Big J

Thank you for a good chuckle!

One of my favourite timbers certainly. On any given day thinning, you'll knock out 2-3 tonnes more in sycamore than beech or oak because it's generally so clean and straight. Burns hot and slowly, dries quickly and splits easily - what more do you need?

346xp. It will handle the larger trees when required, but is perfect for coppice work.

I keep meaning to take pictures of it, but there is an enormous 200 year old beech up on an estate near Aviemore my friend lives on. It has two completely different leaves growing from it, often on the same branch. One is conventional beech leaves, the other not unlike the ones in the photos above, albeit narrower. Very strange indeed.

My first saw for milling was an oldish 088 with a 36 inch bar from ebay for £410. Great saw, ran without any issues, sold for the same as I paid for it. I had two 088s, so one went, but I've also got a Makita DCS7901 now which isn't used for milling, but I would imagine would be fine cutting up to about 20 inch timber. Jonathan

I had two snap in fairly quick succession during the intense cold last winter. Apparently due to metal being more brittle at very low temperatures. Other than that, I think I've only ever had two other chains snap, one milling and one other. Jonathan

Very much agreed. Astonishing how what's actually an interesting piece of (albeit local interest) news is turned into total human interest clap trap. I wish newspapers would report the news and keep the opinion bloody separate.

One of the first jobs I did when I went self employed was building a large shed (12 by 8 as it happened) for our old neighbours. Like everything I ever build, it was hugely over engineered and I make about £1.50 an hour on it! That will teach me to make every bit from scratch without the proper tools. I didn't work to a plan though - my wife is an architect, drew out lovely plans and a cutting list, but personally I work much better when it's all in my head. Best advice for building it is get a woodmizer in for a day or half day to mill up some of the drier logs in your yard and go from there. Douglas fir, Larch, Oak, Sweet Chestnut are best for cladding, and just about anything else is fine for non exposed stuff. Looking forward to seeing the result! Jonathan

At the very start of my chainsawing career I bought a throwaway electric chainsaw from B and Q and blew up the motor within a couple of hours. Took it back, got another, same thing happened. That's the limit of my experience with electric saws! Would a hydraulic saw be an option?

I second that. Went to see an 044 I'd bought on Ebay and very glad I did. It was very hard to start, idled like a tractor and had significantly less power than my 346xp (should have bags more, being 70cc instead of 50cc). Jonathan

That's just stunning flames!

I think that for the money required to get a good electric chainsaw, you are as well to buy a good petrol one instead. That way, you have the versatility of a completely portable saw combined with not tripping over cables in the yard. For reference, the 2.2kw Stihl electric chainsaw retails at £550 and the MS241 (same kw output) retails at £624. With the fact that you would probably get a bigger discount with the petrol saws (more turnover of stock), the difference would be very little. But get a 346xp instead of the Stihl!

Nice reliable saw the MS260 - used to have one, but decided to replace it with a 346xp (with a brief spell of MS361 ownership - it had the easy chain tensioner which drove me nuts). My best advice is stick with pro saws. For my wife to learn on, I bought a little MS181 the other week. I used it for about 30 minutes before becoming so frustrated with it I took it back. When you get used to the performance of a professional saw, domestic machines are appalling. It's like getting Schumacher to do Silverstone in a 911 instead of his F1 car.

I'll speak to him now and get back to you. Could you message me your telephone number please? Jonathan

I've got an excellent cutter/groundie restarting with me at the end of the month for three days a week. He's free two days a week if you want to share!

Where are you Tim? £300-900 depending on quality and availability as part of a larger package (less economical to pick up single logs). Jonathan

What do you call a singing computer? A Dell.

Pack the hollow with C4 and jobs a good un! In my fairly limited experience felling hollow beech, a shallowish gob cut to maintain as much hinge as possible and then proceed to fell as usual. I found it amusing that it would have been possible to fell the 3ft diameter tree I did with a 200T!

I don't mean to be abrupt, but I do think that the need for a calculator to calculate something as simple as mpg is indicative of society getting more stupid. If you're at the pump and want to know your mpg: 1) Divide the litres you put in to fill it by 4.54 for gallons. 2) Divide distance on the previous tank by the number of gallons. = answer in mpg Jonathan

I was having an interesting discussion with a friend regarding this yesterday. He was of the opinion that it was unimportant compared to the thousands of people who have lost their lives since then in Iraq/Afghanistan. I would argue that perhaps in the scheme of things it's not as serious as those wars, but that each personal tragedy is just that. The deaths of the near 3000 people on that day directly affected millions of people in a way that America has never seen before. Don't forget that with the exception of Pearl Harbour in 1941, America has only fought overseas wars, with no direct impact on home soil since the American Civil war. In 2001, I was harsher in terms of holding the occupants of the twin towers at least partly responsible for their fate. However, older, (hopefully) wiser and less extreme in these matters, I feel nothing but sorrow and empathy for those that lost their loved ones. There are a series of videos of individuals affected by 9/11 on the BBC news website. I'd recommend watching them - they are really quite moving. The worst affected and most selfless of all were the firefighters who rushed into the building when everyone else was rushing to escape. In that series of videos, there is one about a photographer appointed by the Fire Department to document the search for remains that followed in the weeks and months after the attacks. He said that he was confronted on one occasion by a firefighter who said: "I don't care if you are authorised to be here, I don't want you here. I lost 60 friends on 9/11" I can't imagine the loss that he suffered, let alone having to spend months searching for my friends. In response to the original question, I'll most likely raise a glass on Sunday with a moment's silence.

85 hoppus foot by my calculations, so £425 to £595 pounds. Kiln dried, in England, you've got £3400 there.

Tight bastard! Given what the final value of the stem is once milled, I reckon £5-7 a hoppus foot is a fair price. Lord knows you would be paying way north of that if you were to approach a timber dealer such as AJ Scotts or Chantlers. Elm is a rapidly vanishing resource - snap it up chaps!

I got my iPad 1 just before the launch of the iPad 2. Consequently, they were quite cheap - I paid £75 for it and £20 a month for two years. Useful bit of kit - means that I don't usually have to spend so much time at home at the end of the day responding to customer queries, as I've had time at lunch to do it. It's also a pain in the backside for what you can and can't do, but I would have one again. Jonathan

I was thinking about this yesterday, and I think we worked out that there have been about 6 days so far this year that you could classify as BBQ weather. On the up side, it's the first summer I've managed to work right through in chainsaw trousers without suffering from minor heatstroke!

I think that a lot of it comes down to the exchange rates