Big J

I don't think it's necessarily just sharpening. It's just the inherent weakness of the system once you get onto longer bars. If you pop a 60 inch plus bar into a chainsaw mill, it will be easy to flex the bar 10mm up and down in the middle with your hand. Given that the forward momentum of the mill means an inevitable fractional forward tilt, the bar will be driven on a slightly downward trajectory. The longer the bar, the greater the flex. The only way I can see around this is a super rid mill frame with a bar tensioning system. An untensioned chainsaw bar of that length is a bit like running a bandsawmill with the tension at half. It'll run flat for a while, unless it hits something challenging and the deflect.

All the cheaper pickups seem to be going two ways. Smaller, weaker engines and more chrome and bling. Particularly the Hilux looks like someone has just glued bits of chrome effect plastic all over it. Looks ridiculous - what is wrong with understated? When you're looking at a machine that has a gross train weight of 7000kg, a 2 litre engine with 150-180bhp seems unwise. I'd much rather spend a bit more for something like an Amarok or an X Class. The X class is to be discontinued by the way.

I think I'd go Amarok. I was a passenger in a V6 a few months ago and it was smooth, fast and quiet. Test drove a 3.2l Ranger and it was slow, uncomfortable and the auto box was terrible. You can uprate the towing capacity to 3.5t on the Amarok with SV Tech.

It's more or less impossible to stop this on bars this length. It makes the cut much, much harder on the operator and machinery. It snaps chains, wears out sprockets rapidly and actually destroyed on almost new MS880 (which thankfully Stihl replaced). Wide cutting with chainsawmills was the final straw and I haven't touched a chainsawmill since. Up to about a 50" bar it's great, but beyond that you get bar sag. What is needed is a bar tensioning system to eliminate this.

What is the felling capacity Eddie?

That hasn't been my experience of Sweden (not to cast aspertions as regards yours). My brother in law lives in Lidköping, about 2 hours north of Gothenburg and it's very nice around there. Lovely countryside, nice houses, friendly people who seems to be happy. I'm happy to be down here in Devon, but just because I'm fairly content and an incomer shouldn't mean that I am prohibited from pointing out what is an obvious flaw in the transport network. I don't buy the charm argument. There is nothing charming about driving down a narrow lane with 10ft high green walls on both sides, never with more than a 50-100m line of sight, constantly having to hover over the brake pedal ready to do an emergency stop. Or having the passenger side of your car scratched to hell as you have to bury the vehicle in the hedge to allow another car to pass. It is logically flawed and no argument about charm, character, history or heritage can override that.

I don't see the correlation between improved infrastructure and negative impacts in terms of urbanisation, population increase and development. I refer back to my earlier comments regarding continental Europe and Scandinavia where they seem to manage to balance this. If you want to point fingers, square them up on the planners, who seem to think that allowing Class Q conversions of barns for rich yuppies who can afford to pay £250k for a ramshackle barn to convert into a swanky pad in the country, whilst making it genuinely hard for working people in rural industry to build their own places........as you say, that's another thread! Scotland's economy is hamstrung by other issues, including geographical distance and remoteness, social issues and land inequality (500 people own more than half of Scotland). Tourism would benefit hugely from improved transport connections. Devon and Cornwall could seamlessly absorb many more people with better infrastructure and the net effect would be that they were less noticed, as traffic jams would be fewer.

I can't wait for electric work vehicles. Just think of the torque!

Is that too much to ask?! ?

Apparently it was too hard to apply for compensation.

a) Productivity is a driver of employment and in order to improve living standards (which are depressed in some parts of the West Country), there needs to be better employment opportunities. Reducing inefficiency improves sustainability. b) I disagree. Population pressure is not the issue in the West Country. 19 century roads are. Almost all modern lorries (which have been the same width for decades) and tractors scarcely fit and the companies that run them are the prime drivers of the economy in the area. I accept that there is a cost, but as I said, just taking one hedge out rather than two would go some say to mitigate this. You highlighted the relative ecological deserts that are modern farms. I've stated before that in the thread about planning that they are almost all unprofitable without subsidy, so in a situation where they are neither ecologically sound or economically sustainable, why is it that we are so protective of farmland? We wouldn't be reduced to relying on hedges for biodiversity if there was a larger forestry industry.

I doubt that increasing the size of the main B roads would have any serious effect on culturally importance or biodiversity. The amount the bankings get hit by cars, they're hardly undisturbed! I'm enjoying this thread though, even if I am yet to hear a convincing argument for retention of narrow lanes and hedges on the more important, strategic roads here. ?

That's a fairly simplistic way of mocking my point of view. Devon has low population density but the landscape is entirely managed, mainly for farming. Its not a natural, utopian wilderness. The dreadful road network can be regarded as a directly contributing factor in the fact that west Devon and Cornwall is regarded as an economically deprived area. Wages are suppressed, living standards lower and poverty more prevalent. I see nothing wrong with wanting to aspire to a system where there isn't needless wastage and inefficiency. The benefits are multifaceted and far reaching. The improvement of infrastructure for those that use it daily does not have to be at the expense of those that use it infrequently and want to maintain that nostalgic charm that they so appreciate when they come here once a year on their holidays....

As I said, I'm under no illusion that the road system will ever improve here, but it doesn't mean that I can't point out that it's stupid. I've driven a fair bit in Germany, Sweden and Poland and the contrast is stark.

That was the original plan but it wasn't workable for us. We should have done it before having kids. Besides, I really enjoy living here, but like anywhere, there are things that get on your nerves. The driving conditions are absolutely bananas. Possibly. I'm not suggesting doing all the residential lanes, but for instance the main road from Cullompton to Tiverton is in many places single track. I've personally twice seen road blocking accidents there. The signage tries to take you up the motorway and then along the A361 but that's 12 miles as opposed to 4. If they just sorted the B roads it would transform the driving experience. Make hauling timber a hell of a lot easier too!

I'm a big believer that the long term viability and sustainability of an economy hinges on good infrastructure. The capability to move goods and people efficiently from points A to B and so on is of crucial importance. The terrain present challenges down here, that is true, but far worse is overcome elsewhere in the world (and done so sympathetically - look at the mountainous areas in Germany, Austria, Switzerland and so on). Devon and Cornwall are empty, but only seem as busy as they are due to the terrible road network. Investing in it would mean that people could move around so much more efficiently, hugely diminishing the liklihood of jams. As I said before, I don't for a second think it'll change, but it doesn't stop me getting frustrated with it. One of my German uncles was over for my brother's wedding near Plymouth last month and he quite bluntly just asked me why they don't widen the roads? That kind of nonsense would never wash in Germany!! ?

Haha! That's crazy talk! ?

I know it would be a huge legislative/legal headache and I don't for a moment think that it would happen, but it would nevertheless be a benefit to the locality. I completely agree that Devon is a beautiful county. I don't regard the bloody hedges as part of that as you can drive for miles without ever getting a glimpse of anything but hedgerows, so deeply recessed are the lanes. It's an expensive endevour, but the economic payback over a reasonable time frame would more than compensate. Possibly, but there is nothing to say that you can't replant the hedges. As I mentioned before, I don't think that the hedges add to the local aesthetic. If anything they mask it.

I disagree. I think that the tight lanes cost the local economy millions every year, as well as needlessly endangering the people traveling on them. Take out one hedge, leave the other, expanding the road to a standard width that will accommodate traffic easily for the next 50 years. Seems sensible to me! Additionally, the tight lanes cause poorer fuel economy. I'm lucky if I get 42-45mpg with the little van in Devon, but I get 56-58mpg in Scotland. So (and these are approximate values) with approximately 468k vehicles in Devon doing 12k a year, that's 5.6 billion miles a year. At at average of 42mpg, thats 133.7m litres. At 52mpg that's 108m litres. As well as a direct cost of £33m to the economy, that's an extra 66000 tonnes of co2 into the atmosphere, which seems like a high environmental cost for the sake of some hedges.

Haha! ? I assume to recommend me to their road upgrade team?

I'm trying to get my wife's head around the fact that the only way to do long distance reversing (an almost daily fact of life around here) is to use the wing mirrors and not to look over her shoulder. That's ignoring the fact that two out of our three vehicles are vans and as such have bulkheads. She's OK at it, but gets flustered easily on the back roads. I'd be curious to see what the accident rate is down here versus other parts of the country with better infrastructure.

Quite agree. I've met a chap in a 55 plate Silver Polo 4 times in the valley where we're working in the past 8 months. The first time he charged straight past a passing place so I had to pull over (in a Sprinter, which was more challenging given the lack of space). The second time he took a full 5 minutes to reverse 150m along a straight lane to a large passing place. No fewer than 5 instances of having to pull forward to correct. Just bouncing from hedge to hedge, overcorrecting every time. Third time was shortly after the 2nd time so I reversed 300m to let him past (he was 50m past a passing place, but I figured it would be quicker for me to go back). Fourth time he crashed into me. He came screaming around a blind bend at 35-40mph (way too fast for the lane), I was doing 20mph max. I came to a complete stop, he ploughed into the banking and his car tipped into my van and then rolled back down. Thankfully no damage to the van (the 4x4 Sprinter is very tall, he just hit the plastic bumpers) but the front end of his Polo looked pretty bad. I don't think you could do anything to teach someone like that how to drive.

Most of the roads on the continent you wouldn't even think about the width of your vehicle. We haven't upgraded our roads to keep up with the development of vehicles in the UK. For instance, on a site we're working at the moment, the pinch point was the road on one side of the bridge adjacent to site. A 2.9m wide bridge with a right turn after it meant that the lorries were having to turn right whilst still on the bridge. It was tight even for 6 wheelers. So I put a ruddy great big layby in straight on from the bridge so that the lorries can now completely cross it before turning and now we can get wagon and drags in. The whole network just needs an upgrade.

It's side protection for the crash tests mostly.

I was just saying to Kathryn the other day that following an old (W124) Mercedes E class in the New Forest, it was smaller in width and height than the new Vauxhall Astra it was following. And then Autocar had an article on that exact topic the next day. I'm inclined to get an older car like a first generation Volvo V70 as a school run run-around as it's 10cm narrower than our Citroen C4 Grand Picasso people carrier. My wife (and then my father in law yesterday) seem to continuously scratch it on the lanes, which is really frustrating.