Squaredy

Well yes, although I have been to see a few houses with enormous Yew trees in the small garden (sometimes dwarfing the house) where the owner wants to remove the tree. You have to take a long term view I would say with houses. The largest single stem Yew I ever saw was in the back garden of a house in Cwmbran, South Wales, and the trunk was six foot diameter at breast height, and then the multiple stems above that had all fused so the diameter was maybe ten feet at the height of the upstairs windows of the house. It appeared amazingly healthy and vigorous and in a large garden or park would have been magnificent. When the house was built in around 1800 it was no doubt a small or medium Yew of no great consequence. Fast forward 215 years and it is a massive problem for the house owner and not getting any smaller. I wish I had a photo.

I do not know about TPO rules, but maybe it could be replaced with a Yew which would not grow big like a normal Yew. I have three Irish Yews in my small garden, and they are fastigiate and grow far more slowly. Not sure if this would be allowed, but worth looking into.

Try milling a bit one day. My experience it is always full of pip and surprisingly pretty.

We don't get Birch logs very often (I think because foresters think it is just firewood) but when we do it never disappoints. Every one I have milled has been gorgeous and the timber when dry sells really well.

I have a set you could buy cheaply....bit of a trek I know. They are about 8 ft wide and ten ft long - two of them....any good? Designed to run on actual rail, but I daresay would work on lesser steels!

Could be a nice Cherry log, but not forest grown so who knows what it may contain... I would value that log at £4 to £5 per hoppus foot. Last batch of Oak I had was a mixed bag, all forest grown and lots of good stuff but also a few below average stems. I paid £130 per ton delivered to my yard (£4.64 per hoppus foot). Once you pay £200+ per ton (£7 per hoppus foot) you must demand a really high quality of log in my opinion. Also take care when buying from tree surgeons....they don't know how to measure logs....! Always measure them yourself before agreeing price - or get it delivered on a timber lorry and use the weight ticket. Elm could be anywhere from £5 to £8 per hoppus foot. Traditionally Elm is low value, and most mills won't want it but it might attract a few small scale millers who know how beautiful the timber is.

Yes, I was asking how the kiln in the video is going to work. If it heats the logs but doesn't vent the air or extract the moisture by de-humidification surely the end result will be lovely soggy warm logs just as wet as when the kiln is switched on?

I don't get it. If you don't vent the hot wet air that will come off the logs how do you expect to remove any moisture? Unless your customer has powerful dehumidifiers in the kiln which it doesn't look as if there are. So if he vents the hot wet air he will lose a huge amount of heat, hence the question about heat exchangers.

I am pretty certain that all woodsmoke is poisonous if you breathe in enough of it...

Most timber drying kilns I believe are of the heat vent design, which means they simply vent the hot air to the atmosphere. Very wasteful I know, but when I looked into heat recovery in my kiln it would not have been financially viable to add retrospectively. My kiln is out of use now, but when I did use it the hot wet air simply vented to the outside and cold fresh air was drawn in.

And there are landed estates up and down the country that won't sell off any land, simply because they don't need to. My landlord (of my work site) has such vast estates he has certainly never visited half of them.

I remember thinking back in the nineties that there must be a limit to how high house prices could go, as eventually if they got too expensive buyers would not be able to afford them. Sadly what has happened is that a mixture of foreign and domestic investors have kept pushing up prices well beyond what is healthy. And of course more and more people ending up going to the bank of Mum and Dad or Grandmum and Granddad. I can't believe that many people think it is healthy to have house prices in many areas totally out of reach of even people with good jobs. If I still lived in the area I grew up in (Kenley, Surrey) I would be absolutely certain that my children would never be able to buy a nice house in the area. Actually, that is almost the case here in Newport South Wales. A tidy house in a reasonable road near me now is at least a third of a million. Building plots can be over £200,000!

Look what popped out of a Yew log we were milling recently. Two young ones and the Mum or Dad. So glad we didn't mill them, as they only came out after about the fifth cut!

Where are you Philip?

Very interesting - I have never had a chipper, though many customers have approached me asking for chip. What is the method to avoid the problem? Or is it just a fact of life that handling large quantities of woodchip that has been hanging around is a dodgy business?

I did not know that. We almost always charge our car between 10 pm and 7:30 am (about once a week), but we do this just because we know that is when the surplus electricity is around - it saves us nothing.

Yes Mr Spaceman is right, we hardly touch the brakes in ours. Also the weight is only a little above average for the type of car....remember no engine, gearbox etc. Overall the maintenance should be a lot less than a traditional car as there are fewer moving parts.

Thought some of you guys may appreciate an update after having my company EV for just over one year. The car itself is fine, no issues and does the job really well. Charging at home is also a piece of cake, and cheap as chips. Charging out and about .... well that is a different matter. I think that if you have a regular route and you get to know the charge points (that actually work) it may well be good. Simply needing to find a charging point in an unfamiliar area is a nightmare. For instance, we were in London at the weekend, and then went down to Surrey. I found plenty of charge points near my hotel (Southwark) but could not get any of them working. There were four in the NCP where I was parking - all refused to work. Drove to another four or so roadside - none of which would work. One of them I had to turn the car round to point the wrong way down a one-way street to get the cable to reach (the road markings were put in front of the charge point not next to). Eventually my wife managed to download an app and we got one of the ones in the NCP to work. My experience is that if you can always charge at home it is great. If you ever need to travel beyond your realistic range then good luck. I will be contacting relevant MPs about this as I suspect most have no idea, and the above incident in London was not an isolated one. What is the point in pushing electric vehicles if they are totally impractical to use away from home? Re-charging will never be as quick as re-fuelling with petrol or diesel, but it should be as simple. To fill up with diesel/petrol you don't need an app or a special card - so why electricity? What a cock-up.

I suggest you need to split quite a few pieces of firewood and see if the holes go into the wood. If it is only the bark that is damaged then I would say you can stop worrying.

Certainly not furniture beetle.

I agree with most of what has been said already. My estimate of weight is 1.5 tons as the cedars are quite dry even when felled except the sapwood. Good to hear it is being milled. You could use the digger you want to hire to push it up ramps rather than to lift it…. And then lift the smaller pieces.

Do you mean £60 to £70 per cube including the cost of the logs? And one thing you have to remember is one of the greatest costs is difficult to quantify - the cost in time and space and tied up capital of having hundreds of crates of firewood slowly drying. For some people the space it takes up is just too much (this is why I stopped), whereas for others they may have loads of free sheds sitting empty.

Well yes I remember being told that the Whitehouse is built of Beaufort brick....but I have never managed to confirm it. Funny how there were brickworks all over the valleys and yet there is so little about this in the museums and online.

Yeah; but some say you risk damaging the brick and making it vulnerable to frost damage. I know how badly bricks can get frost damaged so I am wary... The Dangers of Sandblasting Old Brick | The Craftsman Blog THECRAFTSMANBLOG.COM Old brick buildings across the country have a tendency to get painted over the years by owners looking to “improve” their look. Whether its just a chimney or the whole building that’s...

I am after some advice...I am hoping to clean the paint from the brick of my house. I am considering soda blasting, and have found a local firm willing to do this, but as yet I do not know how effective it will be. I think chemical stripping is out of the question for DIY (45 square metres or so). The bottom couple of feet is sort of stripping itself, but sadly the majority is still sound. The reason I want to strip the paint off is largely about future maintenance, but also about allowing the bricks to breathe as I do have some damp here and there. Looking at the pics it is only the ground floor I am referring to - the upper section is painted rough cast which is fine.