agg221

I used to keep bees, until I discovered I suffered from anaphalactic shock (never got stung by my own bees though!) There are an increasing number of diseases around, which means a regular care regime. You also want a known queen with known tendencies - get one with a swarm and it's pot luck. The queen passes her tendencies on to all her worker bees, so it controls whether the hive is aggressive, or whether the bees follow you down the garden after you've been working with them. Starting with a swarm and then buying a replacement queen is the common low cost route (buying the whole colony is very expensive). I would say the best bet is to track down your local branch of the British Bee-Keeping Association as they're likely to have an apiary and at this time of year it's where the meetings will be. It gives you a good way to see what they do, how much effort is involved and whether you like it. Certainly the one near me was very hands-on for visitors if they wanted it. It's ultimately your best route to a swarm-derived colony too, when everyone has as many as they want, and they may have a selection of books to borrow. The kit can be expensive. The hives themselves come in various standard sizes - they vary in likely yield, how heavy the boxes are when full and how vigorous the colony needs to be to sustain it. If you're handy with woodwork and have a router, making your own is straightforward - see if you can get some cedar for the boxes and spruce for the frames, then buy the wax foundation that the bees draw out into cells for storing honey or breeding young. You will also need a smoker and overalls/protective gear. If you get a yield, you will need to extract the honey. Again, worth seeing if the local club hires out an extractor as it's an expensive, bulky thing to have sitting around for one or two outings a year. One thing, get two hives rather than one. It's easy to split them then and keep continuity if one colony gets wiped out. Alec

I think it's horses for courses. It definitely cuts faster when sharp, but the combination cutters are more fiddly to field sharpen. If you bring trees home to mill, and have a couple of loops to switch between, it's probably a good option in time saved - if you regard time as money, or have limited time for it as a hobby and want to get the most possible done in short bursts. If however you don't have your own extraction gear and everything you mill involves going out for the day, lugging the lot half a mile in a wheelbarrow then I prefer the simplicity of 10deg each side and a quick touch-up as I go along. Alec

5-10 years ago I would have agreed with you entirely, however today I'm not so sure. If you look at the factors involved, it's a combination of quality control on the alloy (affects thermal conductivity and strength), coating (affects thermal conductivity and wear) and casting tolerance (particularly affects cooling as the fins are most affected) and machining tolerances (affects compression and, to a minor extent, compressed volume). There are many threads on here bemoaning the decline in quality of saws from the big name manufacturers, and I think it's reasonable to assume this arises from a cost driver, which will be passed back to their Tier 1 suppliers, possibly at the price of cutting corners, which could apply to each of the above. Meanwhile, 5-10yrs ago I think the majority of chinese copies would probably have been dodgy to say the least, both in quality of metal and in precision of finishing. Chinese manufacturing has now come on enormously in all respects - a lot of medical devices are now manufactured there, as are an increasing number of aerospace components and, as an aside, so are Omega watches. As such, I would no longer be certain which represented the higher quality product. There's also the point that most people couldn't actually measure power (unless you're set up to do it, e.g. building race saws). For most users it would be masked by factors such as chain and bar condition anyway, along with accurate tach tuning for peak revs relative to altitude and air pressure etc. I suspect that within the tolerances involved here, it would be indistinguishable. Sorry, derailed your thread a bit! Alec

I've been considering something better than resting logs on other bits of logs but one thing I've been wondering about - with the sawhorse type the log rests along its length, so you can cut right to the end. With the other types that grip the log at a single point, what do you do when you get to the stubby bit to make the last couple of cuts? Alec

In answer to your questions in order: You could fit a 47mm kit. It would give a little bit more power, but I really wouldn't bother unless you're going for a race saw. For a general slogger, the power increase will be negligible, and non-standard makes life unnecessarily complicated if you're ever looking for more parts in the future. In your bottom picture, if you look at the face that bolts onto the crankcase, you can see the two pairs of channels (left and right of the image) through which the mix is transferred from the crankcase to the chamber above the piston. These channels are the transfer ports. These particular ports are closed, in that they are box-section channels with cylinder bore wall enclosing them. If the bit of cylinder wall that caps them off was removed, making them into 'U-channels' then they would be open. No definitive knowledge of auto-decompressors, but if you can get a cylinder without one then yes, fitting a normal decompression valve (or a plug if you decompression valves as much as I do!) then that should do the trick. Alec

In my experience, prices vary widely. Note that there's a bit more timber there than you're asking for out of it - you could get 2x beams and 3x planks of the dimensions you're talking about, and it might be worth skimming a couple more planks off the sides at say 4x2. You should be able to get it milled easily in 2hrs by someone with a small bandmill who knows what they're doing and works out an efficient cutting sequence. Take that up to half a day for someone who doesn't. I've seen day rates of £350 and hourly rates of £40 lately, so that gives you a range of about £80 to £175. The above figures assume you don't value your time of course - if you do, then you might want to consider bringing someone to site to do it. You'll have their travel time to add rather than yours, so it depends how far they're coming, but will save loading/unloading time, and can take it straight to where you want to stack it after milling. I wouldn't do this one with a chainsaw mill myself - it would be too inefficient. Whereabouts in Norfolk are you? Alec

I do ours with a fine mesh landing net, skimmed across the surface. Very boring job, but keeps it down. Alec

I don't normally reply to these threads, but I thought I would in an attempt to correct a few misconceptions. 1. It's coming up to midnight. My wife is still marking exam papers. She will hopefully finish by 12.30. Tomorrow morning she will leave for work at 7.30. This is normal. This is not a very good hourly rate on a £30k salary. 2. Teachers are a year in to a two year pay freeze. This follows a three year deal of sub-inflationary pay rises. In real terms, income has gone backwards for the past four years and is set to do so for at least another year. Given the above, she can't just work a few more hours or take on an extra job to make up the difference. 3. She signed up to a deal - Ts & Cs, which included a pension, which has already been retrospectively devalued by changing the index it will be linked to when she retires. Pensions work by having a 'pot' which is big enough to cover their liabilities. The teachers' pension pot has been carefully invested over the years. They didn't take pension holidays when a lot of private sector workers did in the 1990s and it is therefore big enough to cover its liabilities (or at least it was when last valued, revaluation now being conveniently a year overdue) - it therefore doesn't need 'subsidising' by anyone else's taxes. True, the government puts in a contribution - it's about the same contribution as most private sector employers make, and soon may well be legally obliged to make, on behalf of their employees. 4. This does not apply to other public sector workers, most significantly the Whitehall based civil service, which has no pension pot and whose pensions are therefore directly paid in full by taxes. This isn't meant to inflame the debate, but to hopefully inform it. Alec

Cherry often produces resin of this type in response to bacterial canker. It suggests there may have been a pocket of it somewhere in the tree, which is now gradually seeping out. It is surprisingly insoluble, except in hot water. Alec

Whereabouts are you? Alec

Spudulike is your man really, but he's away this week. I have used a couple from Garden Hire Spares - they're on ebay but also have their own website. So far they've been excellent. There are real people on the end of the phone if you prefer it to the website, and I've never had a delivery later than next day (even when I ordered at 3pm on a Friday!) In terms of quality, they get the significance of A, B or AB sizes and offer a 1yr guarantee. With the first one I bought, for an 044 on a mill, I pointed out that it would be working hard and they said that didn't worry them - so far no problems and I've had the muffler off to check. Compression (measured by gauge) was good too, so no sizing issues. I know Spudulike uses the ones from Mr Solutions on ebay too, and has had no quality issues that I'm aware of, but I haven't found him so easy to get hold of (I did buy an 051 pot and piston from him as he seems to have some of the more obscure stuff, but I haven't run it long enough make comment yet). In summary, I reckon they're fine. They may wear out a bit quicker, but genuine is five times the price and I bet they don't last five times as long! With regard to your other question, it really depends how bad it is. If it's bad, no it won't fire. If there's damage to the pot as well as the piston then it almost certainly seized, which I would lay odds on as the reason for scrapping it. Alec p.s. don't throw the pot away unless you can clearly see that plating has been ripped off of it - I strongly suggest dropping Spudulike a PM as it may well be recoverable at a lot less cost than a new one.

I've had mine about 18mnths. I've had the Alaskan about 13yrs I think, but most of what I need is plain constructional oak, in reasonable quantity, for boats and now the house, and I got fed up with milling 1-2ft wide x 20ft long planks with it as it took too long and the kerf was too wide, so I stopped using it and hired in a sawyer with portable band mill when I needed it. I've now got access to a regular supply, and bought the Ripsaw as I couldn't extract them. I've used it fairly heavily by my standards over the last winter - probably run about 50l of fuel through it. To put that in context, when I was milling the spruce it did about 8off 14ft x 8in average width boards to the tank of an 044 (0.9l?). This took about 20mins and each board was a 90second cut (I timed them). I'm milling the timber for a 12x12ft extension at the moment - joists, rafters and beams for the first and second floor openings, (the spruce is the floorboards for the first floor). I reckon it will need about 5off 2ft dia x 20ft long butts, which will take me about 3 days work (partly due to trying to get perfectly square beams which is much more fiddly than slabbing) - I would estimate it would have been over double with the 066M on the Alaskan and used an extra butt in sawdust! Where it's really come into its own though is that with a simple tilt jig I've milled a load of feather edge cladding, 8in width and tapering from 3/8th to 7/8th (to be planed down to 1/4 to 3/4 taper once dried). I don't think there is -any- other way of doing this so efficiently, since it's even higher yielding than the traditional way of splitting square sawn planks on the diagonal. In summary, it's made milling the sort of timber I use pleasurable again! You do need the Alaskan with it though, as you say, to break logs down first. I'll have a look for a CE mark. Alec p.s. I've done the cost calculations too, and they do stack up, but I'll leave it for now as this has become a rather long answer to a short question!

It could be the sap - there were certainly a couple of pockets where it felt like milling in water, very strange sensation. It was also much worse the further I got from quarter sawing - the outermost boards were really bad. The small bandsaw is a Ripsaw - the chainsaw mounted one. I really like it for production speed and efficiency of kerf - I reckon I can nearly keep up with a normal portable mill. Unfortunately though they're currently only available from the US - I think you should start importing them to complement the Alaskan so I could get the bits more easily! Alec

You're asking a lot of it, certainly. With a picco chain on, you'll probably get away with it in the short term. Alec

Oddly enough, in my experience it's the other way around. Mine uses 0.75" wide bands, 0.050" thick and has a 14" opening. I mostly mill oak and find it doesn't wander by more than about +/-1mm across a cut with a fresh band. I've been milling some spruce lately and it wanders by a good 2mm. I've also found that a Forester bandmill with a 4" band about 2.5mm thick and a 3ft opening is quite capable of climbing or diving as much as a quarter of an inch if it feels so inclined as the blade starts to dull. By contrast, running a stringline over a 14ft length of spruce milled with the Alaskan the other weekend it didn't vary by more than +/-1mm (plus the depth of the ridges). I can't see any particular logic to what is easy or hard to mill. I wondered if it related to whether things were easy or hard to cleave, but it doesn't seem to. Alec

I haven't tried a mini-mill - I have heard reports that it can be tricky to control the bar tip to avoid wobble, but the thread on here about the log cabin suggests it comes out OK. The Alaskan is a rigid frame, so if you keep an eye on everything at once and make sure the frame doesn't lift off the rail you end up with pretty good accuracy. The surface finish will require some planing off. Small bandsaws are worse - the band is more likely to follow the grain, whereas a chainsaw bar doesn't get the option! You're not going to have a lot of power to play with on a 361. I recall some discussion on one of the US forums regarding use of low power saws, about 10yrs ago, and it seems OK but you need to minimise the work you're asking your saw to do, which means reducing the kerf to a minimum. The one thing in your favour is that with low power saws like this you can run picco chain (the bigger saws just break it!). I would suggest looking at a 24 or 25in bar, with a 0.050" groove and picco chain sprocket. You would also need to fit the appropriate picco sprocket to your clutch - get a spur one rather than a rim one as they last better for milling. You can't buy picco ripping chain to the best of my knowledge, but re-filing at 10degrees rather than the normal 30 will give you a good approximation. I would also leave the rakers a bit high to start with and take them down a bit at a time so it 'bites' but doesn't bog down. I would probably still buy a 36in mill though, as if you get hooked you'll want it, and you can pull the rails in a bit until you do. With that lot, you should just about get a 20in cut. I would de-bark any logs to keep the chain away from grit and dust, which tends to dull it in the cut - you'll notice it far more with the low power. It will definitely be slow, but your interests suggest you don't necessarily need long timber. I would try to work with 4-8ft length logs, which will give you decent lengths allowing for a bit of end shake, and you will probably get through in a tank of fuel. Just my thoughts. Alec

Hi, I'll venture an opinion on your questions - sure others will too. What do you want the posts for? Ash really isn't durable outside. Its a fairly high strength wood for its weight, and isn't inclined to break in brittle fashion, hence its use for tool handles etc. It has a very pronounced open grain, so tends to quickly look 'dirty' if used for interior flooring or similar. Your selected equipment of a 660 with a 36" bar would do the job quite satisfactorily (that's what I use). In milling, more power is better, and ash can be particularly hard to mill, so an 880 would be better than a 660, and more torque is better still so an 076 or 090 would be ideal. The latter two are obsolete models so you certainly won't find them for hire, and to be honest I would be surprised if you could find the other two available as they're very large displacement saws and don't fit the normal domestic hire market. Buying and moving it on afterwards is a viable option, but you are unlikely to make your money back. To be honest, you are likely lose more than by just buying the timber. The only way I think you might not make a loss would be to scan ebay for an 075 or 076 (076 is preferable as the starter parts are easier to get) in working order with suitable length bar. Geography is on your side, as there seem to be a reasonable number that turn up in Yorkshire, and this model is pretty robust and so heavy that many of them haven't been abused on a daily basis. I would go and see it, check it starts, idles and runs up, oils properly (including the auxiliary oiler button) and run a cut through a nice big piece of wood. Prices on saws are seasonal and we're entering the lowest dip so you stand a chance of getting one for about £250 if the seller insists on cash on collection. If you are ready to sell in about October you will probably get about £300 for it, which will offset the cost of a ripping chain at about £30. To be honest, I would advertise the mill and ripping chain on here (if you've literally only run it through one tree, not hit any nails and send a photo to show how minimal the wear is I'll happily buy the chain for £25 inc. postage). I would cut the posts straight out as posts. If you want an accurate size as finished, I'd make them slightly oversize, say 6.5in square, and then run them through a planer-thicknesser once dry. This will take about 6yrs if you're air drying! Hope this helps. Alec

Maybe. I've got various bits around that size - I've been milling 1.5in for boat gunwhales and decking over the past few years and I really want 10in widths x 10ft lengths for the next bit, so I may have a few smaller bits that could be spared. They're air-dried outside, probably for about 5yrs, so are pretty stable now. If he's serious, and has a good idea of the going rate, then let me know and I'll pull the stack apart tomorrow and see if I have four that would do it. Alec

I know I may have a vacant look, but it's going in honestly I thought you'd gone already, otherwise I'd have left this to the master! I reckon my money is on the carb boot. This is due to the combination of it being an older saw so more likely to be cracked or perished, having been worked on recently so more likely to have been disturbed and because it sounds like it came on suddenly and was immediately very extreme - suggests it didn't fail gradually while the engine was running which I would have expected of a bearing seal or crankcase seal. If it had come on gradually I would have expected it to have either been picked up as a climbing engine note, or not noticed resulting in seizure. For the same reasons, second choice from Spudulike's list would be blockage in the carb. Be interesting to see if I'm right. Alec

Hmmm, Spudulike is in Baldock - not the closest. Afraid I don't know anyone up your way. Alec

Yes the stuff near London (assuming you get it) and it's near London in a relative sense to you - Bedford way I think. the trees I'm currently doing are near the M11, Duxford Junction, so quite convenient to get from one to the other. Alec

If you're passing my way in the nearish future (I gather you may be, given your interest in the yew on the other thread) and fancy a go at something of reasonable size, give me a shout, as I have a decent size oak butt (approx 3ft x 14ft long) to break down. It'll probably be the 066M, or I might have got suitable bar-chain combination together to give the 076 another run. You're also welcome to a play with the Ripsaw at the same time if you feel so inclined. Alec

Sounds like it's running very lean, then when you pull the trigger it's so lean it won't even run. Those are symptoms of an air leak. If it's recently repaired, I'd be looking at whether the carb boot was refitted properly and sealed at each end. I would then look over the boot thoroughly for cracks and splits. The other source of leaks is the crank case, through the gasket or the bearing seals, but testing that is trickier and unless you want to make a habit of it, I'd get someone else to. Mine go to Spudulike on here for thorough diagnosis and testing - very thorough and makes a point of looking for things that are likely to go wrong in the future. Whereabouts are you? Alec

QUOTE=yewhunter18;493391]Ahh I see £380 alot of money for an experiment Hi Lee, yes that's what I was driving at - 7ft bars are expensive, as is a 7ft chain, as a combination to the point where if you're buying new it's probably more than the saw! As such, it's pretty much the case that if you can afford the bar and chain then you can afford pretty much any powerhead going... In my case, I simply can't justify it, which is why I went down the slightly smaller route. The other main issue with the 084 is that the pot and piston are one of the very few which aren't available aftermarket, which means Stihl, which means paying more than the saw is worth to repair it if you ever have a problem. This is where the 075 and 076 score heavily in my opinion - the powerheads don't command the premium of the 090 or 880, it had a very long production run (best part of 35yrs) so there are plenty of spares about and you can get aftermarket parts. Hence in your situation, which has some parallels with mine except I don't have a need for very wide boards, I would be inclined to start with one 075 or 076 powerhead and run a fairly long bar, say 4ft. I could use this to freehand quarter up to around 8ft (which is pretty much anything you'll find in the UK) and then plank it up in up to 3ft6 widths, which is about as wide as you can move without heavy lifting gear, if they're you're typical 3in thick, 8ft long type. However, that's just my opinion, so I wouldn't take it too seriously if you fancy going a completely different route Alec p.s. I touch type at about 100wpm - about the only useful thing I got from one of my lecturers who insisted that all essays were typed. I decided that across the course of the year it would take less time to learn to touch type than to type them one fingered. Hence longish replies don't take too much effort!

The gear drive saws are the ultimate for milling because of the torque as mentioned but I tend to agree that I would want something more modern for regular milling because of parts availability. Power is a combination of torque and revs. Older saws tend to have more of the latter, less of the former, so they won't bog down in wide cuts (even without skip chain). If you are seriously considering very long bars, have you considered double powerhead based set-ups using 076/075 (same thing, different label). They're a good compromise on torque/revs, very durable and have good parts availability, both OEM and pattern, as the TS760 (disk cutter version) only went out of production a couple of years back? This also gets round the problem of the auxiliary oiler. If you've read the Malhoff book you'll have seen the set-ups for pulling the mill through the log with a hand winch on the end of the log, which is how you run a twin powerhead set-up singlehanded. Never tried it myself - I stick to things under about 3ft for preference as life's too short for that much chainsaw milling! Alec