Paul Jenks

I'm allowed 40p per mile for the first 10,000miles and 25p per mile thereafter, HMRC. If I was to run a little van I'd be quids in. Alas I like my Shogun and it's much better for pulling the trucks out of fields.

:blushing:Or maybe not having read the later posts

Oh the highlighted bit. Yep, pretty sure.

Which bit? I'm pretty sure about everything I write. I may not have explained myself fully so misunderstandings are a potential.

You don't completely ringbark the tree. Depending on how much you want to stress the tree you go halfway or three quarters round leaving some cambium. You can then repeat the exercise for several years staggering where the cambium is left. Each successive ringing above the previous one. It makes the tree work harder at producing seed.

Holm is bloody heavy so could well be denser than water. Box is very sought after by etchers. It used to be used for pictures in the old style printing presses. It's very stable and has very tight grain so was good for 100's if not 1000's of prints. Folk who do etching would bite your arm off for it. The last lot I had someone came down from Newcastle to get it. Get onto an etchers forum and find out more detail

I know my fingers feel more brittle in the cold. Especially when I clatter them with the end of my steel strop. I find maples pretty brittle anyway.

Nice post. Interesting comments. Thank- you Jamie for your reasoned input. LOLER is there to protect the user. As far as is reasonable in what is a very tough environment, but as someone has said the daily pre-climb checks form part of the LOLER system. We have 8-9 climbing kits that all have to be checked twice a year on top of the daily checks and weekly form filling. Self-employed climbers and/or business owners don't have to have LOLER but if anything was to go wrong your insurance and HSE wouldn't be too pleased. All our big clients ask for our LOLER, PUWER etc before being allowed to start on site and this information is available for inspection by any of our other clients. Most guys who've been climbing for a while know pretty well how to look after their gear and don't conciously put themselves in unnecessarily risky situations by using defective gear. Most of our regularly used kit doesn't make it past 3 years let alone 5. Nicks from saws or spikes being the main reasons. IMO some form of refresher training or a short module might make sense to educate users of climbing gear exactly what to look for and more importantly why a piece of equipment is a fail. We do tool box talks when a piece gets failed in-house as well as by our LOLER inspector. I also support very strongly the post that said to check the gear and the tree all day long. Become too reliant on textbook safety systems and you end up unsafe.

Twas a good game. Had to keep leaving the dinner table to go and watch.

I like some of the comment on business practice, and the bit about smearing butter, or was that on another forum? My brother told me some years ago to develop a professional relationship with my clients not a financial one. It can be a challenge to get your head around, especially if you're struggling for work, and the thread of his arguement was to show what you will deliver and how it will benefit them. If they are focussing on the price can you validly call them a client as they may well drop you if they get a lower quote. Get them to buy into you and your business, metaphorically speaking, and the price of work becomes secondary. Don't bother to try to compete on price as there will always be someone who'll do it cheaper. As for poaching clients. If I allow another company to carry out works for one of 'my clients' I lost them and they won them. My fault.

Are we talking shredder or chipper? and which model?

Blows my theory out then. Try ripping it out and see if that works. Seriously, has it got a manufacturers mark on it.

I always use a swedish strop. It takes longer for the saw to cut through and is easier to bully through ivy and deadwood. Good quality stainless steel too. That big suage on the end bloody well hurts when it catches your knuckles though.

If it's digital you need to get a digital tacho card from DVLA. It looks like a hydrid between a credit card and the new driving license. It goes in the slot and you follow the prompts. Then it tells you it has a fault or that you are driving without a card. You press a few more buttons in a random order and it comes right. You have to get a downloader too as the card fills up with info quite quickly. I.e. weekly. If the card won't work it's usually broken so you have to send it back and get a replacement. Whilst you are driving without a card at the end of the day the machine will roduce a printout, which you keep for your records. The other option is to rip it out.

£120 for a loler inspection is quite high. Anyway, back to the topic. One of the tricks to branch walking on long sinous limbs is to focus as much of your weight down the line of the branch. (Easy when you have spikes on) This means you reduce the loading on the anchor point and have less chance of breaking the limb you're on. It takes quite a bit of balance and a lot of core stomach strength, but the resulting six-pack is worth the burn.

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOwwwwwwwwwwwww.

Don't know if this one has been on. A girls nether regions before sex are like 'an orchid with drops of morning dew'. After they're like 'a bulldog that's eaten a bowl of porridge'.

If your tree has a TPO then it should also have a corresponding TPO number assigned to it by the aforementioned LA. This is all public record stuff and there should also be a map, again on public record. This means that you can get hold of a copy of their map and use that. Generally we have found all the tree officers in our area quite helpful and as they have mostly been in place for some time they know the tree or trees in question. Recently LA's TPO and conserveation area application systems were aligned across the country to ensure conformity and due process. Some may have interpreted the process a little differently. For a CA a letter of intent is all that's needed, with a map/sketch plan and the LA has to come up with a valid reason for you not to carry out the works and they have 6 weeks to get back to you. If they don't get back to you, then after 6 weeks crack on. For a TPO the onus is on you to give a valid arboricultural reason for the works to be carried out and they have 8 weeks to make decision. If they don't get back to you do not crack on as the tree is protected by law. Get on to them and if still not satisfied get on to the LA ombudsman, yes there is such a thing and start to complain. All the plans we submit are clear but very simple sketches showing the road, house, boundaries and tree. As to scale. It fits on a sheet of A4.

My thoughts exactly:001_smile:

Apparently so. Speak to Rob Nash from Overland. He's always used Landy's but as they are being phased out he's now producing Hilux's with Hiabs and tipper bodies.

One of our trucks was hit by a car last year and the chipper was not towable. The team was stuck holding the driver together before the police etc turned up and then were deemed better at directing traffic the senor plod so were doing that for a couple of hours whilst the fire brigade cut the driver free.(She was ok and phoned up a few days later asking if we wanted all the clothes that the guys had used to stem the blood flow.) We went for uninsured loss for the loss of a days work and only the persistance of our broker and my office manager got anything out of the insurers.

Yup. They look great but with a body like that if you fill it up you'll be about 1-1.5tonnes overweight. FYI it's the drivers responsibility if VOSA stop you. Plus, with the lock boxes full of kit and 3 blokes in the cab the front axle would be overweight with nowt in the back. Last year we sent a brand new specialist vehicle back to the manufacturers as the front axle was over weight with just the driver and no kit. It had a load capacity of just over 250kg if it was all placed behind the rear axle to alleviate the weight on the front one. Over loading the vehicles was once seen as acceptable but the brakes don't work properly when loaded over the plated weight.(We used to have an LDV with the faithfull plywood chipbox and when full it weighed out at 5t without any kit or men inside) If you've been tasked to get a 3.5t vehicle for tree work be very careful and check the capacity for both load and towing. The next one we'll get will be a 4wd. The Hilux and the Landrover can be rated to 3.5t and will carry more than a transit, (lighter chasis), can tow more and will tow it more places.

We stayed with my wife's uncle out in the boondocks East of Canberra a few years back and while I was there by myself the chimney caught fire. It sounded like a jet engine and this is in a large wooden house. With very low water pressure, a short length of hose and a great deal of adrenaline after half an hour or so I managed to put it out. When said uncle returned I told him of my heroism and he patted me on the shoulder and said that was how they cleaned the chimney.

Or different customers

Be very careful when signing any agreement with phone companies. As you are signing as a business there is a legal expectation that you will have a lawyer to read the small print. There is usually a 2 or 3 year get out clause buried within making it very difficult and time consuming to extract yourself from it. Either that or very expensive. Try googling for forum sites dedicated to disgruntled clients. We are with Unicom and they are sharks. Just about to finally get out of our contract.