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I now have a mental image of you trying it with a whole Christmas cake....! Alec

Bad luck Peter, my shed was done in similar fashion (Sturmer) a few months back and I believe there have been a lot of others in the area. They don't seem to be very targeted, more domestic but occasionally they hit lucky. Alec

Steve's interesting chart throws up another option - if you can get hold of a proper railway sleeper a lot of the new ones are jarrah (pinkish/orange colour), which is also on the highly durable list. If you ripped one down the middle and then cross-cut you would have four decent legs. Alec

Mark, my wife (who is a teacher) says you are doing a great job Alec

Treemoose on here would be worth contacting. Alec

I have a Homelite XL which was my cheapest saw, since I was given it free as a non-runner by a colleague. Put some Aspen in and it fired straight up. Not much use to me mind as a non-climber, but it fills the shelf up! Alec

Funnily enough I have done exactly that twice. 090, 47" Duromatic bar, Granberg chain, no winch, Burrell on the other end of the mill. We didn't time it on either occasion, but the running time of an 090 on a full tank of fuel is about 15mins and it took about half a tank, so around 7 to 8mins cutting time would seem right, around 10mins all in including sticking in wedges and pumping the manual oiler a few times. Alec

Yes but Jonathan you don't really like chainsaw milling do you? There's also a difference between commercial production and personal interest. I have run an 88" bar full width on a single 090 powerhead. It is quite boring but gets there in time. Alec

Comfortably. Not quick but will slog on through. Alec

What diameter is the trunk? As stated above, you will almost certainly have to pay for having the tree cut up and removed but if the main trunk is a good size with a lot of dark coloured heartwood it may be possible to sell it to offset some of your costs. If it has about 18" of heartwood you might get offered around £100 for the trunk after everything else has been removed. If you want to go down this route then photos as it is now and of the trunk after clearing, particularly showing the cut end, would get you more interest. Alec

The 3120 is pretty old school with more torque than revs so a 6ft bar on a 56" mill would be OK. You can go slightly bigger with skip tooth chain. Alec

It matters that your oak was a Turkey Oak if you want to use it outside and have it last a long time without treatment - either the Sessile or Pendunculate will last extremely well but Turkey doesn't except in salt water. It will do very nicely for indoor work though, which also means the sapwood will be usable. Oak whilst green is very easy to work with hand tools - easier than that rather dry piece of pine. There is an art to hewing which requires finding your rhythm but once you have it, is very satisfying. Gransfors Bruks make some really nice side axes, with a side or centre bevel, but if you want something cheaper they pop up on Ebay. Try searching for "side axe", "bearded axe" or "broad axe". Quite a few decent ones seem to pop up in Bulgaria and Slovenia. Alec

What section do you want to finish up with? The biggest square you can get from 20" dia is 14". This would be boxed heart so very strong but would split to the core giving a rustic look. If you want a section less than half this width then splitting with wedges first would be a good option. Splits run radially to the centre so you can split a half, a quarter or a wedge. For removing the rest, I would be inclined to use a chalkline to mark up the lines and then cut to shape with a sideaxe (if your fiancee will allow you one ) - much cheaper than a big saw and very satisfying once you've got the hang of it. I find reasonably fast too - not as fast as milling with a big saw but not too slow for squaring up so long as you keep the axe razor sharp. Plenty of videos showing how to on Youtube, such as: [ame] [/ame][ame] [/ame] Alec

In a minority, yes, but not a minority of one I am solely ground-based, and don't actually have any chainsaw boots other than wellies. They are fairly convenient and I lived in old army boots for years so they are no less comfortable. I preferred the old style Stihl ones to the new ones - the tops seem to be a lot tighter on the new ones which makes them harder to get on over trousers, and I am only putting them over jeans (I use chaps) so I would imagine getting them on over chainsaw trousers would be extremely awkward. Alec

Thanks, I'll give that a go. Alec

I use a 300mm Gomtaro and will soon need to replace the blade. I did have a Hayauchi pole saw but it was stolen. Very annoying as it was the full 7m one and I need it at full length so am keeping an eye out for a replacement. Alec

The principle is correct, but there are two fundamentally different strategies you can adopt for water management. 1. A comprehensive drainage system, from the small ditches and culverts at the top end of a watercourse, right through to deep dredging and high banks on the lower watercourse. This is designed to move water as fast as possible from where it falls to where it exits (tidal waters) and prevent the level from rising. 2. A series of features designed to keep water where it falls and slow its progress as much as possible. This includes features such as bogs, ponds, pools/meres and natural floodplains. You can combine elements of these but ONLY if you have 1. downstream of 2. So for an example of 2. If a farmer raises the outflow level on a drainage ditch 500m long with a cross-section of 1m square (deliberately or just by letting it choke up) the ditch will hold back up to 500 cubic metres of water. If he does that on 10 ditches that's 5000 cubic metres of water. Getting the approach wrong (1. upstream of 2.) if the ditches drain into a brook with a restricting bridge, which at times of high rainfall runs at full capacity under the arch then when the farmer digs those ditches to remove the obstruction, you now have an extra 5000 cubic metres to get through the bridge, which won't go. Assume normal slope away from the brook and you find that houses standing about 50m from the brook get flooded to around 1m depth. The owners of the houses don't like this (obviously) so they campaign to get the flow under the bridge increased by widening it or deepening the channel. This just moves the water down to the next obstruction (2. is still upstream of 1.) so it does the same again, and so on all the way down to the sea, ie you eventually end up with 1. but with misery for everyone down the line in turn. And this is exactly what happens when the plan for a watercourse is not joined up, people all do their own little bit as they please and other people who were previously at no risk of flooding suddenly find that they are, as a direct consequence of the actions of others upstream. Which is exactly what is happening to us. Alec

One approach you could take is to try to track down a contact for HR at the FC. We had a stand-off a few years ago between our HR department and our H&S department over minimum age (this was for laboratory-based work). H&S had previously set internal policy that the minimum age for practical work was 17, which they applied to work placement students. We then started taking on apprentices who have a minimum age of 16. H&S kicked off about it, HR told them it was the law so they would have to deal with it. I now have 16yr olds with no problem. You may find that if you ask HR at the FC whether, in the light of the rules on modern apprenticeships, it is legal to restrict the minimum age to 17, that you get the change in policy you are looking for. Alec

This. In fact, I go so far on some occasions as to let the sapwood rot off oak butts before I mill them. You do get the odd bit of worm in the heartwood while it's still green but there is so little that I tend to ignore it and it gives up anyway once the wood is dry. Alec

Excellent post and something I am really struggling to convey to our village 'flood action group' who, in a desire to achieve some 'action' are busily accelerating flow through the village, which I live at the very bottom of where there is a fixed structure (Dutch ford). This is badly designed and jams up with rubbish. Every little bit of work they do to accelerate flow helps raise the river slightly higher at the ford, flooding us a bit higher in the process, so I spend my time prising rubbish out of the pipes with a grappling hook and a pitchfork. I would love to convey the concept of SUDS to them, but it is sadly way beyond their comprehension as 'doing something' is far more interesting to them than understanding the concept of removing obstacles starting from the lowest point and holding up water as much as possible at the upper end. Alec

Your pictures are a bit small to be definitive but the signs you have picked up on are consistent with an 075 or first generation 076 (top oil filler). Given that you already have it pretty well stripped down though, the quickest and easiest way to be certain is to unbolt the carb and the spacer block below, then measure the bore with a piece of stick or similar. 051 is 52mm, 075 and 076 are 58mm so there is enough difference for it to be clear. Alec

I bought my mill for my own projects - initially to cut the timber for repairing a couple of wooden canal boats. This was long before the firewood boom when offering a farmer £50 for a standing dead oak on a field boundary made their day - I borrowed their teleporter for the day and we were both very happy. Since then, I have still mostly milled my own timber, most recently to build an extension on our house. Next major project will be taking out the concrete from the sills and the bottom of the posts, seeing how bad it really is and then renewing a lot of the lower timbers. I also have some stock for building a 1690's style longcase clock case in ebonised pearwood and an collecting up plum whenever anyone has some available, ultimately to build fitted bedroom furniture which will go under the slope of the ceiling in the original part of the house. I want to build an open fronted bookcase in walnut to go against a particular wall (log for this is arranged) and a few other things with field maple for the new kitchen. I also mill timber for people on an occasional basis - sometimes people have a tree taken down, often in a back garden where access is poor and it will need cutting up anyway so they would rather have planks than firewood (as above, probably a fair amount of this ends up rotting but less so with oak in particular); sometimes it's an unusual species or an exceptional specimen and someone has a use for it. I do very little speculative milling 'for stock'. Although I do sometimes sell my surplus, I don't have the time to market it and you can guarantee that if you mill 1.5" boards, the next potential customer will want 2", or you will quartersaw and they will want wide slabs etc. I have some 'spare' oak, cherry, pear, black poplar and elm but I will probably end up using it for something before I get round to selling it. Alec

When I was rebuilding my first wooden canal boat (72' butty built by Walkers of Rickmansworth in 1936) I was paying rent on the boatyard space and wanted to finish as fast as possible so I compared methods. For some jobs, such as drilling holes, power tools were much faster and a power plane was much faster than a hand plane. Other jobs, particularly where shapes were more complex, it was a much closer run thing - for a one-off operation it was often faster to pick up a hand tool and do it than to set up a power lead and put it away again afterwards. Some jobs I never found a faster powered method for, notable ones being removing half an inch or more of width from the edge of a 2" thick plank and shaping of complex curved and stepped profiles in a stem post, where an adze was the best tool and cutting mortices in-situ where a saw and chisel beat any alternative (a chain morticer would not have done the necessary shapes or allowed the access). On the current extension build, timbers have been dimensioned with power tools but most other jobs have still been quicker an easier by hand. Really good tools, not necessarily branded or expensive, but which start off sharp and hold their edge have, in my opinion, been the key to this. It's why I have tended towards japanese saws and chisels and pretty much all of them meet these criteria. Alec

The Contra models were the forerunners to the 070 and 090 (the 1106 series saws). This one is basically an 070 with some differences (different layout of pot, piston and exhaust are the main ones). The price looks OK if it is a runner. Is it any good? Well, they are big heavy torque-monsters with no chainbrake. This makes them very good milling saws, although parts availability can be difficult so it's the kind of saw you use for your own jobs when you can come back to it if you have a problem, or when you have a backup saw available. Alec

Evening Paul, It's off and set up but not done - I had to go out this afternoon to mill an oak which has been drying for about 5yrs with no bark or sapwood. Made the maple seem easy (and a 4" thick lump of it x 18" wide and 12' long was seriously heavy even compared with the whitebeam). Yes, funny we were talking about big saws. I did figure why mine was playing up though - clogged air filter from the maple. Alec