a stove last as long as possible or sweeping a chimney as seldom as possible.

The only stat we have is mounted on the side of the storage cylinder, not sure if it still works to be honest - if we want to prioritise house heating we switch the pump on - if we want to prioritise domestic hot water we switch it off. Regulate the total heat output of the stove using the amount of fuel put into the fire and how much air inlet and chimney damper we set. Not knocking all this automatic stuff but like to be able to get heat where I want and when I want it. Cheers mac

In spades

When we fitted a boiler stove a long time ago now - about 17 years if memory is correct - one of the better things we did was to fit a manual switch for the pump, depending on fuel quality we can have warm water in radiators within 20 minutes of lighting the stove. It also strikes me that there is something strange about this system since you say that the stove makes the kitchen hot but you have to pile logs on to keep the radiators going - we have had completely the opposite experience - the stove puts so much heat into the water that the lounge stays cool while the rest of the house is well warmed - hence when we refurbished the lounge recently we put a radiator in the same room as the stove. Sounds as if you need to turn the stat well down

No need to live with it - get a switch fitted so that you can manually turn the pump on when you want it on.

You will find that the machinery to cover that 200yards or the labour involved to cut and carry the 80t per annum of timber that you need plus the cost of paying for a chipper will make Stobarts £38t delivered in price look very cheap indeed. As intimated by Difflock you maybe should put some value on the woodland both for timber value and amenity / conservation value. It makes perfect sense to remove and chip small trees that need to come out or are due to harvest anyway. Felling 2ft dia trees to feed through a chipper is not likely to be cheap or even cost effective. Unless you already have access to a chipper DIY is not likely to save you any money. Cheers mac

Well did you get it home? If not where is it? Cheers mac

The trailer in the avatar has 5 tonnes on it as it went over the bridge, a pile of logs randomly tipped out of a timber trailer always looks like a lot. You will be surprised how small a pile of stacked split logs it makes. You probably have more than 3 tonnes and probably less than 5

How many times do you plan to ask the same question - you already have a thread on this. Cut it up and measure the volume, next time put the trailer over a weighbridge! Cheers mac

If that is one load off the forwarder and he is charging you for 3 tonnes then I would say stick with him - while the tonnage will depend on the moisture content it looks like a good slack handful to me!

I think to an extent you are re-inventing the wheel - put a tapio stroke head on the excavator with a quick change harvadig set up go through the wood felling and cut to length and put a forwarding trailer on the valtra

Sorry 1m = 3.28 feet

I had a look at the white horse website and I think they have this the wrong way around - if I have a box containing 1 cubic metre of sawdust and I emptied into another box the same size I would not expect the top of the heap to be much over the box. If the same box was exactly filled with rectangular logs 250x100x100 and I did the same thing I would not expect to get much more than half of them in. Honest I am not really bored at the mo:biggrin:

I had a look at the website and based on the photos on premium woods website they are selling a pretty homogenous product - the logs look straight, all same length and with little in the way of bent stuff, spikes or heavily tapered logs I think that when you take it out of the crate and throw it loose into a pick up etc it will naturally have less broken stowage than the more random logs that I for one tend to produce. If I took the time I could build them into the crate in similar fashion but thrown in a pile or loose into a bag or box they would take a more space than these nice even logs. But I could be talking a load of old tosh!

It don't matter mate - if they are late they are late and you are entitled to both interest and compensation. However unless they have signed as accepting more onerous terms you can only claim the statutory interest.

Sold one a few years ago for £900 - working order not all that tidy

We have heated our house like this for more than 20 years - if you have free access to timber and somewhere to store a decent supply it is well worthwhile. I Will second most of what Perkins says - in particular a decent stove will put 70% of its heat into the water so you will need a radiator in the same room as the heater. I would say get rid of or have the means to bypass all the automatic bollox, a thermostat near the cylinder is I think mandatory but one mod I would recommend is a manual override - lets you prioritise the heat to the radiators. Before anyone gets on my case I know that this will reduce stove efficiency etc etc etc - I want to heat a house not demonstrate to the world how seldom I have to sweep a chimney. Oh another thing I would do if we were doing it all again - get the figures for the radiator size you need and half it - we have I think 12 radiators none of which is fully opened up for flow and most of them in the bedrooms are not moer than one half turn open

Lots more brash!!!

sounds a bit strange - hardwoods at 10-15" dbh at Yr 30? with planting that tight you will struggle a bit to get them on the ground I would think. Surely not planted at 3-3.5 tree spacing and row spacing. at 6-10" dbh on the softwoods you will want your guys in shorts and running shoes to get 12 tonne a day - the trees will be running at 10 to the tonne! So you will need to average 15 per hour i.e 4 minutes to fell, snedd, x cut and stack - tall order Looks a little optimistic to me Cheers mac