Big J
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Everything posted by Big J
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Not that I am remotely local, but I'm £350 a day plus VAT and mileage running a full hydraulic Woodmizer LT40. Two days work for those four trees I think.
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Average 6 days a week (usually work through one weekend and then get dragged away somewhere so I can't work the next!) and about 10-11 hours a day. So 60-66 hours a week on average I'd imagine. Not my plan to continue this long term, but it's what needs to be done at the moment.
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That is a sensational bit of Elm. The best I've seen I think, and I've seen a fair bit of Elm!
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I have loads of excellent quality yew that can be cut and dried to order if anyone is interested. 12ft lengths, straight, a few logs a bit pippy, no shake, up to 19 inches diameter. Sorry for the derail!
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You would think so, but with having moved earlier this year I've got practically nowt! I have a bit of sycamore and maple, but nothing kilned in the round. It's very difficult to do without it splitting and there is little demand for it. Jonathan
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That's a sad story Paul. Sorry to hear about that. I'm not saying that it wouldn't happen with our dog, but she is the daftest, softest, kindest animal you will ever meet. She is terrified of our cat (and is routinely chased by a friend's cat each time we go over - she whimpers and whines and usually won't come out the car) and when meeting a baby the other day, physically backed off a little when the 5 month old reached out to touch her. I don't take her anywhere near any sheep for the duration of lambing (and she is a numpty who won't jump anything over a foot high, so no danger of her jumping a fence!), avoid all shoot areas during the shooting season. The one thing I won't do though is unnecessarily confine her to the lead. It's not fair on her as all she wants to do is run. I do think that a lot of behavioural issues with dogs are caused by being on leads all the time - they feel they have to be defensively aggressive all the time as they cannot escape. Jonathan
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I have our Collie cross Katie off the lead 99% of the time. She is under control and the friendliest dog you will ever meet. I do object to the notion that all dogs should be on leads. At 2 years of age, Katie is fit as a flea and covers 3-4 times the distance we do on any given walk. We are regularly asked if she is a working dog and her condition is routinely complimented. This would not be the case if she was on the lead most of the time. It's all about training of the dog and owner control.
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Best days out are a combination of the two! Looking forward to heading back down your way again
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Getting depth guages right is very tricky. I do think that the chains for milling come supplied with the depth guages far too high. Case in point was me recently upgrading to a 50 inch bar. Pretty slow milling ensued, despite new chain but I put that down to the wider cut. Eventually, I thought, this is silly, and kept taking the depth guages down. This made a bigger difference to the speed of cut than anything. You want the saw to be just the right side of grabby (I don't really use a guide - just file down by eye) so that it does occassionally stall itself, but more often than not, it's pulling itself through the wood. Taking the depth guages down from standard to just the right side of grabby tripled the cutting rate in 40 inch oak. Love the extraction method btw! Jonathan
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You're telling me! Went for a quick swim in the Tweed yesterday in Upper Tweeddale near Dawyck Botanic gardens. Dog had spend the last hour in it, so I thought, how cold can it be? Well, I came out after a few minutes with an IOU slip from the river for my wedding vegetables!
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Very nice!
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Hi Mike, sorry about that - PM sent!
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Need a cutter just west of Edinburgh for long term work - how's your self selecting in hardwoods?
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Lovely stuff Steve - really nice!
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Hi David, You are welcome to carve at my yard. I've lots of space, lots of timber and a forklift to move stuff around with. Also got lots of sequoia coming in next week. Jonathan
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Hoppus measure: (in inches) 1/4 girth squared, times length, divided by 1728. Example. 36 inch diameter butt, 9ft long. 36 x 3.142 = 113.1 113.1 / 4 = 28.3 28.3 x 28.3 = 800.9 800.9 x 108 = 86497.2 (volume in cubic inches) 86497.2 / 1728 = 50.1 (volume in cubic foot accounting for sawing wastage)
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Alec, based on the hoppus foot measure of 25-27 hoppus foot per tonne (as in a one one tonne sawlog will contain 25-27 hoppus foot), my price is £3-6 a cubic foot, roughly. Had a very large oak (42 inch) butt that I paid three pounds a hoppus foot for this week. Lovely log, but too big to move and had to be chainsaw milled in situ. Had that been easily delivered to my yard, I'd have paid £5 a cube!
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It's the speed of log handling that is key, especially on larger logs. To load, rotate, account for taper with toe boards and clamp take about a minute with the LT40. With the Lumbermate this would take at least 7 or 8 minutes. Then each time you rotate the log, you have to start again. I can see their appeal for economically converting timber, but you have to have a lot of time on your hands, as well as a lot of energy!
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£75-150 a tonne, based on quality. Devaluing factors are length (as Alec says, 8ft is a touch short), shake (ring or radial), how clean it is and access. A knotty lump in a boggy field is almost worthless, whereas a clean length roadside is not.
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I think as much as anything, they've built it to a weight spec. It comes in at under 750kg, so towable on any licence. There just isn't enough steel in that to be rigid!
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I can speak only for my experiences, and I should stress that I am in no way set on Woodmizer (stop gap mill). However, the main thing that the Lumbermate did was set me on a hydraulic mill. Hydraulic log handling, as well as powered feed is the key to productivity. On the topic of build quality, I found the headrig on the Lumbermate to be fine (bar the unsolved issues causing a band breakage every two hours of cutting) but the track was very flimsy.
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I didn't have very good experiences with one that was kindly lent to me. I found the quality of the cut to be poor and it blew bands with a frightening regularity. Also, compared to the woodmizer, it's about 5 times slower.
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Just search ebay or the like for a hygrometer. You want a remote one so that you can monitor it from the outside.
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Wider bands certainly appeal but they are costly. That's the beauty of narrow band mills - if you demolish a band on metal, it's £20 to replace. The time that I'm spending on the woodmizer is certainly informing my choice as to what I want to get when I replace it. I do think that I will be as fixated on width of cut as before - I think that 36 inches would suffice. The difficulty with monster boards is that they are difficult to handle, difficult to stack, and 95% of my customers would only rip it up the middle anyway. I would certainly choose a less complicated machine that the woodmizer, with less electrics. Either way, I'm 56 hours into my Woodmizer experience. I intend to keep it for about a year, so it's giving me plenty of time to make up my mind about it's replacement. I might even apply for a grant myself. Jonathan
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Good luck with it. Make sure not to disk a potential sawlog. You'll have sawmillers after your bloody otherwise!
