spuddog0507

been on that page and several others looking for it, its not been taxed for years and the last thing we knew about it, it had been sold to a forestry company up in the scotish boarders and thats 21 years ago, probably all battered up by now and been worked hard but it may still be working on a daily basis,

Yep we had a 1174 reg BEX 330T different machine when you put the diff lock in it just pulled for fun even on wet ground, most of the time it was moving stone and soil with a 12 tonne dump trailer behind it, if any one knows the where abouts of this tractor i would love to see it again,

There are several ways to look this, 1) Countys where and still are very capable machines, and some one will correct this if i am wrong they are the only true 4 wheel drive there was for many years and they could get the traction down, thats why they where so popular in forestry, 2) If you buy a county today and dont anything to it it will be worth £100 more next wk, so buy it use it, and you will have a capable machine that will be going up in value every day, they never gave much trouble if any, good solid reliable work horse that you would never loose a penny on,

some really good answers above here to consider, now coming from some one who has been involved with selling firewood for some (dare i say it ) 45 years, I was doing it with my dad back in the mid 70s and he made a bit out of it but not much, but you have to remember back then the miners where on strike nearly full time, people where hard up and gas centeral heating was only for the rich, Since then i have allways done firewood but it only made pocket/beer money, then as things have progressed and the demand has risen as more people have installed wood burning stoves, but it is a venture that needs a lot of careful thought as you will end up working your arse off for very little return, I am in a very good position at the moment as i do a bit of work for one of the Uks major forestry cos and when it gets to the end of say a 10,000 tonne harvesting job i get the the job of going and removing the timber that is left roadside, now this will be 3 tonne of this 4 tonne of that and 5 tonne of then etc, its not worth the forestry company sending a wagon for a mixed load, so they pay me to go and remove the timber, i all so get paid of one or 2 local tree surgeons to remove there timber as well, The above enables me to make a bit out of the firewood but it is only a bit, i make more out of removing the timber, and most of it is sold direct from the harvesting site, we now have to consider the fact that after Feb 2021 all logs have to be sub 20% moisture so this is another issue to consider, I would be doing some serious home work on this subject and personally i think as Big J said you could spend your money else where and make far more with a lot less effort, Do a trial on the firewood with say 1 or 2 wagon load and see what happens, but you will miss this winter now unless you have means of drying the logs to sub 20%, i would consider the comments above very carefully,

All the tipping gear on Ifors have the manual back up as standard with the electric as main tip, i have used mine once on the manual tip and like you say 300 pumps its a night mare but it works and its there to get you out the shit if electric side fails,

Do any of the trailer manufactures give the option of a manual tip only trailer these days ? i know Ifor used to on the 8ft trailer but you dont see many, forget the trying to save a bit of money, my advise would be but the right trailer from the start, i took the plunge several years ago and went and lashed out on a 10ft Ifor tipper and if i was very honest i would not be with out it, i hate to think how many tonnes of timber i have moved with it, it is on the road moving timber 2-4 days a week and its always loaded, the trailer has been no trouble what so ever and is still in good order, i think i would get back today what i paid for it 7 yrs ago so that to me is very cheap, i have pissed about with old shite for years and got sick of repairing/replaceing stuff so took the plunge, you will not look back if you buy one and but the electric version, Ok it may be more expense but work towards it, do a wk end or 2 and a odd later day to get cash together, you wont regret it,

well forgeting is one thing but i cant bloody find mine, and i know i will of put it some where safe ?

You just take the worm drive out for the oil pump and leave tank dry,

cabstar spares uk he is breaking cabstars of all ages every day, he is very knolageble and helpful, based in somersett and usually has a lot of adds on flebay,

Dont know him the one who hauled timber for us was Steve Millner,

who is peter J ? i see him driving about now n then, i know about the forwarders as they started life as a MF tractor.

Well he is just road from me, i know of him but know very little about him, his son-in-law used to haul timber for use,

Planted a lot of Oak ,Beech ,Sycamore and Field maple this spring, tubed and staked all matierals supplied and we was getting £1.10p a tree,

Tend to agree with the 90% firewood, spruce will be US douglas might be ok ? pop firewood, oak probably ok, the 5 oaks you have just took down would of been far better done in Dec Jan or Feb you would not get the spliting on the end then as due to lower moisture content in the timber, and it would of milled up nicer with less waste,

Yes and that sounds on the cheap side to me, one lad who i was at school with has 5 mk 1 escorts in a building, none of them been on the road for 20/25 yrs 2 mexicos 2 1300 and a estate says he will sell the lot when he is 60 and buy a big camper van and tour the whole of europe with it,

It was but how things have changed, i ran that van for 18 month and regreted selling it so bought another ex Telecom one and used that for work for about 2 yrs, wish i could of seen in to the future tho as i would of just stored the Escorts and not trashed them,

It makes me shiver reading this thread and it makes me feel glad that i was born when i was, first thing i ever insured was a 1974 yamaha FS1E at a cost of £11 then when i got to 17 it was a Yam dt175 and i think that was £15, then still 17 and past my test i got a Bedford HA viva van the ones that the post office, gas board, water board and telecom had and that was nearly a full wks wage to insure at £32,this was back in the early 80s when back then we had things that where much better than today, like good music, women with big hair, proper tits and not covered in tramp stamps, loads of cheap mk 1 & 11 escorts that didnt matter if we stuffed it or rolled it, we just towed to the scrap yard and got a fiver for it, then went and found another one to last a few months, then came the daddy mk2 1,9 ltr Opel Manta gte but it was not expensive to insure for a 18 year old who thought he was going to be the next Jimmy Maccrae, i think about £40 to insure it for the year, and the best thing of all petrol was circa 85p a gallon so it was affordable to go and thrash the arse of a car up in the hills for an hour or so every night, i dont think this would be possible at todays price,s and i dont think there would be many of todays kids capable of doing what we did, how things have changed and at times i find it hard to believe but its there to see, i watched a video on youtube recently that was a tribute to George Harrison and on stage was Eric Clapton,Paul Macartny,Elton John,Ringo Star,Mark King,Geff Lyne,Andy Fairweather Low, Dave Gilmore, Ronni Wood etc and one of the comments was there was more talent on that stage than there is in the worlds music industry today,

Hi i have noticed this last few weeks on my travels around the northwest there is a fair amount of Beech and Sycamore that are dropping there leaves now and the trees dont look in that good of shape and i am not talking about 10 or 20 trees i mean hundreds of them, i think this goes back to 2018 with the very dry summer and a very dry spring this year, this last few wk we have been digging some trenches any where between 6 and 9 ft deep and once dug out the top 18" is quite damp then there is about 2-3ft of very dry clay but when we dug up between 2 on there way out Ash trees the ground was considerably drier than it was away from the trees, this is just my theory on it, but sub soil/clay does not abbsorbe water that fast once dried out and a tree will suck a lot of water in the spring from as deep as the roots go, so given the dry spring and the tree sucking most the water out the ground at this time as not left much for this time of year,as said above this is my thoughts but would be interested in what others think,

A mate of mine who runs a plant hire buisness had a small 4x4 van back in the 90s, it was either a Rascal or Suzuki ? i cant remember, but we just called it the Sooty bus, it was one of them vans bought as a put me on for 6 months but he ended up running it for about 8 yrs, he had his other half running round delivering diesel oil parts etc to different sites where he had plant working, he all ways did and still does say its one of the best vans he ever bought,

Grant funded it is, and the last time i was with our local FC guy he said he could get us around £4-4,5K for clearing a 3.5 hectare woodland of Rodeys but thats 2 years ago now, it would of been a good job, flat but a bit wet in places and could of all been done with the digger n grab,

Well got to agree with Departed on a few things here, We have cut a fair amount of rodeys for the likes of Tillhil etc in the Northwest, Lancs, Lakes and north Yorks, hand cutting it aint easy work by a long way, 12-15ft rodeys all tangled and intertwinde with each other and you will get a fair bit of work on 60,70,80 degree bankings and rocky crags as rodeys will grow any where, Ok on resonable level ground it would be easy with a 3 tonne digger and flail, but it wont all be like that as you will just get given a area to clear that will incorporate rodeys on all different land types, the last one we did was on flat ground and i just ripped them out with a digger with a rock grab on it, pushed brash in to heaps and burnt, only thing i can say is, its a young mans sport on them bankings,

Hi mine was due at the begining of lockdown but i left it as could not get hold of anyone to renew, so held off a while and had a ring round on one of them wet days, the result was quite rewarding for me, now 95% of our work is in the middle of nowhere in commercial forestry so i would say very low risk but who i was with still wanted £750+ per anum, so renewed mine about 3 wk ago and got better cover than before as added digger use to it and got it for £264 so a nice saving for me, Insurance co will have your arse out if you let em and the thing that gets me is PL insuranc v van/pick up insurance, for the £750 my old PL insurance co wanted i can insure a Nissan Cabstar tipper, L200 pick up, 2 tractors and a 1 tonne high lift dumper and have still have enough change fir a pint or 2 out of original wanted £750, have a shop about it may pay you to do it,

Yes its so easy to insult and slag people off from afar on line, but would they say it if they where stood infront of you ? i very much dought it, I personally am loosing interest in this site all for the above reasons you mentioned, and if you look through the posts there is a few dissapeared of late all for the reasons you mention,

The lad is asking for help,and willing to pay, in a recent post he was asking for weekend work to gain experiance and addmitted he has only been in the game 12 months, he has been honest and by the name he is 21/22 yr old, when i went self employed back in 83, yes i ****************ed up on prices and yes took jobs on far bigger than i could manage but with outside help got them done, one or two people i asked for help gave me grief and took the piss, and to hear what they said made me feel a little insecure about what i was doing, so why do some people have to take the piss ? was you not young and inexpieranced at some point in your life because i was, now i will take time out to pass my knollage on to the younger lads no problem, if this lad was nearer to me i would not think twice about helping him out, life is not all about heaps money, a few very unfair comments on this post which are not good for the site and its not that long since someone rang me and said it was not the same site any more as there has been some very good genuine expieranced old school lads who are a welth of knollage on this site who just dont bother with the site any more, why ??? i could name quite a few who have either left or dont bother anymore who will have forgot more about the tree game than some lads on here claim to know and there is one or two that have dissapeared of late as well, so go easy,

I didnt claim owt of the government, had 3 wk at home sorting a building out at the start which i just so as a holiday ,since then been out felling trees, moving timber, selling timber and fencing, and then this last week when i thought my work was coming to a end the phone went mad, can you do some more walling, local council want some trees sorting out on a playing field, can you come and sort some windblown out, can i get some timber off you and hears me thinking when tides where getting right wed onward,s i was going out to sea in my boat fishing for a day or 2 but thats gone tits up now, so this next wk has gone from nowt to over full in 48hrs 5 sites to go to and look at some walling, another site with about 20 windblown spruce, working with another lad on tues, delivering some timber either thursday or friday, so thats my week filled now and probably the next 4 or 5,