muldonach

I have an 8 tonne botex with a slightly tired hydraulic pump and an 8 lever valve block - it will take 45 minutes to load with 2 x bunks of 2.4 hardwood cord, a little quicker to unload.

Did you read that somewhere - if so please stick a link up - because as far as I am concerned it does not match experience - sorry. If I cut large section timber into 10-12 inch lengths I can leave it for months and when I split it, it is still full of sap. Quite simply - the smaller you split it - the faster it dries

My apologies - did not mean to imply that the VAT rate applicable was 5% - as you point out not the case Fuel duty rates are here:- http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/budget-updates/march2011/fuel-duty.pdf normal £0.61 / litre red at £0.11 / litre if I read it right.

The bark is designed by nature to keep the moisture in - if you leave all the bark on you will slow the drying down until the bark fails. Similarly if you leave all the bark on then the easiest way out is through the end grain. If you split the log you do three things:- a) offer the moisture an unimpeded path to the air b) increase the ratio of surface area to volume c) reduce the distance moisture has to travel from the centre to the outside As plenty of people have said - including me - those logs will be fine, but they will be ready earlier if anything over 4" dia had been split

It will season much better if it has a face which is bark free - the approved guage in our house has always been if you can pick it up with one hand it is fine - if you cannot pick it up one handed then split it

If you do a VAT registration you will be able to pass the VAT along to the customer, or, if you are the end user, be able to recover it. You should enter it into your P&L account as a cost so that it is offset against profits and reduces your corporation or income tax liability as appropriate. Cheers mac

Red diesel is taxed at 5% Be in no doubt that VAT registered or not if you buy a litre of petrol at £1.40 then that is the cost you need to pass on to your customer - a litre of petrol most definitely does not "become 90 pence" cheers mac

And here's the thing you want for de-bogging Caterpillar CAT320DL SUPER LGP - Excavators - Forestry equipment - Mascus UK might as well go the whole hog and see will she drive a harvester head!:thumbup:

Put the kettle on and calm th'self - there's nowt wrong with that. Our woodshed is stacked the same way but is 20 times the size. Could maybe do with exercising your axe a bit more.

Yes either form of biomass will be a lot more graft than oil, exactly what the RHI is meant to compensate for I would not like to say but irrespective of grant your system has to make sense for you. The thing is what you are proposing is a hell of a lot of work for one man and you do not really have the kit to do it. It is all very well bringing out a pickup load of logs when it suits you but that is not what you are going to be doing. Your timing will be determined by the time needed to dry your firewood to reasonable moisture content and ground conditions within your woodland and you need to be well ahead of demand all the time, and in my opinion you have nowhere near enough woodland to keep you going long term. That is not to say you should not take it on but simply that you should understand what you are taking on. Hence the recommendation to put individual woodburners in - you can produce firewood for them at your own pace, if you run short you can throw chip in them, or buy some firewood to tide you over. If you have a sufficiency of good firewood you can use them more than normal etc etc. You have a source of fuel ready to hand which is produced at a price you will never match for main heating, at the same time you have a resource of free fuel on your doorstep and in going and getting it you will get some exercise and help the woodland as well without killing yourself trying to save coppers.

Decide on a sample plot size and number of plots you will need to measure as per blue book recommendation Measure all of the trees in all of the plots, identify by species Estimate firewood %age = total of firewood species volume / total of all species volume estimate the total timber volume (TTV) = (total measured / total plot size) * total area The volume of the firewood available is the TTV * firewood %age

We heat a medium sized stone built house (4 bed, reasonably well insulated) with a 20Kw multifuel stove which runs a central heating system with a wrap around boiler. It has not seen a lump of coal for 15 years and works well - it is fired on hardwood thinnings and will eat 20 cubes of timber in the year. Do not underestimate the space requirement for logs - I would guess that you would need a woodstore for at least 40 cubic metres in order to have seasoned timber available and you say you are space restricted. Do not underestimate the work involved, 40 cubic metres will be 10-15 full working days out of your year by the time you, alone, fell, process, transport and stack the timber. In order to feed your system you will be looking at starting at one end of your 25 acres and clearfelling it, it may look like a lot of timber now, in 10 years or so it will be gone and you will be looking for logs. You may have a saw and an axe now, in a couple of years you will have a collection of saws, a tractor and logsplitter and probably a pile of brochures from processor sellers:thumbup: Is your local chip supplier able to supply chip at a known moisture content? Can you get small quantities i.e. silage trailer or mesh sided car trailer? Given your situation and resources I think I would be looking at fitting a woodburners in the lets especially if they are holiday lets, and in the main house - use the thinnings and windblow from your 25 acres to feed them and use them as top up heaters. I would have no qualms about using a log boiler as well but would design the system to replace it with a chip boiler later - or just start out with the chip system. cheers mac

Did the salesman tell you that? Looks as if it would struggle with a quarter of that! The trailer in the avatar is 8-9 tonne with that load on and I cannot see that supacat moving it very far

As far as I know it was tracking across a field to get to a worksite - and it is still there although now lost to sight. Happened in Somerset so maybe someone on the forum has better knowledge than me - I came on it on the construction equiment forum.

hmmm - like this you mean?:scared1:help:

The first thing you need to address is getting the situation stabilised - you describe your ground as rank peat which I interpret to mean deep and soft. Better not to bog in the first place so I would start off with a light load and make sure I can release the load immediately - so I would not attempt to tow with chains but would have a winch and tow on the winch brake. If you start to chew through the skin then open the brake and get the tractor up onto the skin again. If I am going to be travelling the same ground repeatedly then I will sned the trees where I want the brash even if that means skidding them there. I would have some suitable timber lengths pre-cut and positioned as best possible so I do not have to go hunting after the tractor breaks through, also have some suitable rope to secure them to the tracks so as to get them under the tractor. If you think you may need a digger then you need a set of bogmats for the digger, ready for the digger to pick up at the start of the peat. You need a fueled and sharp chainsaw in the tractor so that you can drop trees and get brash under the tractor at the first sign of bother. Attach a towing strop to the tractor before going on to the moss and leave it there and make sure you have a means to connect to the digger available before you start. When we take a digger on to this ground we do not allow the digger to touch the peat, the digger travels on brash - period. If that means felling a complete rack of trees to make the brash then so be it. When you get the digger to the bogged tractor don't push a bad position- if it will not come out readily then dig the ground away at the front of the tractor and place tiimber at the same level as the tracks, you may have to dig all around the tractor and lead the water away to get the suction broken. Do not try to tow by tracking the digger - use the digger arm as much as possible and track as little as you can, you have already proved that the ground in that area is weak. Have fun!!!!!:biggrin: Cheers mac

If they have any sense they will take your hand off! You will be lucky to get that at the sawmill gate and you will as others have said need to find a mill that will take sawlogs over 60cm. Offer firewood value - they are worth a fortune to someone that needs 7m lengths or very large section beams and you could wait a while to find the right purchaser Cheers mac

You would need to demonstrate that you had paid VAT or if you don't pay VAT in Sweden you will need to pay in on arrival in UK. Also need to advise ferry what you are bringing over and brace yourself for charges

The volume of the timber involved has got nowt to do with the length of this particular bit of string. How many cubes a day will you produce and what rate can you forward it at? You want the forwarding capacity to be just about the same as the harvester capacity and the landing and stacking area will need to be able to cope with this on a daily basis. The actual size of the stacking area is as an absolute minimum the footprint of 1 wagon load of each and every product you plan to extract - you have already mentioned logs and pallet. It will need to be extended to allow a buffer capacity so that the forwarder is not held up when wagons are delayed, with enough space to segregate products. It should also be big enough so that wagons can park in the centre or on one side - the hard road side obviously - and the forwarder accesses the other or both outer sides if you are stacking on two sides of the road Cheers mac

I would not think it all that likely that you will find a second hand one that is VAT free either Probably worth thinking about registering - VAT will also apply to service items and fuel for it so will reduce your running costs or at least let you pass them on to the end user - who will also probably be registered Cheers mac

Ok but what is the underlying soil? - if it is clay then it will go as you describe - the top few inches will be dead soft and you will sink in if you try to walk over it, but it is hard underneath and if you bring the ground pressure down with wide wheels or tracks you can cross it ok. A peat moss in winter is 90% water and the soil has almost no inherent strength whatever - as soon as you spin a wheel you belly out. Now if your alstor is working on peat at this time of year and running fully loaded with no tracks and no brash mat then I for one am getting very interested. Cheers mac

Did you by any chance suggest to your customer that a review of the staking arrangements for the other garden trees and shrubs might perhaps be in order? I have to confess that my reaction to your photo's was along the lines of "good job but I am sure they were planted as a windbreak" Cheers mac

Forget it If the peat is both uneven and so wet that you can only haul 200Kg with a quad or argo - I assume that you are using a low ground pressure trailer - then you need not just a forwarder on tracks and chains but a mechanical harvester to concentrate the brash and build the necessary brash mat. We fiddle about with ground like this reasonably successfully with a quad and a logic trailer but we are gathering firewood for ourselves and clearing rides and roadways not trying to make a living at it - we can haul about 400kg but sometimes need to be careful - e.g. if we know we have a tough slope to negotiate - even just a few feet - we will part load the trailer only and top the load off once we get over the top of the slope. A haul of a mile is a hell of a way to haul with a forwarder and any significant slope on peat is a total pain. The problem with all the modern small forwarders is capital cost - the basic alstor is £27k if I remember right - it is difficult to make them work out financially although a couple of guys on here use them. I would think your best bet is a tracked dumper

seriously nice piece of work that PS - I think Al is a sort of surrogate scot - comes from somewhere over the atlantic don't ee??

You say above that the chap recently bought the place - selling agent should have photos with the particulars - may show the trees against the house?