Big J

Hope she recovers quickly Gary. She's absolutely beautiful. We nearly lost our Collie when she was 3 to idiopathic aplastic pancytopenia. Again, extremely rare, usually fatal and expensive to treat. It's a complete shutdown of the bone marrow, so no platelets, white or red blood cells being produced. Several blood transfusions and a year of immunosuppressants and she was recovered. Betty looks like she's well on her way to recovery. I adore collies - intelligent idiots

I think from a tree surgery perspective, yes. A lot of people have excess cash at the moment on account of having been furloughed and having had their social extravagances curtailed. This, combined with the pressing desire to get socialising again, means that getting gardens tidied ahead of the rule of 6 outside coming back is a priority. Correspondingly, sales of garden furniture and such like have been huge. The pin that'll burst the bubble is that the economic reality of covid has yet to hit. Furlough is delaying hundreds of thousands (if not more) of redundancies, we're looking at a complete restructuring of how the country buys it's goods, with highstreets suffering an unprecedented shock. The legacy cost of the covid support measures is astronomical, and as soon as that reality hits home, non-essential spending (such as tree surgery) will be reduced. Just my 2 cents.

We're heading to Sweden next year and will be carrying on with forestry there. I like early thinning and light machine work, so I'll just focus on that. Where are you planning to go?

That does rather remind me of Arrested Development:

If it was so popular why did you fell it? 😄

Hahaha 😄 I just came across a page on Facebook that made me chortle, so thought I would share

I might have to inflict that one on my daughters 😄

It's a tough call. You don't have challenging terrain there at all, but lumps and bumps, rocks and such like can be difficult. One little obstacle like that can actually be worse than a steady climb. One option is the other drive configuration. The more common system in the UK is serial drive, so all four wheels on one side are effectively locked together. This means you have permanent 8 wheel drive and it's tough to spin out, as you'd need to lose traction on one complete side. I had parallel drive on mine, so each bogie was individually piped, meaning that if you lost traction on one pair of wheels, you'd come to a stop. This obviously limits traction to an extent, but I fitted a flow divider to mine, so I could effectively 'diff lock' the opposing pair of wheels. This eliminated 90% of the traction issues. What the parallel drive system has though is 4 wheel drive mode, where all drive went through the front wheels, which increased the speed to about 14km/h. The drive motors on mine were of differing sizes, so the front motors were slightly bigger than the back, meaning that it was front drive biased. This isn't a great idea as generally you need even amounts of drive front and back, and if anything, you want more drive on the back as the traction issues are almost always when you're fully loaded, and the weight will be largely over the back wheels. Give me a shout if you want to talk through any of it. I spent a long time fiddling the drive system on mine, and I've experience now of different drive systems on the Komatsu and Vimek.

I would be inclined to say that the larger motors would be best. The power output of the machines has dropped due to EU5 regs, so 24hp is all you have (I had 44hp on mine). As such, I'd go for power.

It's an old machine, no doubt. It'd still be cheap at twice the price though.

It's a harvester. Jesus that's cheap. I'd have had that off him for that price. Or more.

You seem to have a Vimek 606 in the background - what's the story?

If you see what I did, you're one up on me. My head is pounding and I can't think straight 😄

It was a bit mad today. I'm not entirely sure that my dog wanted to be out. She's on about 40 hours of walking a week at the moment, so she just takes it in her stride