doobin

I’d deffo burn rather than feed a chipper if your site and location allows for this. Much quicker overall. but as far as cheap pto driven chippers go, the Rock machinery is ok. Similar but better than the woodland mills (can’t remember how, maybe more feed rollers?). Not sure about leylandii but can’t see it being a problem, it’s nice and straight. It’s passable run at 540rpm,but behaves much more like a proper chipper at 1000rpm. On this 38hp tractor we were feeding some fairly gnarly 4” bits of oak through and it didn’t seem to struggle. Feed speed is set with a hydraulic adjuster on the side. This is 5” capacity, and the next model up would be too much for my tractors to lift.

Here you go: 6x6m = 36m2 36x0.2m deep = 7.2m3 of stone 7.2 x 1.8 (that's tonnes per cubic metre for granite scalpings) = 13 tonnes. Worth getting a price for it delivered in bulk from an 8 wheeler. Round here it's £35/tonne, which compares favourably with £50 for 800kg in bulk bags from a builders merchant. If you are close to a quarry then it will be a lot cheaper.

Fit the largest Honda copy you can squeeze into the space. As stated the gx160 is a waste of time- they are for cement mixers, nothing more.

Clamshell grab looks good on her.

With 1800 hours and over four years hard graft under her belt, I’m still going to keep running this old girl to allow me to finance other kit- a new alpine tractor. I’ve decided that if you have the work for it, a new machine is a no brainer, and I’ve the whole of January booked on nature reserve cut and collect works. Here she is hard at work on yesterdays job- I’m especially amazed at the lumps she managed to lift over that hedge at full reach! A few 3.8s to feed the mill. Wind stopped play yesterday so back to the yard today to fit a new clamshell grab I bought for her- have a lot of cut and collect waste to handle in the spring.

Running a mixed fleet I hear you. But there’s limits, and grab and flail work is some of the hardest work you can put a machine through. You’ll blow a pipe every day on a thirty year old machine once you get the oil hot with a flail. I don’t regret any of my finance purchases but I’m in a rich area, so at the rates around here and when interest rates were on the floor, it was a no brainer.

I wouldn’t fancy beating that vintage about with a grab and flail personally.

I’ve been amazed what my auger mounted cone splitter on my e27 will split. id forget feeding it through a processor afterwards though. Just doesn’t work. You have very little control over how it splits. Look at a big horizontal splitter instead.

Restricted access is common in forestry- plenty run rigid trucks but ten tons is still a part load.

If buying new, this firm build them to all budgets and specs. I’ve two of their units. A petrol pressure washer is nothing more than an engine, pump, hose and nozzles. If you use a firm who build them (at very reasonable prices too) then you will get a good setup that works well together from the get go. Avoid any brands who use ‘max pressure’ as their main/only selling point. Jetmac JETMAC.CO.UK Honda Pressure washers and much more

Prices for what you refer to (cordwood or round wood) have shot up recently. So have haulage costs. ten tons is only half a wagon. I’d up your order to a full load and someone might be interested then. I’d also call around local forestry contractors and ask if they could deliver a tractor and trailer load. lastly, if you are less fussy about what you burn then you might be able to get a cheaper load. A tractor trailer load of mixed softwood left over once a block has been felled for example- if you’ll take whatever’s left in the loading bay once the lorries have been then it might work for you both.

Every time this comes up Eggs and I give the same advice. Minimum 13hp engine. Honda or Chonda. Either Interpump (best) or Antonio Reverbi (close second) for the pump. Using a generator to run an electric pressure washer is utterly pointless- you’d need double the engine power than if you just used a petrol pressure washer. If you are going to be storing water in an IBC (buffer tank) then go for a pump that does 21l/min (at around 200bar). This is much better for cleaning kit than 15l/min at 300bar.

Lou Reed.

I have gone through three noco GB140s. still haven’t found anything better on the market but not impressed with longevity.

An insurance broker. They will find you the cheapest insurance for the cover you need. There's nothing that you legally need to do to be a tree surgeon. Just price a few small tree jobs and work up (pun intended).

On this pissing wet day I'm in the workshop catching up on sharpening. There's a good few interesting setups scattered around the forum, from clever truck mounted vices to computer controlled, ten chains a minute setups to drool over 🤣, and I thought it would be good to have them all in one place for others to learn from. Here's mine. For the chainsaws, the Orgeon hydraulic clamping jobby with Baltic Abrasives CBN wheels. A little addition is the cooling setup- just a basic Chinese mist cooling nozzle fed by an compressor airline. It draws from the bottle mounted in a cut down aerosol can screwed to the base board, and sprays a mist of plain water directly at the cutter whilst sharpening. This is giving me simply fantastic results, and I'd say the water cooling and CBN wheels will solve any issues people have with burnt cutters when setup correctly. Setting depth gauges I find easier to do with the Stihl professional gauge and a 120 grit ceramic belt on a little Milwaukee powerfile- you have a bit more nuance. For the bandsaws, it's the cheapest Oregon grinder with a Baltic Abrasives CBN wheel manufactured in the profile of the Ripper 37s that I use. My mods to this are removing the disc cover, reversing the indexing tab (and adding a cable tie) and a trampoline spring on the back to bring it back up on it's own. Oh, and as the depth stop is critical the silly plastic knob was replaced with an M8 bolt and locknut. With a couple of blocks to keep the band in a neutral position as it goes around, you can set the clamp 'just so' and easily index it by gloved hand, using the indexing tab as a fairly accurate guide and allowing the wheel for 'float' the band into the exact loaction as you sharpen. You can also see the flue of the massive sawdust burner that keeps me warm whilst standing still...

Just call a broker and answer their questions. How many m high you will be working, what tickets you have etc.

For sure. It's not just the old boys either. I went to an Engcon demo day a couple of years back (full of a few famous Instagram personalities with their tricked out machines). There was one guy there who was quite open and honest, he went out with a 13t for £400 a day. In Kent. Including diesel. Would anyone on here go out with a 2.7t and grab (a quarter of the purchase cost and diesel bill) for less than that?? No transport cost either.

Don’t have time for videos! Plenty on YouTube.

Either you want to sell or you don’t?

How much would your average thick as shit builder charge to remove this wall all the way around the perimeter? Including footings? This photo was taken at the halfway point. They’d have a micro digger, a pecker and a tracked barrow. They’d smash it all down with the bucket (animals), peck at the footings and then sit there gouging out buckets half dirt and half concrete, loading a track barrow. Chasing bricks around the grass. Waiting for the tracked barrow. I guarantee the bloke on the tracked barrow would screw it round at the pile every time rather than drive backwards also. Say two men for the day and two machines. £600? And then two grab lorries- £350 a go around here. That’s £1300. I pulled it out in chunks with the grab, span around and placed it at the roadside. Where the bricks were too loose I placed the loader bucket right next to them, knelt down the chucked them in in five seconds flat. Then I pulled the footings, and only the footings, up with the grab and placed them on the pile. Called the grab lorry, nipped home for lunch. Got back, stuck the pecker on and easily broke up the large lumps and footings as he loaded it. Then digger back on trailer and away. Luckily i was already on a job 100 yards down the road, if I hadn’t had the loader there a large bucket on the tiltrotator would have done exactly the same job. Total time on site 4 hours. One (very full) grab of CLEAN concrete at a much reduced rate of £125. Cost to the customer £850. You can see how little a trench was left where the footings came out (between the rubble pile and the concrete path) cheaper for the customer and a decent rake for me.

Priced jobs is where you’ll make your money back on one. Doing things quicker. Round holes for round tanks, less concrete. Etc. people always used to say ‘a good op can do it without’ about anything more than three buckets, but it’s frankly bollocks and outdated thinking. The UK is so backwards in this respect. Same with loaders. I’m working next door to a building site on this job, and all day there’s been a digger sat at a stockpile of stone loading a dumper every five minutes. I just grab my stone from the stockpile and put it exactly where I need it- the second man on my job has been putting a fence up rather than sat on his arse on a dumper. My profit levels per job show the value to me in investing in machinery. I can’t stand working for builders on a day rate, they are 99% thick as shit, messy as pigs and my time is better spent elsewhere where I can make a grand a day for a skilled bloke and a machine by quoting the job right and doing it quickly and accurately.

Not really. Obviously you know it’s on there but it’s not terrible. It’s on a 1.9t with a top hitch. The E19 is already a very wide, stable machine. I knew when I bought it that it would be used on a rotating grab and that I might one day get a tilty, so I specced twin aux, extra counterweight, and most importantly the short dipper option. I have no experience of tiltys previously, but I’d say you’d be hard pressed to find a better 1.9t carrier machine. The joystick rollers flow share perfectly and everything is second nature. It’s stable and precise. I’m waiting for a top hitch for the e27 and then I’ll try it on there also.

Very handy. Years of grab and tilt bucket operation has provided me with the muscle memory for it pretty much straight away.

Got the secondhand unit fitted to the little machine this PM. Hose routings will be improved in due course, it’s the old users hoses and a few fittings to tee into the existing hydraulic hitch line. So far from perfect but working for now.