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Big J

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Everything posted by Big J

  1. I've always adored all things water/fish. Learnt to walk and promptly walked into a pond apparently. I go fishing, wild swim, have a large aquarium and a fairly large pond. Watching fish is meditative for me. My future pond would be something akin to this, perhaps without the summer house over the water:
  2. That's a wonderful pond there Kenty. How long has it been established? Does it have filtration as well? I've a grand plan (which involves the building of a house as well) to dig a mammoth pond in two years, which would serve the purpose of natural swimming pool, relatively lightly stocked koi pond and largely separated nature area. Total size would be in the region of 20x15m, but it depends rather on us emigrating as the land is too expensive here and the weather is too poor.
  3. I must admit that I was slightly annoyed that the thread the other day about the Nice attacks was deleted. I was simply trying to point out the entirely destructive nature of near enough all religion, and bingo bango, thread gone!
  4. I should say that the pond is only 3 months old, so not yet fully established.
  5. Well sadly not as deep as I'd like. Hit bedrock early on in the dig, which thankfully sloped away towards one end. With building up the banking, I managed to get 32 inches at the deep side. Impossible to go deeper - solid rock. I don't think that it will be an issue though as our winters are unbearably mild here - only about 1.5 miles from the coast and rarely get colder than minus 5-7 here. This is what it looks like at present: The wild flower mix is really starting to take off around the edge. I fully back filled the pond with soil to allow the plants to spread, but clarity can be a bit poor at times (usually 12 inches, but generally improving). At 25 years old, your Orfe must be quite a specimen! Had orfe as a kid, but they always seemed to like jumping out of the (small) pond. Seem to have gone out of fashion these days. Don't often see them.
  6. Very nice indeed
  7. I have a new pond, and the first fish pond since I was a kid. Not a koi pond as such (15ft diameter, heavily planted) but 16 koi (as well as 3 mirror carp, 3 roach, 2 rudd, 3 perch, a tench and about 3000 sticklebacks) in it nevertheless. No spawning yet though. When do your's usually spawn? Coarse fish are usually March to July, in my experience.
  8. Can recommend both Treevolution (they did my training) and HW (Stephen Hailes is a top chap). I haven't dealt with the Forestry college, so cannot comment personally.
  9. It is not worth the effort. The proportion of heartwood is so small that the only thing you'll get in the heartwood is heart shake.
  10. Nonsense. Hindu caste system, Jewish oppression of Palestinians in Israel, and countless conflicts through time and now resultant from Christian extremism. Take northern Ireland - a conflict based on two groups of people ascribing to two marginally different versions of the same fairytale.
  11. Just terrible. Finding it quite upsetting, the idea of people just going about their normal lives with the ever present threat of being brutally murdered simply because they live in a country that has people that believe in all sorts of different flying spaghetti monsters. Until religion is eradicated, I don't think humans can ever claim to be truly civilised. It will always cause division and hatred and the sooner it succumbs to it's own idiocy the better.
  12. That is lovely, and there aren't many chainsaw carvings I like.
  13. Varios have a huge capacity. The chassis cab has an unladen weight of less than 3.5t, so will carry over 4. Obviously the chip box will cut into that, but I reckon it's still good for 3.
  14. That is ruddy stunning. A bargain compared to many alternatives too
  15. It's not even worth that once milled! Plus, does anyone else really want to mill yew that been drying for 8 years? Like effing concrete!
  16. I keep an eye on weather in Germany and Sweden and it's almost always better - particularly Germany. Less wind, fewer days with precipitation, less cloud and higher temperatures at this time of year. They do get some mad weather though, like the lightening strikes at the music festival earlier in summer than hospitalised people. The price of living in a country with no extremely bad weather is that we rarely get good weather!
  17. I'm in Edinburgh and have kiln dried elm, ash, beech and poplar. Air dried oak, beech and ash. Can mill anything to order - have about 350 tonnes of various timber in the yard at the moment.
  18. Big J

    Pain

    Daft thing is the cheapest I've found it for here is £33. In Germany, hundreds of miles from where it is distilled, it's £24. Why the hell is that?!
  19. Very nice! I have four forklifts, so you could call me an aficionado
  20. Big J

    Pain

    Laphroaig Quarter Cask.
  21. Possibly, and time will tell. I doubt we'll use the deck very much, it's more for decoration! That being said, I do have one landscaper who is taking quite a lot of the stuff at this specification. The joists are screws to 4x2 posts that are knocked 250mm into the ground. The spacing between the posts is only 700mm so there is no bounce in the deck (500mm spacing on the joists). I cowboy these things, but get away with it by using swanky timber so no one notices the half arsed construction effort!
  22. Yes and no! We've a problem with nettles in our garden and as it was a conifer I took down, the ground is just completely bare under where the tree was. I figures a deck would hide the stump, hide the bare earth and hopefully suppress the nettles. It did cost me all of about £3 in screws to put in as well!
  23. I tried to thank him with a stack of fencing for his croft, but he said he believed in karma and was happy to help. Top bloke! So left the guys on the frame saw this morning and in 3 hours they got 30 logs through it. Great quality of cut and no issues. That is about 200 odd boards at 160x25x3800 with 30-50 boards to be edged to 80mm. Happy with the performance, much quicker than the bandsaw mill and no issues with unevenly cut boards because the tension in the log is released all in one go.
  24. A very experienced electrician/woodworker with machine experience friend (who was as stumped as me) said that at least we all learnt something! I feel much more confident on three phase electrics now
  25. FIXED! Wooooooo! Many, many thanks to Steve (roys) for being the fresh pair of eyes on the machine. We did the full range of electrical tests again, nothing came up. In the end it came down to belt tension. The first thing I checked when it wasn't running right was the belt tension and it was the first thing I adjusted. I did tighten it a fair bit in the first instance, but clearly not enough. Many, many turns of the tensioning bolt later, it's roaring through the logs. It sounds bloody stupid to have missed it, but over half a dozen of us, mostly more qualified and more experienced with machines than me, didn't pick up on it. Nor did the factory. I just expected the belt tension to be somewhere in the ballpark of correct when it came from the factory. Either way, thanks again to Steve and we're on our way to getting through the 70 odd tonnes waiting to go through it. J

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