daltontrees

Having just read sopme of the stuff int neh insurance fsubforum, I am more confused than ever.I am going to look at my policy, and I will post my findings. So much in these threads just talks about insurance but people confuse PL and EL. EL is of course in law compulsory. PL is commercially essential for contractors. After that it just gets murky. I must now add to the advice given to the OP that he MUST check that the subby's kit is LOLERED. There seems to be no way round this.

You might be right but that's not the way I understand it to be. My policy, for example, says that I am insured for people in my employment but that subcontractors have to have at least teh same level of cover themselves. If someone is harmed and sues the OP for £1/2M, the insurer will pay out but if it was due to work by a subby can then recover the amount form the contractor and leave him to recover it in turn from the subby who, if he has no insurance, will be bankrupted. Maybe it just depends on what your policy says, but I am pretty sure insurance isn't there as a substitute for competence or for the insurance of hired-in labour.

That WAS his question. Within a few weeks he should have tried and discarded like you. I think the first thing he should do is make sure that if they screw up during the trial period they are qualified and insured so that he is covered. Anywqy, if you take on a subby for a day at £125 and he turns out only to be worth £75, you have only lost £50 worth of cimbing, and if you get him in on a fixed price for the job he has to come back the next day and finish off at his own cost and it's cost you not a lot.

You can tell if they don't have it quickly enough, but I have used subbys who have done a good job olf looking the part until about mid morning when it all starts to grind to a halt. The OP is looking for "a good pool of quality climbers to get the job done in the safest & professional manner as possible". How is a 10 minute van-exiting test going to do that for him?

To "reduce growth relative to other branches", would need to see the whole tree and its situation, species and condition. BAsically take as little as necessary to achieve objectives. Red and blue seem likely to exceed (locally) the 30% rule-of-thumb. RobArb's approach seemsd more appropriate. You can always go back and take off more, but it's pretty difficult to put branches back on if you've overdone it.

10 minutes? You're kidding, aren't you? Anyone can look quick for 10 minutes but can be a total liability because they're compromising on safety. And how will 10 minutes let you see how good they are at establishing all-day-workable anchor points, suitable pulley positions, good redirects for branch walks, never mind cutting bigger stuff, directing safe snatching and lowering and generally planning out an efficient and effective dismantle? I don't dash up a tree, because by the tie I get to the top I have assessed the usefulness and strength of every branch and fork and have planned the whole job out plus taken out all the annoying small stuff and got my ropes on the right side to avoid snagging on lowering operations. Honestly don't know how you can suss someone out until they have done a full tree.

It might be expedient to stay part of the £ for a while, and I expect it would suit England .. sorry ...the remainder of the UK to have it stay for a while too. Governments get by on borrowing, and it would not suit the new slimline UK or the new Scotland plc to have a downgraded credit rating. It doesn't really matter what the Barnet formula says, scottish oil is a tangible asset that I supect underpins UKs creditworthiness. Anyway it smacks of getting divorced and wanting to stay in the marital home until a new one is bought using the proceeds of disposal from the sale of the home. Conjugal rights don't come into it, the nationalistic bit of me wants to make a witty quip about wishing England to be sexually self-sufficient after Scotland's divorce. But I won't, just remember though that after 300 years of marriage Scotland has got rights to a share of the assets. The more an anglocentric UK says that the £ belongs to england, the more the neutrals like me are to feel old resentments stirring.

Quite the opposite, there is no rule to say that you need to be part of the UK to have the pound sterling. The disunited kingdom could choose to share it with Scotland if it suited both parties. I'm not saying whther it would or not, I'm just saying it would bne allowed to. Some coutries that are in Europe aren't in the european currency union, some are. It's the same idea.

Hopefully you're not voting no based on Salmond? You should be thinking about 20 years' time when he is long gone.

It will still be a UK pound because the UK will still be the UK minus scotland. Calling the UK pound or british pound the english pound is like calling the euro the deutsch.

Ask to see their certificates. They have to have at least CS38 or modern equivalent, plus 39 to use a chainsaw for freefall and hand held dismantling, plus 41 for rigging dismantling. Someone will come along soon and tell you that ther is no register of climbers but that one is proposed by the Arb Assoc tech committees or something. It's a long way off though. There's climbers and there's good climbers. They should have all the tickets plus good references.

I will probably vote yes, but (and here's one to ponder for a minute) I would probably vote no if there was an English Assembly. Every other country in the UK has one. Why not England? Why do the english accept non english MPs voting on english only issues? If I was english I would find it morally repugnant. What would be fascinating would be to see how many english would vote for scottish independence.

IN colder weather I like to uwear gloves anyway because I find if I am doing lots and lots of cross-cutting a pair of thin wool gloves under a pair of leather work gloves keeps your hands toasty warm and sees off the threat of white finger. It's either that or heated handles. The inner gloves stop the outer ones getting all slimy and stinky.

It's your fault for recommending the Book of Leaves (p.421). I wouldn't have got it otherwise.

Thanks I have just such a spot. Possibly even making covering it over in deep winter a possibility.

Heh, if you cut your only rope, you will automatically become lighter because you will expel some weight out of your bottom. But in the context of the overall mess, fairly trivial. No offence to anyone, that was just a little bit dark. No jokes about black holes please!l

Motion is dynamics! Anyway, I was just rattling stuff off from memory, and as ever I'm delighted that anyone is the slightest bit interested. Well spotted! I don't think Arbtalk is ready for departures from Newtonian physics yet. A smart-ass Einsteinian reply might be able to demonstrate that the climber descending or ascending at a fixed velocity would become heavier or lighter by virtue of that velocity. But the quantum would be so minute that you could lose or gain more weight breathing. Oh what the heck, I'll never get another chance to use E=mc2 on Arbtalk. If you equate the energy of the moving climber E to mc2 where m is climber's mass and c is the speed of light and equate that in turn to the climber's kinetic energy (the energy stored in his momentum) which is 1/2 mv2, the increase in the climber's weight if he is moving at 1 m/s is 1/2 (v2/c2) = 1/1.5 x 10 to the 16 Which, if the climber weighs 100kg is 0.00000000000000667 kg. Which is not very much. Happily this would be the same whether SRT or DdRT and there is no danger of SRT causing a nuclear holocaust.

Maybe I have been a little harsh. In controlled situationsmaybe they are OK, but on a dirty site and pushing the saws as you do on a commercial job the Windsors snap like knicker-elastic.I should perhaps be retensioning new chains every 20 minutes, but frankly who has the time to do that?

Yesss! Finally killed the thread! That Newton knew his stuff, you english punters should rejoice in his F=ma type stuff. It is as important to understanding as is 'to be or not to be'. No, considerably more so.

Windsor chains are shockingly bad. The chisels are ok but I have never had the chance to see how they are after a few sharpenings because by then the tie straps have stretched and broken. I use them in one sitution only; when I know there is a 50:50 chance of hitting metal inside a butt. When new they will get through a nail or piece of fence wire. Then you can bin them and put on a real chain.

Just happy to have beaten Rob Arb to it for once. I want one of these, the geometry of the underside of the leaves is sublime. I shall investigate hardiness in Scotland.

Your recent poll and thread about this was very much in my mind as I posed this question. In your thread all the contributirs seemed to thrash out a realy useful perspective on compensation claims but I realise now I was left with a slightly unsatisfactory lurch about whether the dodgy-tree owner should put it in his diary to bang in a TPO application once a year to make sure he doesn't lose his statutory rght to claim compensation. Up here where we have a new form of government that doesn't question the recommendations put to it by the Cilly Servants, we have this riduculous 6 month period for claims; i challenge anyone to find a circumstance in which a claim for compensation could be succesful.

Lyonothamnus floribundus?

A useful clarification... I would add that for compensation to be payable the TPO would have to be confirmed, amn application be put in to do work on it, the application would have to have been refused and the damage would have to have been foreseeable and highlighted in teh reasons supporting the application. even then, the compensation claim would have to go in within a year of refusal. Does anyone other than me have abit of a problem with the last bit? In Scotland the period is 6 months. So if you have a steadily worsening tree that you are not allowed to remove but not bad enough to be dangerous, do you have to put in an application for tree works every year to make sure you always have the right to claim compensation?

Aargh! Yes I suppose so. It is a bit hard to get your head round but when moving at constant speed up or down no additional force is put on the anchor point or rope. So once you have started descending on a static line and have reached a steady, unjerky rate of descent, the load on the rope is the same as when stationary. To calculate what happens when you stop, you either need to know the time it takes you to stop or the distance over which you stop. Time is the easier one. Let's say you are descendign at 1 m/s. And you stop in 2 seconds. The deceleration is 1 m/s divided by 2 seconds = 0.5 m/s/s. The additional force on the rope is therefore F = m a = 100kg x 0.5 = 50 Newtons. The total force on the static line is therefore the dead load of 100kg x 10 m/s/s plus the deceleration load 100kg x 0.5. Total 1050 newtons. This assumes the treee is rigid and the rope does not stretch at all. In reality it's more complex than that, the tree and rope flex and store energy temporarily, reducing the overall rate of deceleration and reducing the load on the anchor point. And I forgot the first bit. As you start to descend you reduce the load. Say you get from o m/s to 1 m/s in 2 seconds. The overall load is reducxed by 50N, the reverse of the stopping calculation So the load in this example goes from standstill 1000N, drops to 950N as you move off, stabilises at 1000N for the descent and then increases to 1050N as you come to the ground. Then when you stand on the ground it becomes 0N. How quickly that happens depends on the gracefulness of the landing. I am assuming stopping at waist height then standing up. The load in your feet then becomes 1000N. 500N each foot.