Big J

Lucky me! Wouldn't be a problem as my mum is near Derby. I'll come back to you if I need a tacho fitted

If your train weight is more that 3.5t and you are towing something that is for sale (their definition of hire and reward), you cannot be further than 50km from base. Same vehicle, same journey, same load and private use doesn't require a tacho. Utter bloody lunacy, if you ask me. Steve, appreciate where you are coming from, but I need a vehicle that can get down tight estate tracks and a 7.5t lorry just wouldn't cut it. Also need cruise control for the A9 and it's 100+ miles of average speed cameras. Jonathan

Having recently had a run in with VOSA towing a trailer further than 50km from home, a tachograph is needed for me to continue doing the work I do. It's not worth fitting one on the Navara (at £1400 cost) for the sake of the remaining 18 months of the lease and a crappy 2.8t towing capacity. So, two options, Ranger or D-Max. Both tow 3.5t, which is the key thing. Pros and cons are as follows: D-Max has longer warranty but Ford parts are cheaper. D-Max better on fuel. Ranger can be factory fitted with a tacho for £600 (spread over the course of the lease). D-Max requires upfront £1400 installation cost. I've been warned against a Ranger by one person, but reading older threads here on the forum, the D-Max seems to have a lot of problems with the DPF filter. So, if you were in my position, what would you get? I tow a lot and I tow heavy. I use it off road a reasonable amount, often towing. 20,000 miles a year. All advice appreciated.

Not exactly sure really. Must be down to the cellular structure - ash has very long fibres too, and perhaps doesn't lose moisture as well through sawn faces. I slabbed beech last year at 2.25" in February. By October it was 18% moisture content. Only softwood will dry quicker than that.

Beech is one of the easiest and quickest timbers to dry. Ash on the other hand - takes ages to come down from it's measly 37% MC start point.

True, there is certainly more air flow. To use the reference of drying one's washing - how often can you actually get your washing dry outside in winter? Additionally, humidity usually rises in the hours of darkness as the temperature drops and dew point is reached. Winter has many more hours of darkness and far fewer hours where the air has any capacity to hold water.

Not possible in winter. Air simply cannot carry enough moisture to strip enough from green timber in winter. This is why high value hardwoods are cut in winter as they have a very slow start in terms of drying. For instance, average temperature and humidity in say (December, January, February), the Midlands is about 7 celcius and 80% humidity. At those stats, each cubic metre of air can only carry 0.6g per cubic metre before reaching saturation point. Conversely, a cubic metre of air in summer (20c average temp, 60% average humidity) can carry 10.06g of water (or 16.77 times as much). I've got firewood dry in about 3-4 months in crates in my lower barn in the height of summer. In winter, I often find that my air dried sawn timber will go up in MC to around 22%, from 17% in summer. Jonathan

Wimmer (the Rolls Royce of mobile sawmills) do one with a crane, but I have no idea what it weighs!

Good thread! Cutting some wheatley Elm today. Nice stuff - clean and straight grained. Easy to cut, easy to dry. Will be kilned and sent out in less than three weeks.

sawmill mobile manufacturing co | eBay A song at that price, only a day left to go.

An example: It's like saying to an orthodox Jew that you just had an awesome bacon sandwich.

I only said that as friendly advice from someone who has been in the same position.

I'm going to try to say this without sounding like a patronising cock... The combative attitude just doesn't work with trying to persuade people of your cause. As someone who was militantly vegan for nearly a decade, it grates on me, so imagine how it sounds to the uninitiated. Fundamentally, if you are working in arboriculture you cannot be ethically consistent as a vegan. Let's presume you work in forestry - if you are felling you will be (inadvertently obviously) destroying birds nests and temporarily disrupting habitat. Your industry requires the control of certain pest species - squirrels, deer, rabbits etc. Without that control, all efforts on your part are in vain and the woodland suffers terribly. This is the conundrum I came up against. It's conundrums like this that present themselves time and time again throughout life. Living as a dietary vegan, you will reduce your impact on animal suffering 99%. Being puritanical about that final 1% will have a severely detrimental effect on your life, and you will make a pariah of yourself. I am talking from personal experience. I now consume animal products that have been humanely and sustainably sourced - and whilst I do not kid myself that I have reduced my environmental impact (quite the opposite I'm sure), I am much much happier and am ethically consistent.

Lads, please don't take the piss. Being vegan is a perfectly ethically justifiable position, one that is far more ethically consistent than being vegetarian. There is an issue for vegans in arboriculture because there are no non-leather boots. I remember it being a real issue for me - I was still vegan for about the first 18 months of my tree work. In the end I bought a good pair of leather boots because there was no other option, and that is what it comes down to. If you want good, comfortable (and safe) footwear for chainsaw work, you have to buy leather boots. Mark, it would help your case if you weren't quite so evangelical about your veganism. I found when I was vegan that I was able to convert more people to vegetarianism/veganism by having quite moderate and non-judgemental discussions rather than making controversial statements. In the end, I decided to cease to be vegan as whilst it's an ideal way of feeding people in a city, it's not terribly sustainable in rural Scotland.

I was vegan for about 8 years (quite passionately so). Moving to the countryside and working in forestry, I became unable to justify my position, so no longer vegan. There are no vegan chainsaw boots. Only wellies, which are awful. The best I can suggest is buy a really good pair of leather boots so that they last as long as possible. Jonathan

Heading towards Autumn, I thought that this was going be a completely different thread:

Excellent, thanks for taking the time to relay your experiences. Tom D's brother has one, and isn't too far away, so I'll go see that and make up my mind. I think it's pretty much made up anyway!

I'm not too concerned - they do seem to be a good deal easier to turn going forwards, so perhaps the long reverses won't be necessary any longer. It's a small trade off for long distance towing comfort. I'll only be able to bring a normal trailer back as I'm getting the smallest of the bogie trailers (5x2x2). Looks like a local cabinet maker wants a curtain sider too. Happy to be guinea pig though - I like the weird and unusual, and so far (with my sawmill) it's worked out very well.

I'm certainly seriously considering it. I'm still waiting for someone to give me a good reason not to go for it! It is about a grand more expensive, but given that I must tow 10000 miles a year, that is money well spent as far as I'm concerned. I think that I will pick up the reversing of it fairly quickly - I took to normal trailer reversing quite well. Rover - how is it for simple, long, straight reversing? So for instance, if you've gone nose into somewhere and cannot turn around.

That does look seriously tempting. A 5m trailer, with complete curtain side top and spare wheel is £5250 including VAT. 2.5t load capacity and no weight on the tow hitch is very tempting. I'll speak to my German uncle about it and see what he says.

It's the distance between the two axles that concerns me - on a 5m bed, there would be about 4m between the axles. If you were going over a large bump, would that not ground out? I ask only because there is a specific flood prevention dyke I can get over in the Navara (short wheel base) and can't in the LDV Maxus (long wheel base). Jonathan

Just occurred to me that I wouldn't be able to have a bogie trailer as it would get stuck off road, grounding out in the middle over anything other than a very mild hump.

Seen that video before, but never really appreciated that the role the trailer in it. Hmmmm, food for thought.

All interesting points. I had figured the sail effect would be significant, but I wouldn't have it mounted on all the time. Very interested to know how easy the turntable trailers are to reverse. I have to do some pretty tight reversing on a regular basis, so it would be a worry.

Servicing should be as straight forward as any other trailer and spares could be quite quickly ordered online or over the phone? I speak reasonable German.