AHPP

It may be more than your first machine cost but it will probably be less than the total of the next few machines you buy. Think of it like a section commander having seven men with different jobs working under him.

Mum’s Alsatian pole axed me on a verge once. I stepped round with my right leg out to look behind to see where she was and at that exact moment she was in the process of passing me at full tilt. Right in the side of the knee. Went flying. Probably looked funny. Didn’t feel funny.

You remind me of a bat trainer I did a seminar with once. He delighted in telling us we should have ‘due regard to’ and ‘proper procedures in place for’ ‘PBRs’ and other acronyms he thought made him sound superior. And he delighted himself further by steadfastly avoiding giving straight answers to questions like, “So let’s say that ash might have bats in. Could I cut that chestnut down then?” He didn’t give a fuck about what was right/wrong, good/bad etc. He just wanted to throw confusing and contradictory stuff out there, get paid and be back next year with updated jargon and a bigger bill.

Who was it?

Charfest in Dorset? Men with beards gather and share stories of getting taxpayers to fund economically unviable things. People don't want to buy biochar. They want to buy scratchcards.

Well written. I laughed.

I was only coming on this thread to congratulate whoever posted this incisive piece of social commentary. It shows up on the new posts page with the thread title. Yet more fine work. I should have known the author.

A member on here (based in Lancashire, can’t remember his name, hasn’t posted in ages) has a system of willow coppards for his chickens that I thought looked pretty good. He cuts the willow trees at waist height. They coppice/pollard/coppard (cut them and they grow back vigorously, multiple stems). They provide shade as they grow for a few years and the chickens wander round underneath them. He then cuts and chips the new growth onto the ground. Repeat in another few years and/or do some different ones next year. Apparently willow has some antiseptic qualities that are good for staving off feather rot etc.

How does one get money for carbon offsetting in the UK? As far as I'm aware, we don't have state run cap and trade.

I laughed.

Thanks for posting. I think I know him as Sam. I was talking to him about some climbing. Can’t find messages etc but pretty sure it was in the last six months. I’ll have another dig about the phone and laptop for more info.

MattyF has posted on here about one he made from carbon fibre sheet. I made one from a solid lump of wood, more in the spirit of the original than as a serious tool though. Sheet material and pins/bolts/sleeves/bushes will be better. There'll be build/design stuff online, probably on the American arb forums. The way I'd approach the design would be to copy pin locations (maybe spaced a tiny bit differently to account for your 13mm rope or maybe even with an adjustable pin, either by filing a slot from one of the holes or having different sized sleeves/bushes) from pictures of commercially available ones and fabricate out of whatever you like to fabricate things out of. I'd print a picture of it, stick it to the sheet material and cut and drill to that template. I'd probably make the outside shape (not massively important to functionality) something novel so it looks ragtag and cowboy. You might prefer to just copy the original of course. I've not made a tether. I'd probably use rope/tape sheathed in some kind of hosepipe.

I'd use it. Make your rope wrench big enough and then you can use it as a rigging wrench later if you make the tether strong enough (quite easy).

Is it cutting a curve and the bar binding?

Buy a foot ascender. In the unlikely event you don't get on with SRT, it's still useful for double rope. I think the Climbing Technology one I have was only £35 ish new. You'd be utterly mad to climb SRT without a foot ascender. You'd still be fairly mad to climb double without one of course. Make a rope wrench and stiff tether to go above your existing hitch. They're not PPE so only need to be strong enough to hold a kink in the rope to take some friction off your main hitch. You can relegate the DIY stuff to a grappling hook line if you don't like it and/or later buy proper stuff for your main system.