doobin

Not just you Jack- multiple times this last week I found myself thinking 'couple of hours and I'll be heading home'. Looked at the digger clock and it's barely midday FFS. I don't clockwatch. Just seemed that my internal body clock was out of sync.

Yup, echo seem tough and offer a five year domestic/two year commercial warranty.

Yes, I have both a 135 and a 181 in the lockup for 'garden' type jobs. Although have not had the 135 in any state of dissasembly bar chainging the chain yet. Both hardly get used.

Husky 135. Beats the stihl 181 imho, and I have a lot of stihl.

They will burnt great.

You need to define how small. Any 'wee' drum chipper is going to be 'a bit rubbish' compared to a roller fed 6" towable.

Doh! 🤣 it’s true what they say, you buy kit and work comes to it. Only bought the 40hp compact last week as a cheap thing that might come in handy. Looks like a hire for it next week.

I have a pto chipper plus a wee chipper. Love the look of a tracked tractor but they are absolutely no use to me!

Giant and worky quad are two of what I will be demoing. Might the cast be for sale? Looking for SQ11.

You need a better Mrs 🤣 I just need a pedestrian loader to complete the set! I've got two tractors, two forklifts, a Multione, three diggers, muck truck, high tip tracked dumper, 2t tracked dumper and 3t wheeled.

Painful. Arse about face but that apparently is easy enough to change. I could only be smooth with it standing behind it, but I'm sure I'd get used to it. And I'm sure every other pedestrian loader is the same- you never see any video on youtube where the operator looks even slightly in control. Even for domestic work, I personally would prefer a micro digger and grab. But it sure beats labour. The concept is good, but for me the tracks make too much mess for domestic jobs. I've got demos coming up of three different wheeled machines soon, as I'll do anything to save manpower! To my mind, you're never going to lift much with it, but on the flip side these things thrive on repetetive short cycles. Trouble is, a few cycles of the Micro Bull and the job is trashed. I'd sooner sit with a micro digger and rotate to load logs rather than spin around tearing the arse out the job. Maybe wheels will be the answer, but then I'm spoilt for machine choices anyhow! So I think I want the lightest little loader I can get, and a set of turf tyres plus narrow wheels for when the access is tight (which when you want to get a loader in is normally a groundworks job anyhow, so a bit of mess is OK) And just live with the little payload, but do more cycles making less mess. I mean, if I can fit it in I'll have the Multione in there anyway. For a small tree gang, it looked versatile, and anything like this will always be 'the cheapest man on the job'. Although I have my reservations as to how much use things like the stump grinder actually would be (?) and I bet they aren't cheap. Was impresssed with how well designed things like the mini log grapple were.

Had a play on one of these on a job recently. It wouldn't be for me, but if it looks like it would suit your line of work then I can report that that are incredibly solidly built little machines.

£117k profit on nearly £12m turnover?? There really is no money in this game!

“Formal insolvency procedure”….

All 1.5t machines have retractable tracks these days. My e19 goes down to 990mm

As far as I’m aware, nobody do. A couple of of 1.2t models around that go down to 710mm, and there’s an oddball Kobelco I think that is 1.3 and goes down to 800mm

Yes, and if you need more power direct mount the bucket. Or use a ripper tooth! (although good luck hiring one 🙄)

This is that bit that so many people just can't grasp. Every time you do ANYTHING in the first world-drive to the shops, have a shower, eat dinner or post on Arbtalk, you are releasing CO2 from the past that has lain undisturbed for hundreds of millions of years. They witter on about 'oh, can't we just use wind power? And electric cars. And biomass!' Take biomass. Lets say you can get around 44 mw/h per ha from sugar beet biogas. That's about 158,400 megajoules of energy. Potential yields of biofuels per ha p.a. - Forest Research WWW.FORESTRESEARCH.GOV.UK Extremely approximate guideline figures of potential yields of different forms of biofuel per hectare per annum Petrol is around 35 megajoules per litre. So to fill up your 50 litre petrol tank, that's 1750 megajoules. That ha can fill the tank just 90 times, much less when you take into account all the inneficiencies of the harvesting and production costs. These are very rough, back of an envelope calculations, it's probably way worse than this. Fossil fuels are a giant bank of millions of years of sunlight, across vast acreages. They aren't being replaced, and we don't currently have any alternatives except nuclear that can match our current consumption. I don't have a clue what the answer is. Nuclear looks to be the only option to me.

I've been thinking about getting one of those and mounting it onto a spare platform for a MuckTruck as it happens. The engine above the drum type would lend themselves to such an application.

Free market, innit 🙄 Global economy and all that. Do you buy all your screws in packs of ten from the local hardware shop, to 'support the local economy'? Or do you buy them in boxes of a hundred from a big mail order centre? They all come from China anyway. Our whole ****************ing 'economy' is built upon the arbitrage of cheap third world labour, leaving a ton of 'disposable' income free to support massive bubbles in the stock market and housing. That may well be coming to an end. However, I'm not about to shoot myself in the foot by paying triple to 'support the UK' when the average house price here is fourteen times the average local wage. I have to do what's best for me to claw my way up to a similar standard of living as a ****************ing postman from the eighties, with their free council house and gold plated pension. I don't need to be paying for the MD of Greenmech's foreign holidays, or his salesmen and their brand new pickups. I fully accept that backup should at least exist, unlike a lot of the Chinese distributors- but I personally don't need backup on something as simple as an engine, drum unit and a pair of vee belts and wheels. As soon as it all changes and I can afford to pay three times the cost for a comparable chipper yet still afford an honest house on an honest days wage, then I'll be beating your door down.

To be fair, i always thought Ifor were like Land Rovers- agricultural and ovverated, with idiots paying silly money secondhand. Then I bought a new GH1054BT, and it's just superb. I had nothing but trouble with Indespension trailers, but this thing is faultless. Or at least, it would be, if Ifor and the dealer had done the assembly and the PDI properly. Leaf spring nuts were only just threaded onto the nylock bit on one side, leading to a spring coming loose and trashing two tyres before I noticed! The dealer didn't want to know, said it was something I'd done- until I sent them a screenshot of the email I'd sent after towing the trailer back, saying what a nice trailer but please check your PDI process as I'd just had to lock the brake rod nut on before it parted company 🙄 So yes, trading on the name somewhat, but this GH1054 is still a very good trailer.

I've got a laurel hedge reduction coming up, not much of a drag but I will trial the wee chipper and mini high tip dumper and report back. Should be ideal- the guy in the hedge can pass me the branches down and I just guide them straight into the chipper. I'm almost enjoying a bit of gardening- makes a change from the norm. This was a regular job from yesterday. Hedge out (around forty metres worth) and dispatched back to yard for green waste grab in 7 tipper truck trips, then two loads of stumps and a quick rake up with the digger rake. Sod chipping that lot- it'll all go in one green waste grab. Obviously would be differerent if I had a chipper I could machine feed, but of us were done by two o clock. That included tensioning off the chain link fence, cutting out the bit behind the hedge (to be replaced by a squash wall) and bundling that all onto his fire ready for the evening's festivities.

I'd be interested to know how good the feed rollers actually are. It's a lot of money for a little machine. 50-60 days a year is a fair bit. If you are generally chipping into the back of your truck, then I'd invest in a reasonably small road tow- should be plenty about that were built small to keep them under 750kg, might be going slightly cheap as of the 15th and trailer freedom day 🤣 You're certainly right to change if what you are doing is damaging to your health. But look at the bigger picture. Money invested in (quality) machinery is as good as money in the bank. 60 days is five days a month. Hand digging is damaging to my back. So I have a micro digger on 5 years finance. It costs me £230 a month, and I really don't care that I might only use it one day in a month, because on that day that I do use it it covers the finance cost. Five days a month? You'd be mad not to get a proper small chipper IMHO.

It's 'LTS'- a slightly dodgy 'brand' who I think have gone bust. Your standard, run of the mill eBay importer of Chinese tat. I was much happier paying £800 plus VAT for it than £2.5k for the same thing from another brand! It's also got a swivel chute from an MDT (I think) chipper- courtesy of another member on here a while back who bought the chute as a spare part and reported that it would fit. So she owes me £1k plus VAT in total. I've welded some strap down points to it (nightmare to transport otherwise) and the little carabiner you see welded to the chute usually holds a 13mm spanner to unbolt the spout- although didn't need it after closing the anvil gap. I went for that design because it was the narrowest, and the whole point of a wee chipper is that it fits into the back garden. With a strop around the front drawbar it's a lot easier to heave it about with two of you. The tow behind type are for big gardens with a homeowner who wants to play with a lawn tractor as far as I can see. Basically you want the larger 15hp Loncin engine option. Stay away from Briggs- they are shit. Not sure what's on the market currently- what have you been looking at?

After giving the blades a tickle I closed the anvil gap to around 5mm. Much improved- finer chip, couldn’t stall it even forcing some pretty big bits in- twelve foot lengths of hazel etc that were around 4” at the start. It chewed them staight up. Obviously nowhere near as fast as a 6" tow behind, but it's a wee chipper. On these garden tidy jobs the drag is a bitch. It made such a difference to park the chipper at the tree and guide the stems straight in, especially when dealing with long brambles and multiple little stems. Two of us were forcing armfuls of around a dozen 1" bits in at a time, and it didn't really slow the motor at all. The anvil gap has really made a difference. Even if the client didn’t want the chip for chickens, I think I’d use the mini chipper again and a high tip mini dumper to run it out to the truck. It did self feed to an extent, but if there was a bushy bit or a lot of leverage hanging out of the top it wouldn't- can't see that there's any way round that on these kind of machines, and if I wasn't feeding it I'd be dragging- and I know which I'd prefer. Can anyone recommend a supplier of decent blades for these generic machines? 31cm x 5.5cm blades.