AHPP

On a slight tangent, I’ve often thought a briquette maker would be a handy thing to have. Yields a product with some shape and structure to it so can burn in conventional log burners (probably easier/cheaper for you to acquire and rig up for a small kiln - unless you’re planning a bigger operation, in which case maybe a dedicated sawdust burner is better for you). One of my plans for my own firewood at home is getting a briquette machine (proper one, auger type, looks like a giant sausage maker) and putting it in the back of a van or box trailer. I’d do a round of local joinery shops, have them dump their (bone dry) dust into my machine hopper and use their electricity to extrude briquettes into the van/trailer. I’d then park the van/trailer near the house door and take them straight to the log basket until the trailer’s empty. No cutting, no splitting, no storage, minimal handling. I think the machines were about two grand when I last daydreamed about it and a 3.5 tonne horsebox would do for the trailer element. They’ve even got front and back doors for loading and unloading.

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.

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.

Quality

The .gov in the URL.

I do that too. Far greener to not have to have replacement parts made and transported etc.

A bloke on youtube wrapped some meat in jeans, t-shirts etc to see how lethal a .22LR was at different ranges. Would be interesting to test your 50 odd meters hypothesis like that. Hitting the target with the ricochet would be the tricky bit unless you used a massive curtain instead of a lump of meat. I reckon a tumbling 40 grain .22 would go through a lorry curtain at 50 odd meters.

Have you got a more credible source?

That's the thing that usually triggers my suspicion. Do you know of a test I can do in the field to confirm (say >95% certainty)?

Are there any specific signs/indicators/giveaways for ash dieback or is it an elephant test (hard to describe but you know one when you see one)?

Mike's absolutely right. The popularity of .17 rimfires is inversely proportionate to how good they are, all thanks to regulators who know fuck all. Back on topic for difflock, low power for plinking is great. Safer for obvious reasons and loopy trajectories give the satisfaction of judging distance, working out your drops etc without having to walk or drive hundreds of metres. The most fun shooting I've had was with a 12 ft/lb .22 PCP, smashing mints and bottle tops.

duplicate delete

The geographically inept drive me mad. Grid references, lat/long, what3words, phone screenshots of the map app (that they all come with) with a pointer dropped where to park your car. Mobile phones can navigate you to anywhere on the planet within metres. Some apps will give you an arrow to follow. All of that is in everybody's pocket all the time and they still telephone to say they're outside the Co-Op and is it left or right? I could have delivered a pizza to Osama Bin Laden's cave when I was twelve thanks to no more than the haphazard instruction of my scout leaders. Adults have no excuse.