djbobbins

Anyone need a go anywhere mobile office / workshop? Your First Choice for Russian Trucks and Military Vehicles - UK Russian (I say "go anywhere", perhaps that should be "go anywhere providing it's not too far from a filling station". 40 litres per 100 km works out at 7mpg, or about £18 quid in fuel for me to do the 10 miles to work and back!!!) 260 litres of fuel storage = £312 to fill it at £1.20 / litre. So much for the £60 limit on a pay at pump payment...!

The absolute best I have ever had out of my V6 auto box Trooper is 21mpg, and that was a 300 mile round trip on the motorway, cruising at 55-60. Seems to move the fuel gauge to start the thing, but then in its defence it's nearly 18 years old, has got close to 150k on the clock and I can leave it parked in all weathers for three weeks and still rely on it to start, go, stop etc.

monocoque and not very rigid one at that then?! but capable(ish) off road - mud, grass etc? ground clearance?

What about something like an X-Trail? I was having a butchers at those today coincidentally - for about the same age and mileage that a Freelander 2 would set me back £14k, you can get an X-Trail for about £8k. I was seriously thinking about chopping in my wife's Nissan shopping trolley (n.b. been very reliable apart from her driving it over a lamppost in last winter's ice; can't blame that on the car) and the Isuzu Trooper and getting an X-Trail to cover both roles. Anyone know what they're like off-road?

Ash felled in spring 2010 Eucalyptus felled and stacked in 2007/08 Alder felled and stacked between November 2009 and March 2010 Daw Mill doubles (at least, I think that's where it comes from) Bits and bobs of the 30t of housecoal left over from when my employer used to have a domestic coal business Offcuts of kiln dried sawn softwood from a friendly local furniture maker (although they've recently only gone and installed their own woodburner, something about wanting to burn less gas, selfish lot!!) Only for an open fire evenings and days at home but have been getting through about 3 barrows a week at the moment plus a wee bit of the archeological biomass (i.e. coal!)

Cold and dry in Warwick...

WD40 for me - if you get rid of the water, then there's less chance of the lock freezing up.

We had a euc at the front of our house (6-7m away and about 10m+ tall) and minor subsidence to both our own house and the neighbours. I was not clear on cause and effect but felled it anyway - the upside is that the lawn and other plants are greatly improved, and once the wood had seasoned I had a decent stock of firewood for a while. So it's not all bad news! P.S. Apologies that this is about as helpful to your argument as a chocolate teapot!

So presumably the intention is to stop scurrilous property developers submitting numerous planning applications until everyone involved gets so sick of it that they cave in? I can agree with that to an extent, but think it is very worrying that councils will be allowed to do planning applications as an "at cost" (or maybe "cost plus"?) exercise. When was the last time that knowing that all costs would be recovered led someone to think -"Hmmm, I'll do this one particularly efficiently."??

Gareth; just to make you even happier - if Liz makes it through to 2012, there will be an extra public holiday in the summer for the jubilee as well! Bank holidays and British Summer Time : Directgov - Government, citizens and rights

You can order replacement handbooks here: Original Ford Betriebsanleitung, Handbook, Manuale, Manuel, Manual - Druckerei C.H.Beck but will cost you a few quid. (Perhaps cheaper than going to a garage though!) Have a dig around the Ford owners forums, I've found out various bits and bobs in the past, although it can be tricky to sort the wheat from the chaff as far as advice goes sometimes...

Do you think you can find comparable space (without getting involved in e.g. planning issues) at the same sort of monthly money elsewhere? If so then maybe consider it; personally I'd be wary about putting a load of time and investment into a kiln drying system which relies on you being able to burn wood in a smokeless zone. Unless of course your stove is an approved appliance?? Also a power supply would be useful - if needs be you can buy ex-electricity board billing quality meters to sub-meter a supply (we have done it with a tenant). You could always insulate all of one of your containers apart from one section (e.g. one of the doors). Then rig up a piece of guttering at the bottom with a drain. As the warm damp air circulates around, the water vapour condenses out on the cold door - effectively the door performs the same role as the chiller coil in a dehumidifier.

I'd have to plump for adding my name to the "air drying undercover" voters, but if you did want to think about some kind of kiln drying in a container, might it be worth thinking about the type of system that used to be used in chicken sheds? My next door neighbour had a former chicken shed as his workshop, it had an externally built solid fuel fired stove, with a feed and return 3" pipe natural convection (so no pumps or need for electric supply) hot water radiator system. That way you could burn wood as your heat source. Reckon it would take a while to dry though, and you'd definitely need some way of venting off the damp air. How much weight of water would you be looking to remove from your container load of wood? It should be possible to work out how much energy will be needed to do this, and assuming an efficiency for the boiler system, to come up with a rough idea of how much wood you'd need to burn.

Not sure about the superstition bit but I had a similar experience years ago on the embarrassment / not knowing where to put your face side. Nice guy whose garden I helped look after, me and my mate turned up one summer evening to do a bit of work and found the owner having a bonfire at the end of the garden. Not thinking too much about it we got on, until bumped into the owner walking out of the house carrying an armful of clothes. Turned out his wife had died that day (in her mid 40s) and he was doing some clearing out, presumably as some kind of catharsis. He was a really good guy to work for and I still replay in my mind the grief he must have been going through and wish I could have done / said something different than the stunned silence and mumbled words I did come up with.

Quite like the tyre idea but not sure where you'd get hold of a tyre quite that wide without a bit of asking around - must be about 19 inch rim but 14 inch wide! On a slightly more serious point, the design of the treadle system means that when he's swinging the maul he's effectively standing with all the weight on the right leg only. Can't therefore put any effort into it so I'd love to see him having a go at a chunk of my eucalyptus, which I had to persuade apart with a maul, two wedges and a 14lb sledgehammer... also can't imagine it's the best thing for lumbar stress swinging a maul stood on one leg!

Was about to say something similar; you'd better hope that's not one of those special elasticated rubber cheques... else you'll be going back round to re-load your logs!

Scroll about half way down this and see what the guy's leather boots did for him when he missed the steel toecap... Chainsaw boot test - Tree World

Payment options maybe, e.g. cash / paypal etc but not sure you can on postage; otherwise wouldn't you get unscrupulous people sticking a listing on with no reserve, waiting for a bid and then bumping the postage cost up??

Can't see it being an issue unless it is going to be stood for a long time, in which case just make sure it's well mixed before going into the saw.

cheap as chips or cheap for chips?! I've tended to go for supermarket boggo standard own brand 20-50 personally (for the saw that is, I reckon it might taint the chips a bit) but find that it tends to fling. You reckon the bio oil is better? Isn't the viscosity too low?

BBC has a few photos of the effects of weather. Sad to see that someone was killed by falling timber, but also showing an interesting way to prop a tree up - lean it on your house... BBC News - Severe weather: Your pictures

Are the log jacks on the Clark website somewhere? I just had a look but couldn't see them anywhere...

Anyone got or used one of these? I was thinking about asking for one for Chrimbo (my wooden, homemade saw horse isn't the easiest thing to move around and I have got logs to saw in a couple of different places) but am undecided whether it wouldn't be better to just buy some box section and bolt one together myself... NEW FOLDING METAL LOG STAND SAW HORSE SAFETY GRIP 150KG on eBay (end time 23-Nov-10 13:14:44 GMT)

Wood burning stoves are excluded: Excluded technologies | RH Incentive but "biomass heat generation" is included. For each kWh of heat you produce in a small (sub 45kW) it sounds like you will get about 7p (tariffs are due to be updated following government spending review). Unless I am being really dim about this, that means that if you can source pellets or woodchip for sub 5p / kWh (I've worked out what this means in pence per kilo somewhere in one of my other posts) you will be getting your heat for free. And if you get your woodchip for free / from a job, you will be getting paid to heat your own home! If I had the space I'd go for a woodchip boiler as part of a system with a thermal store ahead of a stove with backboiler but I guess it's down to choice. FWIW, I remain to be convinced on ASHP. The CoP is about 2.5 at best, or so I'm told. Combined with power at about 15p/kWh (say) your heat is still costing you 6p/kWh - compared to about 4.5p kWh for kerosene at the moment. Mind you, the RHI on the ASHP should just about cover the power costs providing it's running efficiently.

I'm guessing the next couple of months might be useful for that...