doobin

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.

Domestic tree surgery is now fine to use red. The 5% is the reduced rate of VAT, which makes no difference as most tree surgeons claim the VAT back anyhow. The rate of fuel duty is considerably less than white- I think it’s around 11 pence per litre whereas white is 55 pence per litre.

Why am I not surprised?

That’s basically Nordic socialism as I understand it. We sold our North Sea oil rights. Gone. Norway created a sovereign wealth fund with theirs and reap the benefits to this day.

You mean…like a nationalised company? I thought socialism never works?

Woodturners, but my God what a load of hassle!

16 is processor grade as you know, but it’s shit firewood and I think you’d struggle to sell it to any firewood merchant. I know there’s a guy on here who mills it, but as you suggest, 16” is a bit on the small side. Biomass might be the best option?

Council housing built en mass in the 50s (a lot of it for returning veterans- home fit for here’s etc) set the stage for one of the longest periods of stability this country has known. Like it or not, we live in a society. @AHPPlikes to espouse anarchy as a suitable soloution, but let’s be realistic. The government dissolves- unless you band together with other like minded folk then you are toast. So you team up with others, and agree to their rules. Walking Dead, anyone? Hey presto, you’re in a society again. So that argument is just as utopian bullshit as the idea of socialist utopia. As a nod to this though, I could get on board with the idea of extreme devolution, and free movement for those originally in the union between devolved states to find one that best fits their ideals. I don’t see the United States lasting in its current form, the Southern states are just too different and will secede. Unbridled capitalism doesn’t work either. Vested interest always start to take over and subjugate the weaker- and by weaker, that can just be those who were born a few years too late (see housing crisis. If you are living in a council house now, what chance do you think your children have?) This model of passing down ‘housing wealth’ to help your children buy their first house isn’t good for society as a whole, it leads to a schism between the haves and have nots. That’s not ‘socialist bullshit’- it’s reality. Take it to its logical conclusion and in the absence of alternative governance (most likely, we are at a tipping point now in terms of voters with/without housing), you’re either at French Revolution or more likely a dystopian sci fi scenario. I think the only way this can work is with the whole country pulling in the national interest. Obviously some hard choices have to be made, immigration is the obvious one for me. Cut it totally. You’ll never hear a ‘stereotypical’ socialist say that- in their utopia this country can support everyone. Well, it can’t. We should be looking to maximise quality of life for those already here.

Let's hear your alternative plans? Like it or not people need housing. I used to be all 'oh, free market', but eventually you come the realise that a free market will never exist. As one group grows more powerful their vested interests take over, as we see now with the dominance of developers. My political tendancies align very strongly with the SDP. This problem can be fixed, but it requires a nationalist and socialist response.

Ash for delivery. 8 cube going out today.

House prices are a product of how much people are allowed to borrow, and the system has gotten out of control. The house now takes less man hours to build- new builds are thrown up without any care or attenton to detail. What costs more is the land with planning. If you let people borrow more, they bid more. Developers pocket a bit more profit on the way, but as house prices are bid up the value of land with planning also rises. With the stroke of a planners pen, land that would be worth £15k per acre is now a million per acre, and the landowner rides off into the sunset. This is all paid for from the future earnings of the first time buyers, enabled by the aforementioned deregulation of income muiltipliers, coupled with criminally low interest rates. These poor misguided fools think it's wonderful that restrictions are relaxed 'so they can borrow more to buy a better house'. They don't join the dots to realise that they are being shafted, and that had things stayed as they were then the same job would have bought them the same comparitively massive house that their average earner teacher and postman parents live in. @pleasant- you are correct, it was 30 years ago (early 90s) that house prices were 3.5x average wage. The 90's was still twnty years ago to me v🤣 This correlates perfectly with my point above- the average 30 year old is now looking at the same houses as their parents did 30 years ago, but it's just not happening no matter how many avocado toasts they forego. That's because the same standard of living now demands more than twice the effort (wages) at 8.5x average earnings for an average house. Put in the simplest of terms, you now need to be a junior doctor to afford the house a dustman did thirty years ago. The country is ****************ed, and 850,000 immigrants a year coming here are tipping us over the edge. We can't recover from this without a massive socialist intervention along the lines of the council house building program of the 50s. We're in a stalemate, where those with property (including myself, before anyone tries that angle) are either sitting pretty or getting stinking rich via rents off the labour of everyone who came afterwards. Rents are at an all time high, and all sucessive governments have done is funnel yet more money towards landlords from the taxpayer, via housing benefit. It's the same thing- if people can afford more, the price goes up and they end up no better off.

A gold backed BRICs currency (especially with OPEC trading oil in it) would signal the start of a terminal decline for the Western world. Bring it on, I say.

Yup. The more people are allowed to borrow the more they will bid. It’s all gone to shit since. The banks have got people right where they want them on the debt treadmill, with abnormaly low rates pushing up the capital cost higher still. The introduction of buy to let mortgages fuelled prices, and help to buy added £50k straight onto the purchase price of a new build (and Persimons profit per unit) in just two years. These misguided government interventions over just fifteen years have led to a massive divide between those who were born early enough to buy a house at sensible price to earnings ration and all those who come after them. Landlords have skewed this even further, with a few becoming shockingly rich at the expense of future generations. Buy to let mortgages were always an abomination. It never made sense that a landlord could put down ten percent on an interest only mortgage and cream a couple of hundred a month off from the difference between an abnormally low interest rate and the rent. Banks lobbied for these changes. Suddenly anyone could become a landlord even without an income to support the loan, and the artificial increase in property values due to government intervention has saved their bacon from reality. Anyone remember that scene from The Big Short, where the guy is in a strip clubhouse and he realises that a stripper has mortgages on six houses? This country needs a return to house prices as a sensible multiple of income, sensible interest rates that provide a return upon capital, and an economy based upon producing and manufacturing things of substance. Recently we as a country have lived in a dream state- a financial merry-go-round supported by artificially high property values, selling off national assets, importing cheap tat based upon arbitrage of third world labour, and unrealistically low interest rates allowing us to pretend that we are rich. When countries who sell us the things we are totally dependent upon (and that’s oil) start to refuse our currency, people are in for a rude awakening.