Big J

An apple. Squeal little piggy, and all that! The right side of 2m tall ?

If you look very carefully, you might just see my phone on the tractor wheel just ahead of me running it over! ?

I suppose it depends on the terrain you're towing in. I've 160hp with my Sprinter and on Devon hills it is at times painful. The large-capacity diesels offered in some of the American pickups seem to have few issues, and handle high mileages and heavy loads well. They are a lot of money in the UK now though with the terrible exchange rate. As regards the Raptor, not being able to reclaim circa £8k in VAT is a biggie, and there are much, much better 4x4s out there if you are going to use it domestically for that kind of money.

A profoundly silly truck. I can't figure out who it's aimed at because it's lowered load capacity means you can't claim the VAT back, and the towing capacity drops too. 213hp isn't that much for a pickup, and if you were spending £50k, you'd just get an F150/F250, especially if you lived somewhere where you drove on the right.

My cousin has a large dead sequoia in the garden that is in need of removal and milling. 28m heigh, roughly and about 2m dbh. It's to be climbed and stripped, dropped in full length, firewood cut to length and logs milled (Lucas mill) into dimensioned timber with a few slabs. Anyone interested?

We have a stroke processing head on our Kranman P25B processor. It's quite quick, but quicker than most of the ones that I've seen for excavators on account of the 103cm stroke. The heads for excavators tend to be 50cm or so and seem painfully slow. Would you need such a large machine for harvesting such small trees?

No use to me, but I'd be curious to see the planks, if indeed they are milled. Substantial sticks.

Tendons are most of the way healed, but it takes ages. I'm fragile and have a tendency to overdo it. A bad combination.

I was! Then overdid it and hurt tendons in my elbows. Cubital tunnel syndrome I believe. That being said, my back is still a lot better than it was before my 6-8 months back at the gym. Lost most of the muscle I regained, and really need to get back to it but struggle for time and motivation.

If it's clean, I might have a contact for it up near the Lake of Menteith. Boat skin

According to the Netatmo network of online weather stations, Cullompton (where we live) was the hottest place today in the UK at 30.8c. Not too unpleasant though as we had a strong breeze. The 12ft paddling pool is out now, and having only filled it with spring water this morning, it got up to 22c this evening and the girls were delighted. A few degrees cooler wouldn't go amiss though as it's hard to work in 30c.

Not really, no. Generally a bit too big I think. I'll reexamine them again with hurleys in mind. I always forget to consider the hurleys.

Some photos of the Poplar

It's Scots pine, rather than Scotch. It can be very dense, and the high resin content will slow the cut down too. 2.5 tanks is too much though. Which powerhead are you running on the mill? On a 38" wide cut it would want to be either a 3120XP or an MS880.

And quite right Stubby. It is the only way I'll learn! ?

I stand corrected! I am sure that I knew that, but it's funny how things get contorted in your head

Lovely cabin Billhook. I work with Dan quite a lot these days. Sell him timber, he saws timber for me

One of the potential avenues for usage for poplar is low grade timber to form structural walls using a method called Brettstapel: http://www.brettstapel.org/Brettstapel/What_is_it.html My wife's old practice did two Brettstapel buildings in Scotland, and as well as being ecologically superb, it does make use of low-grade timber. I'm not precisely sure how poplar would perform in this scenario, but it's worth investigating. One thing that occured to me is that it could perhaps be used as part of a wall with a designed moisture gradient. As we all know, poplar is super hydroscopic, so potentially you build a timber cassette (essentially a SIPs panel) with poplar forming the inside wall and spruce on the outside. The poplar would suck excess moisture from the air inside the rooms for it to move through the wall outside. Just ideas, but I find it interesting!

Very interesting to hear. There is a random block of about 110 such poplar just by the motorway here. They will be an absolute pig to get out due to lack of access, so I've no idea why they were planted there. As I said before, at least with biomass there is a viable outlet for such timber now.

It might be worth having a conversation with the woodland officer to see what is threatening them down here. As far as I can tell, if it's vaguely tidy timber, chip is the bottom of the market down here. The fall back position if you will. I can't see that they'd turn it away in Kent at Sandwich.

There is a bloody pest/disease for every species! Thanks for the input though. No issue shifting it for biomass here, I don't think.

That's very helpful. Thanks for the link. I'll study it with more detail later this evening. The site is clay based, but surprisingly dry. I'd have to compare the soil maps for there and around home for comparison. Poplar just seems to do really well around here - I've seen some true monsters.

These are my rough calculations for this particular strain of poplar (I reserve the right to admit that my figures are completely out if indeed they are completely out!) : Planted at 2000/hectare (4 hectares) 10% loss on planting (1800/h) First thin at 7 years. Trees 0.25 cubic metres, racks at 1 in 7 put in. 257 cubic metres, around £3k profit. (1543 trees/h) 2nd thin at 10 years. Trees at 0.5 cubic metres, step rack 3/4. 515 cubic metres, around £10k profit. (1286 trees/h) 3rd thin at 13 years. Trees at 0.75 cubic metres. Selective, 1 in 4. 964 cubic metres, around £22k profit (964 trees/h) 4th thin at 16 years. Trees at 1 cubic metre. Selective, 1 in 3. 1273 cubic metres, around £32k profit (636 trees/h) 5th thin at 19 years. Trees at 1.25 cubic metres. Selective, 1 in 3. 1050 cubic metres, around £26k profit (420 trees/h) 6th thin at 22 years. Trees at 1.5 cubic metres. Selective, 1 in 3. 694 cubic metres, around £17k profit (277 trees/h) Clearfell at 25 years. Trees at 2 cubic metres. 2216 cubic metres. £55k profit. That's with a harvesting cost of about £30/t on the first thinning, reducing to £25 ish on second and then £20/t thereafter. The figures are fairly conservative as the 30-year-old poplar on this site are nearer 4 cube than 2. Profitable enterprise and if I was a landowner with 20 hectares of spare grazing, planting poplar would be something I'd seriously look into

That's just lunacy Murray. Why on earth isn't it being planted en-mass to supply the biomass market? My best calculations put it at about YC70 (yield class, so 70 cubic metres per hectare, per year), which is double the best softwood output. The vast majority of the trees I've seen in this compartment are harvester processable too. I just need to find a landowner willing to chuck a couple of acres of low-grade farmland at me so I can experiment!

It would be more valuable as part of a larger load. I'd say you'd get £60/t for it now if it was a full load of similar sticks. Plus haulage.