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If you weren't being paid for it, but were simply taking the tree down for your own benefit as logs, you could do it under your household contents insurance. This covers pretty much anything you may wish to do with a chainsaw unpaid (and is how I am covered for my own felling/milling for my own use). Alec

Depends which sort of sharpener you get. Rob's one is on the bar; some types are freehand (particularly the very cheap ones) so it doesn't matter, others are bench mounted (these ones usually use a large diameter wheel and cut on the side face, rather than small stones that cut on the diameter) and need the chain off the bar. Alec

Hi Tony, I bought mine from the US along with a load of other bits and pieces. They were actually bought for doing bandsaw blades but have held up well on chains too. They came from here: Ripsaw portable sawmills - Shopping Alec

I do like the grinder Rob sells - even chains on a 4ft bar can be done fairly quickly. I would like to get some CBN or diamond stones for it though so the diameter is maintained constantly for more sharpens. I use diamond stones for my Oregon grinder and they hold up really nicely. Alec

"Chainsaw Lumbermaking" by Will Malloff. Original hardback copy. I can finally stop borrowing it from the library! Alec

Whereabouts are you, and can you put up some pictures? Alec

Larch is a softwood. It's reasonably durable outside, but that's the heartwood, not the sapwood. It is reasonably strong and hard, and has long grain so it tends to move a bit - a bit like oak or sweet chestnut. It was used for pit props and miners trusted it, so it's pretty reasonable for strength and durability. Alec

The mould, otherwise known as blue stain, is likely to go quite deep. You could try sanding it but if it won't go within an acceptable depth then either letting it all go silver or applying a dark woodstain or paint are your best options. It doesn't have any structural significance though and mould or greying is pretty much inevitable on unpainted or unvarnished timber used outside. Alec

Having run an 064 and an 066, both run very hard for milling on a 36" bar, you can definitely feel the difference. The 066 was noticeably more powerful. I can't say how that would equate to ringing up for example, but I would imagine after a day of it you would notice the advantage. I can't comment on the husky I'm afraid. Alec

I was wondering what to serve with Christmas dinner this year - looks like I'm sorted. Alec

Big J has already commented that wood takes the water back up again, but this is only to a certain extent. The structure of wood is like a big bundle of tiny drinking straws all bundled together. The straws have little membranes across them every few mm, which partially block them. They also have small holes running between adjacent straws. These holes (lumens) allow liquids to pass through. In the living cell structure, if there is damage within a straw, the membranes above and below can be closed off, allowing fluids to pass to adjacent straws which helps the tree to keep all its cells functioning and stops it from bleeding to death under the high osmotic pressures involved in transporting fluids 100ft up in the air. These membranes, both within the straw and in the lumens, are soft and act like flexible diaphragms. When they dry out they change irreversably and become permanently shut. This typically happens at about 12% moisture content. Hence, once you have dropped the wood below this figure, water uptake is much slower as it can't get in so quickly. This is a slight generalization, as obviously wood can still take up water so they aren't a complete seal, and in some species (notably radiata pine from New Zealand) they are absent, but the principle is generally correct. Hope this explanation helps! Alec

I would second Geoff's comments - a further consideration is the almost infinite life of a decent quality petrol saw with the use you'll give it, relative to the lifetime of a battery, which will get progressively worse with each charge cycle and will ultimately give up, probably just after they have become obsolete and unobtainable. By contrast, parts for many petrol saws remain pretty much available forever (you can still buy the key parts for a Stihl Contra from the early 1960s). You are doing something pretty simple and repetitive in cutting firewood, so personally I wouldn't go for training to the level of tickets. Sharpening and maintenance are simple principles and the former is a skill acquired through practice, the latter by reading the manual! Someone to show you what to do would be advisable though - this is how I learned. Good PPE is always worth it - chaps are cheaper than trousers and not too cumbersome when you're ground based and fairly static. If you do get a petrol saw then ear defenders are also advisable. Alec

Also worth noting that not everyone in the UK is formally trained/qualified. A private individual can buy and operate any chainsaw they like without paperwork. They can't always buy it new via a dealer due restrictions imposed by the manufacturer, but there's nothing illegal about buying a saw from ebay and using it. If it's not for hire or reward you are covered in the UK under a standard household contents policy, even if you use it on someone else's land (with permission). The limitation is more when you want to work on certain sites, get certain jobs or be covered by certain commercial insurance policies which may impose restrictions. Alec

I'm not sure that you always do. So far as I can see, there are two possible sources of buds - you're either initiating growth from dormant buds which formed as the tree grew, or you're relying on the ability of callus tissue to form different structural elements - my understanding is that both of these are hormonally driven. Woody species tend to show strong apical dominance, which is hormonally driven. If you disrupt the flow just above a bud, you get a concentration which can force the bud to break. When used on fruit trees this is typically on small shoots where you can see the buds. Working on the assumption that no new buds are formed on a stem after it has grown, you can reckon on a bud every, say 3-10cm vertically along a stem, with semi-random radial placement. If you then consider the same stem as a branch of say 30cm dia you are looking at very large surface area (up to 0.1m2) to try to guess where to hit to force the bud to break. This would be consistent with a low success rate from wounding. However, it would also suggest that horizontal cuts would have a greater success rate, since you would get better disruption to hormone flow. A wider cut would also be statistically more likely to hit the right spot. Years ago I did my school work experience in the propagation department at East Malling - this was during the advent of micropropagation. The process can use any soft vegetative stem tissue (needs to be capable of callusing). You build up this horrible looking lump of callus - looks like a mini-tumor. You can then literally stick it in a blender if you want more bits, and can grow thousands of tiny blobs of tissue in a very short time, all sat on agar jelly. Once you have got them big enough, you change the hormonal environment and they start producing buds, then shoots, then roots, and you have a plant. This suggests that if the hormonal environment is right you can get growth from any point, irrespective of the presence of a latent bud. This may show less dependency on cut orientation, although there still may be some if you need a particular form of disruption. It should be possible to distinguish this though by statistical probability - more of the tree will be in the right position to promote callus tissue than the probability of hitting the right spot for a latent bud, so you should see a much higher success rate. It will be interesting to see how it develops. This is definitely true today, but it hasn't always been. Earlier practice was to use crab stock and grow big trees, which survived centuries and definitely became veteran, since the middle usually rotted out. There is therefore a reasonable amount of literature on the subject from this era - it's not very collated but, for example, there are some indicative points in Evelyn's Sylva (1669 first edition, much more comprehensive in the expanded third edition of 1679 which includes Pomona) and I recall there being something specifically on mulberries in Culture des Muriers (Nismes, 1763). There is also a bit in The Gardener's Assistant which dates from the 1880s and it became necessary again during WW2 as part of the dig for victory campaign - Raymond Bush wrote some guides which were collated in one volume. For what it's worth, apples have a habit of spreading as a series of tiered branches as they grow. If they're not maintained the lower tiers tend to die off, leaving you with a tree on a stick. Because they pollard well the easiest thing to do is chop the top off at the desired height and form a new head, but you can force new growth using the axe technique. I've only done it to two trees, and it worked on one of about five or six cuts made. Alec

My wife gave me that for my birthday earlier this week. CDs have been in the car, volume has been very loud Currently watching BBC4, but not as good as Bon Scott. I reckon one of the funniest videos I've seen is here: [ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VlRUIHwygc]AC/DC - Baby Please Don't Go - YouTube[/ame] Alec

In East Anglia there's a lot of Plot elm, which sets fertile seed. It also hybridizes with the English elm and produces fertile hybrids. This creates a broader gene pool. There appear to be varying degrees of resistance - some trees can get to a decent size - 100ft, 2ft dia, then succumb. There's a row near me of about seven trees, all around 2ft6-3ft dia. One of them got it in 2010, and has come back strongly. Two more got it this year. It will be interesting to see what happens next year. If they all come back, I think it's a fair certainty that this particular population is highly resistant. I know of half a dozen more very large trees in this area that are doing similarly well, surrounded by dead hedgerow trees of about 25ft. The real challenge is that to demonstrate this level of resistance simply through survival you are waiting 50+ years. There are a lot of other things that result in trees not making it to that age in a non-rural location. Once trees get very large, so you can be confident that they are truly resistant, they are into old age anyway so other causes of death become likely. The challenge is in encouraging the spread of genetic diversity, derived from resistant populations. You can propagate elm vegetatively from cuttings, which at least helps build up the resistant population by planting them widely. Assuming these are also fertile you then enhance the overall population through breeding of resistant populations. There are a couple of reasonable sized elms where I work (18" dia) which are highly likely to be felled next year as part of a building regeneration scheme. This is the type of thing which is more likely to take out resistant populations than anything else - rather akin to the panic felling of large numbers of ash trees. I am hoping that the trees can be left up until June and I can then propagate like mad to preserve this particular genetic strain. I might end up with a house full of cuttings at this rate! Alec

Thought I'd update this as I know there are a few people on here in the relevant area. Apparently the current operation has been running for a few weeks - gone through Ashen, Halstead etc, along the Essex/Suffolk border. We're the furthest out so far, but Clare, Yeldham etc are obvious next directions. It's a white transit-sized van, working during the day. They're only going for sheds, not houses, and only when the shed is totally out of line of sight from any neighbouring houses - they're not doing garages that front onto the road. One of them wears size 6 Reeboks. Targets are petrol-driven garden equipment - mowers, rotavators, hedge trimmers, chainsaws. Apparently there are two classic patterns of operation. One is to come back within the week, the other is to come back after about 3 months (when insurance has paid out and new kit bought). No sign yet of them coming straight back to any of the people hit, although of course they may just not have found anything, but it does suggest the latter pattern. Alec

Maybe - we'll see what they say when the forms turn up. Meantime, if you spot either an 090 or 076 for sale do let me know. I've got detailed photos of both, and they've got long bars on (076 has ripping chain too) so they won't exactly make convenient firewood saws and I reckon they'll be back on the market pretty soon. One of the thieves wore size 6 Reebok trainers, both wore gloves, so there isn't much to go on, but apparently there's been a bit of a spate of it round here lately. Alec

Stolen, along with the 090 and the Alaskan.

Yes. It's the 'using it quite a bit' aspect. Unless your average log diameter is around 18in or less, anything smaller is going to become the rate limiting step to how much you mill, and do so very quickly. I milled quite a lot of oak at around 2ft dia using an 064 and then an 066, typically straight stuff at around 20ft length. A cut would take up to about 25mins once I got to the middle, meaning a refuel, so either dragging saw right out or filling on its side, which means you can't fill right up so you need a second refuel. This meant an all-in time per board of over half an hour. I was typically cutting 2in thickness, so getting about 8 boards per tree. What with setting up time etc, a tree like that would take a day, and I would be done in by the end of it. Using the 076 (well, until yesterday ) I could make the same cut in about 7mins, on a single tank of fuel. That means producing way more per day, and being less shattered at the end of it. Rate of cut is very much not linear with cc's for some reason. Alec

Yes it should, very slightly. Whereas with a sprocket nose you tweak it up until the chain is stiff and then slacken off just enough that the chain pulls round freely, with a hard nose you tweak it up just enough that the chain is fully seated in the bar rails. It's particularly hard to get right on a long bar, or if the sprocket is a little worn. Alec

I think you may be right - shoe size about 6. Must have needed a car to get it away though. Alec

Cheers All, It's slightly odd - more for what they didn't nick, and walked straight over/past. I can only think that someone came down the road and they decided perhaps it wasn't quite as quiet along our road as they thought it was, or that they felt they had been there long enough what with every trip up to the road by hand, lugging something heavy. Nothing they didn't take is where it was, and the access route they used, which is pretty much the only route, is now no longer accessible thanks to an unravelled roll of barbed wire. Now I have to see whether insurance will pay up or wriggle out of it. Alec

They weren't laying about, but they weren't targetted - the other things that went were a couple of rolls of lead for the extension, so I reckon it was people of the mobile disposition. You can only hand carry anything in and out of our place. On the plus side, the 076 is not very happy so it's saved it going on a trip to Spud. Alec

OK, if anyone spots a mid-1980s 090AV with an old, tatty 28" Stihl bar, or a mid-1980s 076AV with a very new looking 47" Stihl Duromatic bar and ripping chain on it, still bolted to an Alaskan mill, please let me know. The mill has the front post missing. Cheers Alec