sime42

Two small mercies .... Nadine Dorries to quit as culture secretary and ‘could be given peerage’ WWW.INDEPENDENT.CO.UK Ms Dorries could now receive a peerage in Boris Johnson’s resignation honours list

These guys make us tree climbers seem like amateurs. And they're slightly crazy. 310m, no ropes! The Shard: Climber reported and three men arrested WWW.BBC.CO.UK A 21-year-old man is detained on suspicion of scaling the 310m tall skyscraper in central London.

Nice. Which one?

Yeah, the recipe I used included lemons and oranges. I think most of the flavour came from them.

Great, but do we really need a conversion?

Looking forward to the seeing photos of the upgrade. An honourable design rationale indeed. Especially in today's rubbish world of massive over production and consumption of throw away goods.

Ummmmm. This is why one should read back over what ones written before hitting the submit button!

This is also true. I made it myself many years later and was underwhelmed by it. I thought maybe I'd not quite hit it at the right time as the sap tasted pretty much like water, a very slight sweetness. Still, the idea and process of making the wine is worth a go at least once. It might just be rose tinted memories but I found the whole experience pleasing.

This is possibly the best bit of advice so far. My grandfather used to make birch sap wine. I've found memories of going off into the woods with him armed with a brace and bit, a demijohn and a length of rubber tubing.

VID-20220902-WA0005.mp4

I don't think I can claim much glory actually. I thought you were intending to have the grain from side to side, having seen the bearers underneath, I just noticed that it wasn't aligned in that corner. I think your fix has worked; the retrofitted bearers make it look as if it was always part of the design. The brass bearers sound like a good idea, but I don't think they'll be required, it'll be perfectly strong enough as it is. I would leave it alone now, as it looks so nice already. Anyway, if a failure does occur it won't be a sudden split that would cause the user to fall. It'll be a gradual process so you'll get plenty of warning that the platform is not strong enough. I can tell that you're a structural engineer. I feel that you may be over-engineering the steps a tad! I mean no offense, no criticism, I'm the same!

Me too. Like half of us on here I reckon. It's only when Andrew narrowed it down to the top platform that the Eureka moment occured.

No. Just a nice bit of entertaining Friday night comedy. If you don't do humour I guess you wouldn't be a fan. Each to their own, no Biggie.

Cracking Have I Got News For You this evening. A tribute to Boris Johnson.

If you decide to give it a go, be prepared to be disappointed in a couple of years. Make sure the customer is too. Sorry but Silver Birch doesn't like being pruned at all. It tends to look a bit crap for ever afterwards. It over compensates with regrowth and/or the cut limbs rapidly die off and decay. Plus it won't stop it dropping all the seeds and twiggy stuff all the time. If you do do it it needs to be when the tree is dormant, so winter, after the leaves have dropped. They bleed copious sap when cut otherwise. Like a rapidly dripping tap, literally.

Ok, that's good to know. Thanks. Things have obviously moved on a lot. Do candidates get assessed on all those things too? We were shown SRT and use of throw lines and big shots for example but not tested on it at the end..

Yeah, the ones I'm thinking of seem to be larger than normal, as well as more abundant. I've also seen lots of premature Field Maple seeds on the ground. Guessing that's more down to drought stress.

I've noticed oaks are heavy with acorns round here, maybe another Mast Year on the way. The energy crisis aside, we could really do with real winter this time around.

Careful, you might end up boasting about being paid obscene money for eating lobster at work every day or having two brand new cars on the drive next!

Same round here, all sorts of fruit going to waste on the ground. People don't trust naturally occurring food anymore. Didn't you know? If it's not on a supermarket shelf, or not been delivered by Uber then it can't be safe, surely?!

Thinking about the sub-topic here; free or not as the case may be, firewood. I've noticed that a lot of construction timber gets thrown out during renovation work. Largely softwood, granted and likely to be contaminated by various things, but still, it would make good firewood. Free I'm sure for those willing to collect and process it. It'll save the builders on skip or tipping fees after all. It could also perhaps be a workable business model if people wanted to go around collecting it at scale, and then selling it on as cheap firewood

Fair enough. It's very low key in that case. It ought to be prioritised. Insulation has barely been mentioned recently in the context of rising energy costs. This isn't a short term issue, it'll be with us for years yet. It makes far more sense to reduce energy consumption with insulation, (and triple glazing, might as well leap frog double glazing), rather than subsidising households to keeping wasting it in leaky houses. Obviously that's a long term strategy, there's some people that will need support right now. I've no idea of the numbers but I'm guessing it'll be a bell curve type distribution. The vast majority of people will just have to do some belt tightening, a minority will legitimately really struggle to survive, another minority at the top will hardly notice the sharply rising costs, (and will actually profit from the situation in some cases). I believe that there's plenty enough money around to fix most of the mess, the challenge is in its redistribution.

And that is on top of already cancelling the Green Homes Grant scheme and other such home insulation programs in recent years.

Great. I thought you wouldn't be disappointed. The more modern friction hitches, (of which the Distel is but one, a fairly basic one at that), are vastly superior to the old timers like the Prussick or the Blake's. I'm not sure why they're still being taught on the courses. They were when I did mine 15 years or so ago anyway, maybe things have changed now. I guess it was because the Prussick for instance is very simple, so not easy to get wrong. I only use a Distel, on all my ropes including wire core flipline. Never had any issues.