djbobbins

I'll give that one a hearty "seconding". In desperation I bought a Golf a few years ago, it was relatively cheap for the age and mileage, seemed nice and clean but I could tell it had suffered a minor shunt (poor panel fit on NSF wing). Ended up costing me £2500 in various repairs (cracked gearbox housing, numerous problems with drive train) in about 14 months before I decided enough was enough and p/x'd it in. Garage did an HPI on it and discovered not only had it been clocked (by at least 30k) but was also Cat C damaged. All told, the loss on the car and the repairs cost me over four grand in a year. For the sake of spending 10 minutes and 10 quid on the web it is a mistake I will never make again.

To whom? If there are any buyers out there it would be a winner, there are bloody hundreds of the things at about height for going to a garden centre... they need some kind of thinning out and selling a few would be ideal.

My father has got about an acre of pasture land which has naturally seeded with rowan trees over the last ten or fifteen years from some nearby mature specimens. Some of the "seedlings" are now beefing up about, up to about 8 foot tall or so. Whilst they're not ready for doing anything with yet, I was just wondering if the wood has any particular uses (i.e. in the way that alder does for clogs or charcoal, ash for axe handles, pop for getting rid of that firewood customer who always complained, that kind of thing)...

Oh, and the oil companies also pay tax on their profits as well as a tax on extracting the oil... so the 60% of the pump price (fuel duty and VAT) is probably more like 80% when you take that into account... Still, Gordon Brown managed to use all of this money to pay for your local council to employ a horde of people in non-jobs, or for benefits claimants to live in £2000 a week houses, so I suppose we should all be happy:cursing:

The cheapest I can remember seeing unleaded petrol in pence per litre was 39.9p. That was in about 1987 or 88. So since then, price has gone up more than three-fold. More recently, I recall that for a while petrol hovered around the 70-75p per litre mark, about 2003-04. So in effect, it has almost doubled in cost in seven years. That is the equivalent of about 10% compound per year by my rough calculation. If you really want to, you can go onto the ONS website and see how prices have changed since 1987 (see "Time Series Data", series identifier "DOCU")! But it would seem my memory is pretty good, probably because it is so painful going to the pumps... I'm not here to defend the oil companies, but what they are doing is responding to the market. Yes, they make money on extracting oil, but why would they then process that into road fuel and sell at a loss, if they could instead sell it by the supertanker load? To draw a comparison, for those of you that do firewood as well as tree surgery, if you can get £500 for a job, and you have two options of what to do with the wood - either sell it for £50, or deliver it to someone's house and pay them £50 to take it off you, which do you go for? Last time I did any real research on this, the margins on petrol retailing were very slim - about a penny per litre. The most profitable thing at a petrol station was the carwash, which probably explains why so many filling stations have closed and are now occupied by a gang of blokes with a few buckets of water and sponges. Global oil markets are driven by supply and demand, OPEC is happy to have oil at $100+, Osborne sees that demand for fuel doesn't really fall if he creams another penny or so on top of every litre, so unless someone is going to come up with a wood-fired car I think we will have to get used to more pain at the pumps.

Dairy I think I could cope with, body clock might take a bit of getting used to, but sheep are buggers - I did a stint on a family farm during school holidays years ago. I have a hard-etched memory of a day when a group of us rounded up, penned, sheared 650 ewes and wormed 1,000 lambs. How is it that a 2 foot high sheep can climb an almost sheer three foot verge, and five foot of dry stone wall on top? How? No really, how?! I reckon they must be possessed!

What about a Series Landy and go for classic car insurance?

There are a couple of different things to consider: gearing (debt to equity ratio in the funding of your business) cover ratio (number of times that your business profits will pay the interest on your outstanding debts) Since your business is likely to be "owner operator" personally I (and your bank) would probably be most concerned about the latter. As well as interest charges, however, I'd recommend taking into account any fixed or obligatory payments such as vehicle leases, property rates and also salaries. The total cash outflows for all of these mandatory payments represent the level of risk to your business of failing. It is worthwhile remembering that most businesses do not fail as an immediate result of making a loss, but of not having the cash to pay debts or interest costs as they become due. Sure, if in the long term a business makes recurring significant losses, it is unlikely to be generating positive cash and thus is likely to fail, but that is a symptom of long term problems. So - in a kind of answer which only opens up a load more questions - perhaps consider how much you turned over last year (or more importantly, got paid in cash), what your fixed costs and interest charges were, and therefore what the ratio was. How much does your turnover need to fall before you aren't able to cover costs? If your business can take a reduction in turnover by 50% and you've got long term work contracts, then you're probably okay. However if you find out that should your turnover reduce by 10%, you will be struggling to pay your bills, you might want to consider reducing your cost base!

Having enjoyed a family picnic and a quiet pint at this pub: Castle Inn EdgeHill, Banbury, Oxon, OX15 6DJ I came home this evening and have just finished mortaring down some paviours for new steps next to my garage. It struck me that laying bricks and concrete is something I find rather satisfying - I think it is the (perceived) permanence of it. Anything else, apart from tree work, that people get job satisfaction out of?

Euc burns well as has already been posted on here but the thicker stuff (16" or so) couple I felled took three years to be properly seasoned IMO. It is an absolute witch to split by hand; I haven't got a splitter so if you're better equipped you might be okay, but on an 8-10" round, the maul pretty much bounced off it without making a mark (other than where there were very big cracks from drying). I ended up having to take a 14lb sledge and wedges to a good proportion of mine. Have a butchers at this: Prima Bio - eucalyptus specialists - promoting new uses for eucalypts

FWIW in your situation I would be minded to keep it up off the floor (pallets?) and either stacked with deliberate air gaps, or if it is already down to log size, deliberately loose piled so the air can get through it.

I had mine sawn and stacked outside (exposed to the elements on the outside face of the stack) for about nine months. I then split any bigger stuff and had it in my open faced log store for about another two or three months. It burns well, however once it is dry it is relatively low density which means either a big pile of logs on the hearth, lots of trips out to the log store or burning a shovel of coal every now and then.

I'm guessing it was in one of the delightful areas of Coventry (and by the fencing I'd also guess railway) so maybe Canley or Willenhall? Not one of those rough nasty areas like Finham or anywhere down the Kenilworth Road?

If he can do that with his teeth I'll be really impressed!

Still, saved them a few Rand not paying for a tree surgeon, eh? I reckon those marks will polish out with a bit of T-Cut... !!!

Someone once told me that the French equivalent of Sellafield is on the Cherbourg peninsula, right at the northern tip. Don't know if it's true or not, but if my geography is anything like correct, if anything ever goes seriously wrong there, it is London that's downwind in the prevailing direction... I tend to think of it this way - everyone wants cheap, green, reliable electricity. Cheap means coal (not green), green means wind, hydro etc (expensive and not necessarily reliable) and nuclear probably means a bit of all three. But it's got to be done right.

I always offer anyone coming to work at the house a drink; it's just common courtesy. Keep telling my missus to do the same and if I know someone's been round to do a job during the day, normally the questions to her when I get home are "did it go alright?" and "did you offer them a drink?" On another tea related theme, there was an old guy lived near where I grew up in a fairly remote farmhouse. No mains water, elec or phone. One day, one of his calves gets stuck in the quagmire of a yard. He walked down to a neighbour's place and got them to phone the fire brigade. Neighbour goes round to have a nosey at what is going on. Brigade come out, winch calf out, whilst they are rinsing their wellies off in the trough in the yard the farmer offers them a brew. They all accept, he goes inside, gets his kettle, comes out and dips it straight in the same trough to fill up....!

Cool as funk but I wouldn't want the fuel bill!!

I'm curious about something I saw today and wondered what anyone else might make of it. Should have taken some pictures but I didn't have a camera phone with me. To cut a long story short, there was a crew dismantling a tree est 60 foot tall, base adjacent to a busy B-road. They had the chipper, tranny and another couple of vehicles on the ground, so traffic was single file past the site. This was being done by hand, no stop / go signs and no traffic lights, What I thought was a bit odd (I wouldn't have fancied doing it personally) was that there was a climber up in the tree, saw on a strap, on the one large bough which extended directly over where the traffic was driving underneath. At the time I passed, he wasn't sawing but I was surprised that he should be stood up there whilst public vehicle were driving underneath. Just curious, that's all...

Hmmm.... I don't fell trees professionally but I reckon I could have done it with an axe in not much longer than that... and had a better hinge at the end of it. Am I the only one that thinks it's a sign of something very wrong when they can afford a video camera and two quads, yet the girl is running around with nothing on her feet?!

Don't know about birch wine but have just made some rhubarb wine and it tasted pretty good - although I suspect would leave you with a bad head if consumed in quantity. Appearance wise, the less links drawn to the word "sample", probably the better! How do you go about collecting birch sap then?

Just thought I would pass on the benefit of my experience over the last couple of weeks; hopefully some people might find it useful. My weekend / hobby / backup vehicle is a 93 Isuzu Trooper, 3.2V6 SWB. After the last MOT, one of the advisories was a minor leak on the exhaust, which on inspection turned out to be in a flexible coupling. The flex coupling sits in a wishbone shaped piece of pipe, which joins the two downpipes from the engine banks into a single pipe. Anyway, the leak has got slowly worse and my need for the car has got greater (change of job and company vehicle returned) so I decided to do something about it. My normal exhaust supplier said they couldn't get hold of the wishbone section of the exhaust, and that apart from the rearmost exhaust sections the Trooper exhausts are a dealer only part. Which sounded potentially painful in the wallet area. The second place I spoke said they could get hold of the part, but it was 200 quid. There was also a risk that, because in the past someone has tack welded the wishbone section of the exhaust onto the cat, I might need a new cat too - which would be another 300 quid or so. Eeek. My third call was to a place in Leek, Staffordshire (All Car Exhausts, shameless promotion for them but I promise I am independent and just recommending them because I'm chuffed with the outcome). I told them the problem, and the guy on the other end of the phone did acknowledge that the wishbone section on the exhaust would be "strong money", even without the risk of having to replace the cat. Just as I was thinking it was time to bite the bullet, he went on to say "But if you bring it in, we can cut the old coupling out and weld another one in its place. No need to worry about going anywhere near the cat." So, to wind up a long tale, 60 quid for a job well done and a nice sounding vehicle again, rather than at least 200 and potentially 500. If anyone else finds themselves in the same situation (and like me, isn't able to do the repair yourself) then I recommend doing a bit of phoning around and asking the question.

Jesus... It's even worse than the article they did on the 10 best stoves! So, let's get this right: 1) spend 800 quid on gear (according to their prices for a rechargeable chainsaw, a log store, a couple of axes and a splitter). 2) go home and either a) injure yourself or damage your property b) realise a rechargeable saw is no use whatsoever for felling the 50' euc in your garden, c) realise that despite your garden being "large", it's not big enough to sustain a plantation d) realise that it's all a bit like hard work, stick the saw in the loft with last year's veg growing kit, tai chi mats and other excessive consumer goods. Depending on your volume of logs required, either buy a net from the local petrol station or order a load from a supplier.

I was told that an old lad near where I grew up had a similar contraption, but adapted it to run a shaft drive off a PTO. PTO was running faster than the belt drive would have, saw blade gave up the ghost and embedded itself in him. I'd led to believe it did for him. This was donkeys years ago, but I still get really uneasy at the thought of people using unguarded circular saws, even when it is to do work they were rated for.