Marko

May be worth reading the trials and tribulations detailed in Light My Fire - The Coed Cae B&B Guide to sustainable heating with wood Whilst the wood boiler is responsible for all the central heating and hot water they do have a further three log burners topping up the rooms. I think they get through 40 cubic meters a year. Stone built cottage but well insulated (or at least as well as you can insulate an old stone cottage)

Copyright applies - just because they are shown on the web does not make them a free resource for anyone to use. If you still have the large original file then you can prove ownership. I would write to the site owner and point out your issues, give them 14 days to remedy and notify them of a usage charge of (say) £25 a day fwill apply thereafter for the use of your material. Please remember that the poor business owner may have no idea that the pictures were stolen but that is for him to sort out with his web designer. If you get no joy then the next port of call would be the hosting company. They would take down the site if you show you have tried to be reasonable in resolving the matter but copyright infringement continues.

Our prices went up last year as for the first time we had to buy in wood. Nothing left our yard at less than £100 per m3. Our builders bags were going out at £65 - my nearest competitor sells the same bag at £35. We sold out last year and our orders for the coming season now cover 80% of the available stock. I will happilly tell any customer about my competitor and his prices and explain the differences - we sell two different products - ours is 4-5 year old mixed hardwood baked in a polytunnel - his is all recently felled, contains a good proportion of Lleylandii, processed wet straight into the bag and delivered the same day. His is still a real bargain for anyone with the facility to store it. Customers can make a choice between top quality ready to use or cheapest. It really isn't a problem.

Zak, If your load is 24 tonnes and they say you will get 1200 bags then your bag weight can be no greater than 20kg (24000/1200). You can thus get 2400 bags at 10kg or 120 bags at 200kg (roughly what Elfinwood was telling you).... it depends on the bag size. The above is for rough calculations - please please remember that firewood should not be sold by weight!

I have an old sign trailer for sale - sign size is 8' x 4' on a frame on top of an old trailer (not roadworthy) photos are a few years old but must be worth £100? PM if interested.

Class A Jumpsuit or Class C?

The guidance from Moneybox on R4 was that you should not claim for expenses that you would still incur even if you no longer worked/owned a business. The example given was for a DJ; a proper suit would not be permissable but an Elvis Outfit would.

Steve, out of interest it would be interesting to see the 'league table' for inbound links to Arb Talk. No worries if you feel it is confidential - just a thought. Keep up the good work. Regards, Mark

Website layout looks OK but no pictures are showing at the moment so it definitly looks 'draft'. I would also not indent new paragraphs to the same extent and would justify blocks of text to tidy it up.

Home users, builders and landscapers may be a good market to get into: if you can help them with the little problems with their saws then they might give you the business when the job is too big.

We do metre long billets on arrival, leave them to season and cut them to size when ready for sale. We have tried vertical and horizontal but have settled on this 22 pto pump horizontal splitter from Riko:

Just a reminder that any Arbtalk user who does hire out processors can advertise for free on Firewood processing equipment for hire

Very good idea. Same principle but he doesn't seem to make as much mess as I do although it does look like it shares the same proximity to breaking when at max pressure! ...and it does not involve a tractor and dodgy home made hydraulics - so most of the fun has been stripped away. A good tip - if you use a newspaper only mix the resulting dry briquette is ideal for soaking up waste cooking oil / fat - just drop it in the pan and it quickly draws up the oil and can then be burnt in the wood boiler. No clogged up drains and a bit of free hot water.

It is packed into the tube by hand (I have an idea for a hopper feed when I master the pressure problems) and then a ram is pushed down the box section then partially withdrawn and the box section indexes backwards. The ram is then applied again and it ejects the briquette. Hope this is understandable; it would be much easier to watch a video but I haven't got one. The bulk of the water is squeezed out and it takes a further month in a greenhouse to bring the core of the briquette down to 20%. It makes no commercial sense whatsoever but has been good fun experimenting (and does get rid of sawdust!). They do burn really well.

Yes, pre soaked newspapers chucked in a cement mixer, add lots of water then the sawdust. 10 minutes later it is all a thick soup.

Not top secret but it is a little dangerous (so don't try this at home kids). The design is MKII - MKI exploded. MKII is not that much better and is still dependent on knowing just about how much pressure you dare apply (when the box section starts to go round it is time to let go) rather than anything posh. MKIII is underway using some thicker walled stuff that hopefully will stand the maximum pressure of the splitter and thus be a bit safer. The sawdust was from under the saw bench so was seasoned mixed hardwood. 10 newspapers added to the mix as a binder.

I agree. For us, the justification to invest the labour is more to do with a good way to get rid of waste that would otherwise be a problem rather than the end product. I did some sawdust briquettes over the weekend - it was quite relaxing in the afternoon sun listening the radio but it took 1.5 hours start to finish to make 50 6"x3"x3" blocks on an adapted hydraulic log splitter but did get rid of a dustbin full of sawdust.

Also a much cheaper version for using leaves and sawdust Pressing Matters - The quest to turn garden waste into fire Briquettes for a wood boiler

ECU's? If I remember correctly the foil from a 10 pack of Embassy number six folded in half was 8 thou - so you could set the points anyware

Dean, Whilst I don't know much about Police tactics in such situations I do share your frustration with the speed with which firearms legislation was put under the media spotlight. The biggest bout of my dismay was reserved for the BASC spokesman, who could have pointed out many factual points about legitimate gun ownership but chose to offer the Olympics Shooting Team as a primary reason for maintaining the present ownership laws. Whilst I know this is a subject close to your heart, you will also accept that if that is the very best reason for having firearms in the community then we have lost the argument. I can't understand why BASC had not got a fully prepared set of bullet points for such an arising (in emergency break glass) - it was a very very poor response to pertinent (and totally predictable) points being raised. The professor advocating we should store ammunition in centralised repositories was another classic that the media latched on to. Perhaps the fox will wait while I go on a 20 mile round trip to pick up a few bullets. Since the awful Cumbria incident I have noticed two news items - someone shot in Liverpool ("the victim was known to the police" so that's alright then?) and the CCTV footage of a lad shooting up a house - both well down the news and both passing without further comment. To my mind, the quanitity and availablity of illegal firerms are the real issue that the police and media should be focussing on.

Half a bulk bag of railway sleepers @£20 = £62 a cube. Even the chancers are putting a sensible value on their time and are doing 25% better than the professionals still slogging their guts out for £50 a cube.

For top quality properly seasoned mixed hardwood bought by the cube... £100 delivered.

Can anyone remember the the thread with a picture a a reindeer made from logs and twigs? If so I would be grateful for the link. Thanks

I went Tuesday this week. I couldn't afford to stop in the bar so did see Rick. Both were in top form. A great night out.