Big J

If I towed a 2.4m wide sawmill down them they'd be wider once I passed through 😄

Looks superb out in the open like that. Good job you don't have it down here though. With the width of it and the tail swing, you'd be getting into a world of trouble on the back lanes in Devon 😄

No, unfortunately not. It's very close to Minehead and there isn't any space, nor is the stand large enough. We're getting the job done as quickly as possible and the bridleway will get polished when we leave.

There's just no other way of getting the timber out. I've spent almost 18 months exploring the alternatives. Fortunately, the very deep flood water (a regular occurrence - not actually my fault) means that there is no way to get through, so most people aren't bothering to walk into the woods.

We're on a thinning site near Minehead at the moment with a long and very tight extraction route. 600-700t to come through this bridleway. It's slow going 4-5t at a time. It hasn't been helped by the vast amount of rain we had this week, which has filled the bridleway with 400mm of floodwater.

Fire is on again this morning. The logs are starting to feel a little damp in the store too (not from being rained on, I should say). 85mm of rain here this week.

I was just about to message you too 😄

Hi all, We're a man down for the next couple of weeks on a softwood site at Minehead (Somerset) and need an experienced softwood cutter for douglas fir, larch and some spruce. Nothing especially large or difficult, but the stand is on a slope so experience is required. I realise it's very short notice, but excellent rates of pay. Please message if you can help out

Speaking to a Met office forecaster friend this morning, the weather situation of the past 8 weeks or so has been caused by a stubbornly persistent Greenland High, which has pushed the jet stream way to the south. In the last week or two, the High has moved off to the NW slightly, allowing a trough to develop across the south of the UK, bringing back an Atlantic influence, albeit with temperatures well below average. I love cold weather, but the heavy rain is horrendous. My wife was just out in the garden briefly with my younger daughter trying to plant sunflowers, but it's just started torrentially raining again and they've legged it back inside.

Same here. I can't even remember it ever being this cold in spring in Scotland. I'm working at Minehead at the moment, and the constant rain and 9c really makes you feel like it's November.

Just up, living room is 17c and the fire is lit. That'll get it up to about 21c and we'll perhaps light it again once this evening. The average temperature outside is only 6c at the moment, so it's unrealistic not to have some form of heating.

Another thing worth noting (when it comes to the debate of old versus new) is that the AV systems and fumes are so much more bearable with the newer generation of saws. I remember stepping up from a MS260 to a 550XP, and as well as gaining a chunk of power, my hands were in much better shape after a day of cutting. I always thought that the best policy for saws (if you're using them full time in forestry) is to hammer them for 9-12 months and then flog them on eBay and replace. You'll get 2/3 or 3/4 what you paid for them new, avoid those major mechanical issues that happen at that sort of hour count (1500hrs I'd guess) and get a nice shiny new saw to cover in sitka sap

I guess it's a trade off for performance against durability. If you're a commercial cutter, being paid by the tonne, you're only expecting to get 18 months out of a saw, realistically. If that saw allows you to cut an extra tonne every day, 45 weeks a year, you've earned just over £5k more (assuming you're being paid £15/t). That pays for a great many saws and it's undeniable that new saws are a lot faster than their forebears.

Grows far too fast for quality. For instance, there is a massive difference between the western red cedar grown here in Devon and the cedar I've cut in Morayshire. The growing season is too long, and in some instances, they never stop growing. Scandinavian trees have a clearly defined season of growth, with fairly hot summers and almost constant daylight. On the flipside, they also have a sustained period of inactivity each year during winter. Additionally, the constant wind that the UK is subjected to causes the trees to pack on a lot of reactionary growth, meaning they are much girthier for their height than their European and Scandinavian counterparts. This reactionary growth is full of tension. I think it was nearly 10 years ago now that they downrated UK growth sitka so that it cannot achieve a structural rating in excess of C16. Don't get me wrong, with the amount of eucalyptus I plant, I'm entirely in favour of having some fast grown crops, but we could do with a bit more high end softwood in this country.

Roadside timber prices are a bit nutty at the moment for log. Daft really considering the generally low quality of UK grown softwood. I was passing a builders supply today in Cullompton and noticed that they had a pack of timber in from Vida. They're a Swedish company - I passed one of their mills in October near Eksjö. It's absolutely enormous. When you consider that their roadside prices of excellent, slow grown log is only about 70% of what ours is, it's no wonder it's economical to ship it into the UK as a competitor for UK grown products.

£2500 a cubic metre including VAT, exactly. Utter greed. Decent quality larch is about £100/t delivered in at the moment. Recovery rate is 0.55 (factoring in the tonne to cubic metre ratios) when cutting premium, no sapwood cladding from good quality logs. So you need £181 worth of raw material to produce a cube of finished product. Commercial mills will covert the logs for about £70 a cubic metre, kiln dry it more or less for free (on account of burning waste wood products and being RHI supported) and then grading and planing double the cost. So £500/cubic metre. That's what I'd expect the wholesale price from a major mill to be. Costs are obviously much higher for small mills, but there is no scenario in which £2500/cubic metre is justifiable. That's getting on for kiln dried walnut prices.

Board foot is a very obscure way of measuring Andy. It's either cubic foot, cubic metre or linear metre. I'd be looking at £18/cubic foot for straight edged, rough sawn and £30/cubic foot for PAR (planed all round). More than that isn't justifiable.

The fire is on morning and night, and sometimes through the day too. The average temperature so far for us this month (averaging day and night) is only 8.4c. It's very cold for this time of year. We've got some lovely spruce with a bit of douglas, which was really intended for next winter. It was felled May last year, processed in late October and stacked outside, not under cover for the entirety of winter. Due to the dry, cold spring, it's sat at 18-21% MC, despite the logs being a fair size (50-60cm). I've honestly never burned hotter burning wood - I've a well sealed stove and it's sometimes a struggle to keep the temperature in the normal operating zone (according to the flue thermometer). It burns so much hotter than the ash we did most of winter on. Much, much better.

No, that's an insane price. Almost £100 a cubic foot. I'd be looking at £18/cubic foot for rough sawn cladding. That equates to £1.85 per linear metre.

I do not envy any of you having to sign up to this shitshow bureaucratic nonsense. Firewood is already overpriced to the point of being unaffordable as a source of primary heating. I don't mean that as a slight to any producer - we have poor quality trees, in small, difficult to manage blocks, a crappy transport infrastructure, difficult climate for drying and idiot customers. I don't know how any of you manage to make a business out of it without working yourself into an early grave, and I doff my hat to you. Regardless, this whole Woodsure scheme isn't going to have any effect on particulate matter in the air at all. Domestic firewood users burn so little timber in the scheme of things that even if the scheme were to work, it's hardly going to make a difference. We just finished burning off brash on a site we recently clearfelled. I hate burning brash, but on this site we had no choice. Far too soft to send a mulcher in and impossible to windrow due to the aforementioned boggy ground. So we made up 11 large stacks. It'd take me a lifetime of fulltime burning to get through the volume of timber we burned off. But it's entirely legal and something I'd not rush to repeat. I do have one firewood customer who is in the process of being reamed by Woodsure as we speak. They seem keen to get started penalising producers.

It's a tough call. I appreciate you taking the time to fully explain your position too - it makes for interesting reading and I agree for the most part. Running a small harvesting company, I tend to find that you get what you pay for. I pay my cutters £20/hr (self employed) and their output is such that they are markedly cheaper than one chap that I use occasionally who I pay about £13/hr. That guy brought a cutter with him for a job we did last month and I had to say that I couldn't pay him more than £80 a day for the 2 days he did, given how slow he was. For me with my work, it all comes down to production speed. A cutter on £200 a day producing 20 tonnes of product is much cheaper than a cutter on £120 a day producing 7 tonnes a day. The chasm between the fastest and slowest is even more extreme than that. I've had many more cutters I've ditched after a trial week than I've kept. When I was cutting, in 40 year old hardwood (I spent three years cutting on the same estate) there wasn't anyone that could keep up with me, but that's almost 10 years ago now and I'm far too broken to cut full time now. My limited experience with tree surgery is that it's a lot more cutthroat, in terms of wages. The proprietors have less work ahead of them than forestry contractors and seem to make more of an effort to keep costs down to keep a kitty in case of a downturn in work. It's also a lot less skilled, until you get into climbing. I'd suggest getting your CS30-31 and getting into forestry (depending on where you are in the country). Once you're experienced and productive, you'll be a rare breed and able to ask for £200/day. Doing more technical work (like felling for a skyline, felling outsiders or chucking trees at harvesters) up in remote parts of Scotland can command up to £300 a day. Just my thoughts.

I seen countless plantations where every single oak, sycamore, beech, maple and birch is knobbled. I've even seen ash stripped. Hectares of completely pointless planting. They'll never amount to anything more scrub.

Adjacent to the block we were working in was a small copse of mature beech. Over 100 years old. Looking at the canopies, you can almost tell the exact point where the greys moved in. They are perfect trees to an exact point, and then the canopies above that point was gnarled and twisted. I can say with absolute certainty that planting broadleaves anywhere in a woodland setting our part of the country is pointless without extremely thorough control measures. It's worse than pointless. It's spending £3.60 (plus VAT) on creating hardwood bushes and a future plastic waste problem. Anyone fancy crawling through a bramble thicket in 15 years to extract 2000 plastic tubes per hectare from underneath oak bushes with only 1.3m of straight stem before stag heading?

Is there anyone here who would consider looking after a recently planted site near to Chard? Plenty of roe deer and the landowners are very keen to have their numbers reduced. Please message if you can help. All necessary insurances and certificates are needed please.