spuddog0507

I was watching a old episode of Till death us do part, with Alf Garnett the other night and there was a quote in that which i pissed my self laughing at, he was on about voting and he came out with , they have to vote Labour because they cant spell Conservative, that did make me laugh, but we need to remember what the country was like when that program was made back in the 70s,

Thats me now, i look at every thing and where it,s produced, i would sooner pay a bit more for something that is made in the UK, even beer i have given up with the big commercial brewers and now just support the local smaller brewers, and there is some top class real ales about now,a days,

simple, just avoid it as i here its not good in small engines, i know of one or two who have had problems with saws this last wk or 2, just buy the V power or Ultimate and you wont have any problems,

Can hire you a fast road tow log splitter 😂😂😂😂

Yes there was a lot handball unloading, The said load on the Wagon was for the water board, fencing posts for a pumping station some where on the outskirts of Carlisle, the concreate Co my dad worked for did a lot of water board stuff, and he tells me most of the sites where small and remote and they might of had a dumper and a mixer on site and that was it so all posts unloaded by hand, Back then every one just got on with it and did,nt moan about much not like today,

I think they did offer him something like that but he had had enough driving by then and they wanted someone else in the garage maintaining a growing fleet so he took that job instead,

That confirms then what i so the other day on the A59, 8 or 9 arctics pulled up for a brew or a butty and all where 50+, Photo added below is back when a lot of young men wanted to drive a truck, photo was taken circa 1962/63 of my Dads wagon a 1958 Dodge 350 loaded with concreate posts for a water board job near Carlisle the morning after, back then it was nearly a days job doing that run as we have to remember there was no M6 back then so it was from just north of Preston, pick the A6 up and through Lancaster, Carnforth and Kendal and then the long hard climb up over Shap fell on the old A6 not as it is today, down in to Penrith and then on to Carlisle, That run today would take about half the time as compared to back then and its not the trucks its he road net work we have now, He drove till the early 80s but the company he drove for was changing every thing to arctics and he only had class 2 but he got a chance to go on to maintaince,,,

Dont worry about it, there will all ways be another, i have been looking from one end of the country for a old twin axel feed wagon chassis on the smaller supper singles for last 9 mth with no joy and then i find one round the back of some buildings at a farm we shoot on about a mile from my yard,, but thats what happens, that grab on your trailer i had a look at it on Tues what does it open up to that one is it the 1300mm one ?

Your a bit late here, 2 trailers rolled up in the yard next to me a few month back, 2 grain trailer with hydraulic metal covers on them and hydraulic tail gates, one will be 18ft and the other is 16ft both on decent floatation tyres and very tidy, Lad bought them to transport sawdust in and they came out of Skipton auction about 4/5 months ago,

Some varied weights coming up here, i think some of these are dried weight ? but from the blue book by the FC, from the sizes provided 10ft 3.1mtr x 3ft ,92mtr your log comes out at 2.06 cube and Cedar being 1.12 cube per tonne when fresh felled so i make that 1839kg give or take 25kg either way so your digger is a tonne short on lifting power, most timbers are around the just over a cube per tonne except Oak @ .94, Beech @ .97, Elm @.97 and Scotts Pine @.98,,,

Yes Carl round the corner with recovery/car transport tucks offering £15.50 an hr £50 call out and paid time n half on call outs, 25 days paid holiday and 20 paid sick days, the lad who jacked on him Carl said he was paying him on average £700-900 a week, his add for drivers has been live for 4 mth and not one enquiry ?

Yes all good lads to work with and no harm intended and yes every one looked out for each other, there was a plumber who was and every one thought he was a arsehole and so full of him self had a do at the old Irish lad with the barrow brush n shovel as mentioned above, a lad called paul a cockney chippy went to sort this plumber out and while he was talking to him inside some other lads emptied his van and buried his kit hence we didnt see him again but the old Irish lad was salt of the earth and would not do any one any harm to any one,

Yes but we are not polatician,s so that dont count, if it looked right on paper on the day and it ticked a few boxes it was right !!! no foresight what so ever !! One thing i do stress to the younger lads who work with us is, Dont just think about today and tomorrow be thinking where you are going to be i say 5,10,15 years from now and be planning forward, but look at things from all angles,,,

Please correct me if i am wrong here, but i would say the move on the driving liecences is mainly down to the drastic lack of HGV drivers that have not come through in the last 20 yrs, things where made that difficult and expensive for some people to go and do it and no one wanted to go down that rout ? We now have a massive shortage of HGV drivers all across the board and this has been the knock on affect from the change in 1997, ? Sat a snack bar on the A59 near Gisburn north yorks on Tues and there is a lot of HGV drivers use that spot but all who pulled up when i was there about 8 or 9 of them they were all 50+ !! so where are the younger HGV drivers ? they arent there and this is why we as a nation are having some supply problems to retail outlets, Builders supplies near me have wagons sat in the yard and last wk i met the MD driving a wagon n drag loaded with concreate blocks, they have been looking for drivers for last 9 month and a guy round corner from me cant get any one to drive recovery car transport trucks either,,,,

FFS its just been confirmed then that the world has gone MAD Who and how much do these people get paid to think this shit up ??? its becoming a very crazy world we live in, Donkey & Carts are on the horizon for some of us,

Nor me only the one i mentioned and he was only on a brush, shovel and a barrow tidying up, and yes lads from all over the country,

I dont know about a site full of pissed up Paddys ? at least they wernt of there tits on weed ? i can only remember Paddy with a drink problem and he got nowt right till 10olock when until he had had his 4 cans of Export after that he was fine, as Skyhuck says they where mostly self employed lads on Piece rate and it had to be right or it didnt get signed off which equalled no pay till it was done right. what we have to remember is these lads on the tools where taught there trade either as a apprentice or by hands on, Then the foreman on these sites was generally 50+ but he had probably spent 30-35yrs on the tools his self before getting the foremans job and you could not hide anything from em, not like todays foreman/site suppviser who is fresh out of collage with a certificate to say he can do it ? and back then there was no Facbook , whatsapp or mobile phones to piss about on all you did was work and if you needed to make a phone call you went to the site office, it is much much different today ,sorry,

Well that just about sums up most of the younger Uk work force for today, i feel sorry for you,, no sence No drive No hope !!!! only happy doing F - - k all !!!

Dont know if many of you lads have seen this but it looks very very serious to me, the wild fires in the Tiger forest in Russia which if i recall right is the worlds biggest forest have now been burning for over a month now destroying every thing in its path, the fire is now bigger than the rest of the fires put together that are burning across America, Canada, Greece and Turkey, the report i have just seen says its going to have a massive knock on affect world wide with timber prices as the Tiger forest produces 100s of 1000s of tonnes of timber a year, the fire has now got to the stage where it is way out of control and with what ever they do to contain it just seems to be a waste of time,,,

I dont know about being pricey at just over a grand for whats in it ? i would not like to try and make one for that , i think for what they are and the time and effort you would save its a bargain, we had some logs that we could not get tractor and trailer near to load and i am just glad there was not many of them as we chained then and dragged them with crane, stop shorten chain and repeat till near enough to load, it seemed to take ages to move about a dozen logs, seen one of these winches working on a small forwarder and it worked very well and after speaking to the owner about it i was sold on the idea, lucky enough i have not been in that situation again since but i would not hesitate to purchase one if i was ever there again,

we had a job pruning some trees back that belonged to a nursing home but where taking over the residential garden next door, the lad who was working with us that day came round the back of the property with a couple of saws and the client said to him, all right Winston,, this bloke calls every one Winston by the way, the said lad Stephen dissapeared and was sat in the truck he had taken real offence to being called Winston and asked if he could go home, talked him to stopping for the day eventually; I dont think this lad would of lasted one brew time in that Paddy hut back in the early 80s, Something has gone sadly sadly wrong some where ??? I so a post on FB a few wk back that was about growing up in the 70s and it read, We spent our days looking for frogs n shit like that,, todays Snowflake generations kids spend there days looking for a WiFi signal !!!!

Yep happy happy days for us for sure, We worked on 5 Wimpey sites around the Northwest, skipping from site to site for a month or so on each site turfing the gardens and seeding the recreation areas along with tree panting in the winter, We did one at Radcliff near Bury, 2 small estates in Poulton which one of was near the TVR factory, a massive one at Sharples hall at Bolton and i think that one was about 800 houses then the last one was at Warrington which was not that big but it later became the set for the channel 4 soap Brookside, Only lad a kept in touch with was a chippy called Carl from Poulton and unfortunatly he got killed in a RTA on the M62 while traveling to a site in Bradistan, We where shit up every day and piss wet through many a day but we just got on with it and never moaned, we used to do prep work mom/tus/wed and then we got a arctic load of turf on a thursday morning and get all down by late friday aft then home when finished, great times and some times i wish i could turn the clock back,,,,

Your not a undertaker by any chance are you ? 😂😂

Back to the Wimpey sites, we where mainly 16/17 years olds at the time and to be sat in the Paddy hut at brew time we got ripped to bits 3 times a day every day but we stuck it out for 3 years till the site was finished, F - - - - - g good times tho,

It is , i worked on some Wimpey sites around the Northwest in the early 80s, loads of Irish lads on them sites back then but it was enjoyable to go to work,