Big J

Dropping to consistently below freezing by the weekend. Really chuffed about that as hovering around freezing means a lot more ice than solidly below.

I guess so, but you'd see big efficiency gains, meaning you can charge more. Also a lot less annoying to operate. When I had the Vimek with the tilt rotator grab, it was just brilliant. Going back to a normal swinging, non-tiltable grab afterwards was awful. Glad to hear you're both getting on well with them. I have even seen 2t machines with them. They don't even seem to consider using a digger without one. The other thing which seems incredibly efficient (and I'm pretty sure it's illegal in the UK) is for wheeled excavators to run (often tipping) trailers. Coupled with tilt rotators, they are versatile machines for all manner of road work, reducing the staffing costs due to reduced machine requirements.

Why does hardly anyone use tilt rotators in the UK? I'm reasonably handy on a digger, having dug out many forestry tracks, but only in the UK and only with 'dumb' excavators with direct mounted buckets. In nearly 1.5 years living in Sweden, I have yet to see an excavator without a tilt rotator, with most equipped with a grab on that rotator too. Watching theIt jm work, it quickly leaves you with the impression that to not have a rotator would be insane. It just seems very odd.

A snowy commute to work this morning. I had falling snow for the first 5km and then it abated. There is something really lovely about cycling through the forest before dawn with good headlights. The ice and snow crunching under your (studded) tyres is quite enchanting.

Finally a bit of winter weather. Minus 4 and fully sunny yesterday. Made for an excellent 60km exploring some new hills on the gravel bike. It dropped to minus 7c last night and has lightly snowed. Minus 3c now. Heading out on the bike again in a mo. I do like winter A few photos from yesterday:

At work and it's starting to snow. Glad I've got the studded tyres on the bike! VID_20231116_104705.3gp

Apparently there is a film from 1930 called:

The Terminator

Quite a nice day here today. Bit of sun in the morning, which makes a bloody change as it's persistently drizzled for about two weeks now! But at least no storms or torrential rain. It's just a bit miserable.

Haha! I am pretty much the only one in the village still cycling outdoors now. Everyone else has just gone onto the indoor trainers. I cycled down to minus 16c last winter, but that created technical issues. The Garmin shut off and I had two spokes snap. I've self imposed a minus 10c limit this year. If it's colder than that, I'll just take the car! 😄

Been pretty dismal here of late. Not the kind of bad weather that stops you doing anything, but rather persistently grey with drizzle. 2-8c generally. Looking forward to winter and it becoming properly cold.

First ride to work this morning on studded tyres. 0c and a light dusting of snow. To warm up tomorrow.

I'm glad today for a day off. The road is lightly glazed in ice, minus 1c. Chance of snow later today. I shall be spending some of my time today sorting out my two winter commuting bikes with studded tyres (one for road, one for gravel).

Some truly savage weather coming for Scotland tomorrow. The area around Dundee, Montrose, Forfar is in line for an absolute beating, both in terms of wind and rain. Stay safe folks.

Generally very pleasant autumn weather here. Frosts on some of the mornings, and a bit breezy sometimes. Minimal rain. The autumn colours are stunning. The maples all seem to go a spectacular shade of either gold or red. The aspens, birch and cherries have all turned now too. Makes for some wonderfully colourful cycle rides through the forest.

@Whoppa Choppa You're a recent addition to the forum, and your contributions seem to be largely limited to mocking and ridicule. If you have something that you'd like to add to the discussion, then by all means, please do. If you have nothing constructive to say and feel that the masacre of civilians is a laughing matter, then kindly f**k the hell off.

Sunrise at the sawmill. For scale, the forklift in the distance is about 13t and that's the middle sized kiln here.

How so? The Israelis have (since Israel's formation) been incrementally and systematically taking the Palestinians land and rights away from them. There are half a million Jewish settlers in the West Bank alone, in direct contravention of international law. As many have put it, it is an apartheid. In situations with such appalling human rights violations (spanning three generations now), it can hardly come as a surprise that extremism festers. Never to condone heinous acts on either side, it must be understood that the Palestinians have precious little power in this situation. Gaza is an open prison and it's residents treated without any respect whatsoever.

And that is fundamentally the root of the situation in the middle east. The Israelis cannot be surprised that Hamas acted without humanity (and I absolutely condemn Hamas' actions) when the Israelis have been systematically stripping the Palestinians of that very humanity for 75 years.

I will check what I can and can't photograph and post what I can. The site is 51 acres, about 200,000 cubic metres per annum finished timber. The mad thing is that they only take pine and spruce, 3 to 4.9m long and 12-18cm diameter, top end. There is so much supply here that they can be that specific. My line deals with destickering and resawing. I've been averaging 550-580 cubic metres a week through my machine. I spend my days keeping quite busy and listening to an awful lot of podcasts and Radio 4. Almost everything largely automated, but timber being timber, stuff goes wrong and timber gets jammed, twisted, breaks etc and human intervention is required.

It's a sawmill, but I guess at that scale, not dissimilar to a factory. The small machine forwarding didn't work out. Combination of factors really - landowners unwilling to pay much or anything extra for a small machine, massive boulders everywhere, payment on volume underbark, not over and excessively complicated due to there being so many product niches. I did a site on a large forwarder that I kid you not had 20 different product types. It's too chaotic for my somewhat rigid mind and whilst I barely found any mud anywhere (hurrah!), it proved to be complicated and stressful. The sawmill work is fantastic. For a start, it's 27.5km away, which I nearly always cycle. I have a variety of routes (road and gravel) which keep me entertained. It's well paid, there is loads of work and I'm told that I am (by a massive margin) the most productive operator of the resaw line that they've ever had. And the machine has been installed for 17 years. It properly appeals to my ADHD/Autistic tendencies as I've got about 10 different things to keep an eye on at any one time, 4 different control stations and I still find the time to sit on my ass and watch the computer monitors for half the time. I love the continual efficiency savings that can be made, tweaking the machine here and there to get an extra 1%, 2% and so on. None of the chaos of working in the forest, but I still cycle through the forest every day. Best of both worlds really. I'm also doing some work doing gravel cycle holiday guiding. I'm leading a couple of Swedish tours next summer. Get paid to ride my bike, stay in nice hotels and eat lots of good food. And we're also doing holiday lets, which proved to be popular this year and will (I expect) be more popular next year too.

I don't think that you can compare a house in Ilfracombe to within 30km of a country's capital. Infact, in terms of infrastructure and opportunities, there is more to go on here than in North Devon. There is a fair bit. Don't get me wrong, if you don't have the right skills, work won't be so straight forward, but if you're in either primary or secondary industry and you're good at it, you'll do well. Within 45 minutes of us, we have a major IKEA factory, Nordan windows and the global manufacturing hub of Volvo articulated haulers (employing 800 people). I have returned to an earlier line of work, and now lead the resaw line at a large exporting sawmill, which processes around 1000t of roundwood a day and exports 40% of that to the UK. Like any rural area, there are issues of course. There has been a massive influx of European migrants in recent years though, so the demographic has gotten younger and more diverse. Loads of Germans, Dutch, Danes, *insert just about any European nationality here*. Within 30km of Stockholms centre isn't a fair comparison. And why does it need to be the capital? We live 1hr from Växjö, a city the size of Exeter, 35 minutes from Vetlanda (a smaller city) and 25 minutes from Hultsfred, a large town. We have all we need. You can fly to the UK from Växjö. Driving here in winter is a doddle. You have a few days with dodgy snow (the wet, slushy stuff that everyone hates) but for the most part it's like driving at other times of year. Almost everyone has studded winter tyres and you just drive at 80% of your summer speed. I envy those people who have true freedom about where they can live due to remote working. That's a wonderful opportunity to have, and potentially quite exciting. Haha! If only. Slut means end and priser is prices. So Slutpris is the final price.