daltontrees

Maybe I can help? The folly as ever is in assuming that there is one rght answer. Answers only ever come from questions, the clearer the question, the clearer the answer. Someone poses a question on Arbtalk. Someone else jumps to a few innocent conclusions, makes some assumptions, uses fragmented experience, relies on imperfect authorities and dives in with an answer with the best of intentions. What was the original question? Oh yeah, a tree none of us has seen may or may not be close to the centre of a boundary line that may or may not be defined or provable. Here's the answer. None of us know enough to to say what the answer is. Sure, we can say if A is the case and B is the Case and C is not the case then the answer is in the absence of improbable and undisclosed circumstances the answer is D. Whe workign as a trainee surveyor I came acrosos a fairly frequent stipulation in title deeds. When someone split the ownership of a bit of land, they stated in the deeds that the new owner must plant a line of boundary trees or ahedge and that thereafter it woud be maintained as a boundary at mutual expense. Compare that with the situation that nature creates. The acorn falls and flourishes and no-one stops it. On the one hand, despite the fundamental that a tree must start on one side or the other and therefore be one person's or another with all other growth being an encroachment, if two people agree that a tree or line of trees be planted to be the boundary and to be mutually maintained, a different sort of law supplants the law that governs natural generation. On the other hand, the natural tree on one man's land encroaches with hair-thin roots which unabated thicken till their encroachment becomes nuisance. The law on this is clear, it doesn't start to be jointly owned when it grows up, it always has been one man's or the other's. And in the middle, if ownership is unknown or can't be proven, the law has evolved another set of remedies to deal with ambiguities. The only difficulty is lack of facts about the case and getting uppity in the defence of unstated jumped conclusions and assumptions.

The bridge is held on by those two little shackles. They have a nylock-type locking ring inside them. My guess would be that if you take this on and off a few times you wold marginally increase the possibility of it unscrewing itself. But you'd probably still need a pair of pliers to do it. I have had mine on and off a couple of times, but when last I renewed the saddle I renewed the shackles too, just for overkill safety. As for using it as a full body harness, it appears to be designed to take the upper part for this but I have no interest whatsoever in such a thing. After all, chest harnesss are intended for helping fall arrest, whereas arb harnesses are meant for work positioning in the 'sit' position. I just can't imagine a fall arrest use, unless you're going up in Mewps. Which I would only do as a last resort because consider it safer in small to midsize trees to be working from a top anchor than from a basket. I can't actually remembe the Mewp requirment but I have a vauge recollection that a 500mm max fal is tolerable and tha this can be achieved in a Mewp with a short lanyard. I hope this helps.

Cheers, Solomon. Inevitably reference to QTRA, as in the system and not its company or any individuals, is bound to come up, and I think it would be somewhat artificial to discuss the quantification of tree risk assessment without using QTRA as a reference source, but personally I would be happy not to go beyond the published and free to use practice note available at their website. Similarly with THREATS and the ISA stuff and any other methodologies in the public domain. Would it also be appropriate to state from the outset that anyone using any principles or techniques of tree risk assessment discussed or offered on this site do so entirely at their own risk without liability to Arbtalk or the individual contributors? If such a generalised disclaimer is understood by one and all then people may be able to express themselves more candidly without having to add a postscript of disclaimers and caveats at the end of every posting? If so, roll on Wiki-tra, and I will switch off the lawyer on my shoulder who is always tut-tutting at me.

I have a pair of swivel krabs on my Treeflex, absolutely indispensable! Would go out of my mind without them.

Thanks, not so well actually due to a shoulder injury so I am choosing my tree jobs carefully. Consultancy going well though, so am getting by somehow. Probably got too much thinking time and so am posting more frequently than the typical lack of feedback suggests is worthwhile...

I too would be interested n the authorities on this. It seems to go against some pretty fundamental tenets of law.

...can't we have one tiny part of the world wide web where t.r.a. can be discussed without fear of being badgered?

Can see the pictures now. Looks a nightmare to get back together. I imagine returning it to Top Dead Centre could help.

Working on Ryobis is for me a true nightmare. I have taken the view in the past that they are so cheap and parts are so dear and everything about tehm is difficult to work on that you somethimes have to cut your losses and chuck out the badly broken ones. The link doesn't work. I have a 4046C that I would like to nurse back to helth but I think has a scored cylinder or workn ring, so I'd love to see what they look like inside.

That's good advice.

I am having good results painting the ends once with 50:50 turps:varnish mix. If anyhting it takes the wood lonmger to season because it can only dry out through the sides. As seventh devil says, choose species that dont have high shrinkage. Ash for example (and your photo looks like Ash) is ridiculous for shrinkage. You can hear cracking in stems as you ar dismantling them, as radial tension is released. Conifers at the nodes can't crack and the grain effect is fabulous.

I think it's officially Auricularia auricula-judae, but the politically correct mob don't call it jew's Ear it's now Jelly Ear.

First and only time I tried VT I decked it in slow motion from about 5 metres up. Never going to use it again!

Gordon Bennett, this is a bit of a floaty thread. After years of experimentation I have fond that 1.6m of 'wasp' is the optimum length. Tie a double fishermans with 2 inch tails when hand tight then tighten it with all the strenght and weight in your body. I put mine over the washing pole, put a brick at the bottom of the pole, put a spade in the loop and its end against the brick and pull like hell. It will be so pre-tightened that NO-ONE will ever get it undone. Then tape down the ends to stop them catching on things or use shrink wrap (put it on the loop before tying the knot!). It works at 1.6m with a 3 wrap prussik or Schwabian or Blake's. If you use a 2 wrap, you'll need a shorter loop and so a shorter length of rope. I buy 10 metres at a time, gets me 6 loops and an offcut. Works out at about £2 a loop. Disposable! I would strongly recommend experimenting with other hitches after you get comfortable with a Prussik Hitch. It's a no-brainer knot but really irritating in practice after a while.

Tentatively count me in, resistance to QTRA is futile and I am willing to spend some time on an open system. However, as stated elsewhere I am already quite far on with a publishable article with that in mind and wouldhave to be cautious about going off half-cock. I think Acer is right (gosh did I really agree with him...?) about keeping it contained initially. If you send me a PM I could to and fro with you for a bit until it is ready to go public.

As I recall Mike Ellison published his original article about QTRA in 1985 in the AJ. Surely it is his? Personally I have independently evolved a quantified TRA system, possibly having common ancestry in Matheny & Clark but also in standard tree risk practice of people I know who are professional risk managers. I even did someting similar when I was a surveyor dealing with investment risk management. The fundamentals definitely can't be anyones intellectual property.

That's absolutely right. All subsequent growth that crosses the boundary, be it stem, roots or branches, is an encroachment. In no way does part of the tree accrue in ownership to the neighbour once it is in his soil and airspace. Knowing where the acorn landed may be literally impossible to tell. The stem may be asymmetric because of reaction to weather. If it's too close to call, you may have to arrive at a pragmatic view. If both would-be owners are happy to see it go and there are no statutory protections, go it may. If one resists, think again. In theory by law you wold be entitled to saw the tree vertically right down it stem at the boundary, and take your 'half' away. This would inevitably kill the tree. But if it's the neighbour's, you are still within your rights because you are removing a trespass. Building a raft over tree roots may avoid damaging them but will probably kill them anyway. Paying for some advice at this stage frm someone who can see the whole tree in context, who can ask follow-up questions in real time and who knows the local council's position on such trees could save you a lot of grief and money in the long run. Here on the sofa it's interesting to speculate and good to try and help, but it's never going to be as good as 'paid' advice. Qualified, insured, expereineced written advice.

The FC advice seems sound. But basically the disease comes down to miniscule individual bcateria which like the common cold are effectively ubiquitous. It would ionly take one bacterium on one fly's leg and that fly to move form one tree to another to look for a bark crevice to lay its eggs in and then you have the formula for infection. You can't stop infection but you can avoid the things that will very obviously help it, like dirty tools. Since the precise vectors for the spread of teh disease is not known, equally it is not known whether airborne infection is possible or likely (such as chipping would encourage), but if insects are involved then evicting them at maturity will probably encourage spread. Removal in winter can only help reduce spread.

It has no bottom. If anyone ever gets tot teh point where they think they have fungi/tree interaction completely pegged, they can always turn their attention to the notion that trees and fungi have been interacting since long before the dawn of time (I would guess about 1,500,000,000 years) and that some fungal morphology nad strategy is a result of adaptations to tree species that are long since extinct in climates that locally no longer exist in atmospheric conditions that we would find strange today. And vice versa, trees having evolved defence mechanisms to long gone fungal species that we (thorugh the fossil record) can never know about. Not only does the hole have o bottom, it has no sides either.

NAture doesn't stick to definitions, and so whether something is a particular kind of coloniser is just a starter for 10. The teacher may now what he's telling you is not strictly right but that if he tried to explain why you'd never get past go.

Not quite foolish but 'mostly the case' seems to be a good starting point. And furthermore some fungi are capable of more than one means of colonisation, as far as I have read (i.e. I'm not making it up from my own experience). Thus Armillaria mellea can colonise by sapwood exposed either by rhizomorphs ofr spores, bu can and most often does colonise by active pathogenicity. Also Keretzschmaria deusta is held by some authors to be sapwood exposed but on the recently circulated PTI list it is down as heartwood. It may be both, with slim chance of being actively pathogenic too. Few woud argue that Nectria coccinea colonises living wood, but Nectria cinnabarina seemingly can't be made to do the same and goes only for dead wood. Pleurotus ostreatus is on the cusp of colonising live wod, the same might not be said for the other Pleurotus species (dryinus or cornucopia). If you're trying for definitive answers, you may get frustrated because well respected authorities will give different answers. Eery now and again fungi ger reassigned to different or new genus'. Like Nectria and Neonectria. And I also sense that fungi that attack heartwood get called heartwood colonisers even though they may gain entry and colonise initially by other means. If you need answers for an exam, learn what the curriculum tells you the answer is. Then you can passs and spend the rest of your life qualified and find what the real answer is.

Using my own numerical interpretations of the words used in the ISA system, I have come up with this. It's a screen shot of an Excel table, sorry of it's fuzzy. It gives severe 1/1 to 1/20 high 1/2 to 1/10,000 moderate 3/4 to 1/100,000 low 1/5 to 0 This is without prejudice to my own work on this subject which will hopefully explain and reconcile these apparent anomalies.

I tried to derive a specific rather than a general proof for this and ended up looking at Fibonacci numbers and from there to Pascals Triangles. They seem to provide a general solution for any probability problem of this type. And they show that the probability of any nominated 15 coins coming up tails and the others heads will be the 1/33,000 figure but the probaility of any 15 being tails is 155,117,520/310,235,040 better known as 1/2.

Don't waste time on it. The answer is that for some time now it has been unacceptable for variety names to use latinised terms like 'Purpurea' and/or 'Pendula'. Thus if a purple beech was found or cultivated for the first time now it would possibly be named Fagus sylvatica 'Weeping Purple'.

Yeah, if there's a prize I'll spend time on it. It's certainly an easier one than the Trees of Damocles scenario.