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I get what you mean with this - I would have them made in 2mm SS, holes every 3" or 4", depending on whether the minimum width to be fixed down is likely to be 8" or 10", either laser or water-jet cut, depending on whether you mind the darkening on the holes, and fix them down with SS coach screws. It's going to be a semi-visible fixing, so this would be in keeping with the style. It would also be easy to nip up later when the wood shrinks (shouldn't need to access the ones into the leg as they will be into end grain so negligible shrinkage). The only tricky bit, regardless of fixing, would be getting the counter-bore holes in the top to line up with the projecting heads of the fixing. If you take a battery-powered angle grinder with you it would be easy to cut off to length. Alec

Thanks

Is any of the oak brown? Alec

Sadly that doesn't apply to the vintage auctions: BUYERS' PREMIUM A buyers' premium at the following rates will be added to the hammer price. Class 1 - Tractors, Steam & Other Vehicles 5% plus VAT Class 2 - Motorcycles 8% plus VAT Class 3 - All Other Items 10% plus VAT Alec

It's the quarterly vintage auction on the 18th - I usually go, but mainly to the junk bit. The machinery auction is on a different day and much quieter. Alec

A good size, worth milling. The knots up the side suggest it will be more 'character' than perfect grain, or it would be suitable for structural/landscaping use rather than decorative. The risk of metal will put people off but if I was doing it I would cut around it - place the cuts to miss it and if necessary just shorten up the piece with the metal in once milled out. The trouble with selling single butts is that it is difficult to get big commercial mills to take them, unless they are something special or they have a need. It's more likely to go to someone with an Alaskan and a need. For example, I have someone who wants me to mill them a large area of rustic oak flooring so if you were near me I would be interested. You might get £4/Hoppus foot if you find someone with an immediate use, so about £400. If you want to move it on quickly then £2/Hoppus foot (£200) would be a bargain. You will get much more if you cut it up, split it and sell it as firewood, but you then need to take into account your fuel costs, chain/saw wear and time, so if you could spend the same time doing something more profitable then selling it whole would be worthwhile. Alec

We bought the 2 ha field next to our house last year. It's arable, contract farmed. This puts us in the category of small farm, so small in fact that we now fall off the bottom of the list (5ha minimum under CAP reform). Last year's figures are, I think, relevant. Because of delays in the purchase, we got access so late that there was no opportunity to do anything more than get a crop straight in, so no herbicides, pesticides or fungicides used early in the season. We got yellow rust - it took three sprays to get it back under control and if we hadn't, there would have been zero crop. We had a very bad flush of wild oats - eventually got so bad that we had to use a specific herbicide, and they still came back. I then spent over 100hrs hand pulling them (ie 50hrs/hectare) and still didn't get them all, so we had to delay harvest to let them ripen up, adding risk of total crop loss, but fortunately the harvest was early and the weather held. We had some black grass and a lot of broome (which I hand pulled as much of as I could). After all this, we got a total harvest of 9.5 tons. At current wheat prices this is £950 gross, minus haulage. I owe our contractor for seed, spray and labour at agricultural rates. We will be in the black, but it will be marginal - maybe £100 if we're lucky, due to the good grace of our contractors not charging us for storage and being our next door neighbours so not charging travel time. This year, we have killed off all the residual grass growing under the wheat, which took two applications of glyphosate despite letting as much as possible germinate and then giving it a tilling. We shouldn't need to repeat this now it's back under control. We have used a pre-emergent weedkiller, some slug bait (pasta-based to reduce the rate of dissolution) and will need to apply whatever our agronomist says we should next year. The consequence - assuming we have a similar year to this year (just for comparison) we should get about 20 tons yield and, being a high grade milling wheat, we should be able to sell it for the equivalent of £2,800 at today's prices. It is likely to net around £1,200. Relevance? Well, without using the full range of sprays, we would have had a total crop failure. Eliminating herbicides and using hand weeding would, if you apply minimum wage, have cost around £1,400 cf. spraying glyphosate at around £25 per application. Doing nothing would have dramatically reduced yield, but not had much impact on cost. We talked to the tenant at College Farm, Duxford at Open Farm Sunday this year. He has a small area of organic wheat which he grows for Waitrose. He reckons he gets 1/3 the yield and sells at double the price, compared with conventional agriculture. This stacks up with our findings. Does it make any global difference if we don't farm our field? Obviously no. However if you run the figures, removing the sprays would drop yield to a point where either prices would have to increase by an order of magnitude, or you would have to farm on an enormous scale to get the economies of scale necessary to make a living, which is somewhat at odds with the view of small farming. Do I like using sprays? No. Do I see a practical alternative? No. Alec

I have done it but my wife is the expert. Don't try to cut the veneer to size first - leave it oversize in panels, at least 1cm all round. Once stuck down it will be nice and stiff on its backing and much easier to trim. You will need a veneer hammer to smooth it down - this is easy to improvise with a bit of dowel and a piece of hardwood - look on ebay for pictures! Use proper pearl glue - it's worth it in the end. If you have a glue pot, great, but any small metal container can be used if you are careful. If you haven't used pearl glue before, read the instructions on how much water to add. I used the metal top of an aerosol and heated it very gently over a candle to melt it. Keep the glue pot covered to keep the mix right and if you overheat it, throw it away as it won't work. Soak the veneer in water overnight, before cutting the piece to size as then it won't splinter (so much!) and keep it damp until using. Clean every last scrap of old glue and finish off the box - washing with warm soapy water and a rinse with clean warm water will do it - raising the grain is not a problem. Once you've brushed on the melted glue, placed the veneer and smoothed it down with the hammer, you can either hold it in place with a weight, or if you've got the glue right it will 'tack' when it cools a bit - leave it to dry out fully overnight. If you have any bubbles, prick them while the glue is still warm and squeeze out the glue/air. Once dry, the veneer will shrink down and any prick holes won't be visible. If you get confident, you could do several pieces at a time, but caution says do one piece, let it dry, trim it, then do the next the following day. It will take longer but be more certain. Do consider whether you want to use modern thin veneer or old fashioned veneer which was sawn about 1/8" thick. Alec

One consideration might be what you are using the woodland for. If it's small diameter coppice (e.g. hazel) then you are likely to need to need to work on you knees anyway, and each individual branch will be small enough not to move out of the way when it's cut free. Alternatively, if it's amenity then you may not need to do much felling. Woodland grown trees also tend to be tall and straight with little or no crown, so less of an issue breaking them down as once felled and the top removed they are less likely to roll. If you are cutting up for firewood, you can probably break down into sections you can extract, but you will need to take into account the handling issues. If it's big stuff and you want to try chainsaw milling, I always end up doing this on my knees anyway! With a winch set-up, you would be at very little disadvantage, although a second pair of hands to help extract boards and beams would be very useful (which is no different to anyone else doing it). Working alone in the woods isn't advisable anyway (although quite a few people do it, myself included) so in practice if you work with someone else, either a friend, paid help or for a share in the extracted product, that should take care of the few jobs you can't do. Worth noting that, for your own site as a hobby, you don't formally need training. That's not to say it's not a very good idea to ensure that you know what you are doing, and training is often the best way to achieve this, both for using and maintaining a saw, but you don't need to get tickets. This means you could go down the route of either a formal course, or equally something less formal, either with a recognised trainer or with someone suitably experienced. Alec

If you are going to have to buy something anyway, I would buy a chain rather than a sprocket. 3/8" chain is going to be restrictive in the long run, as getting a sprocket-nosed large mount bar will be difficult. 36" bar on a mini-mill works OK (I use one) but it may not run dead straight. I sometimes get a little bit of wander in the nose end, and I'm using an 066 which is a bit more manageable, so be ready to true up the face on the racksaw. Also, bear in mind that a 36" bar will give you about 80cm of actual cutting depth on the mini-mill, so you will either need to complete the other 20cm of the cut. You could cut, roll a quarter, cut, roll a quarter, cut, then roll up the cut to horizontal and freehand from the other side or finish with steel wedges (if doing this, still roll it up and split from the end and inwards from the outside, rather than be tempted to just widen the saw cut, as this will just make it split randomly - always split from the outside inwards). Alec

Thanks for that, potentially very useful. In answer to Jules' question - 'we have all seen' may be true for those in the industry, but may not be true of those tasked with designing planting schemes. The guidance is overly long for the uninformed to read, but the pictures are clear and options for management of air, water, planting medium and traffic are well set out, so it may result in the adoption of some good practice which would otherwise have been overlooked. The biggest omission in my view is that the tree selection criteria section doesn't actually follow this through to a list of planting options which meet these criteria - a single table showing the top 16 planted species doesn't indicate the merit, or otherwise, of these 16 - common does not necessarily equal best. Alec

Ideally it wouldn't have lost that many leaves yet, but it did make good extension growth this year - suggests it could have been happy to start with and then been stressed, which would be consistent with mole damage to the roots. Moles aren't interested in the roots - they are carnivorous so are looking for worms. Damage to the roots is coincidental. Did the leaves go any funny colours before they fell? There could also be some signs of scab, which can cause early leaf drop. If so, pick up the fallen leaves and reckon on spraying with a fungicide next year if you feel so inclined. Alec

Spruce will give very good strength values, but doesn't have resistance to fungi or insects (in this respect it is similar to beech). I don't have any strength values for beech but can probably get some. For farm buildings - don't overlook poplar. Far better than most people give it credit for (there are surviving poplar cruck blades from the 15th century), but very difficult to get 'official' values. It isn't naturally resistant to insect attack, but absorbs treatments very well. Alec

I also would not use beech. Although it is no more or less durable than rapidly grown spruce, which is what the modern construction industry relies on, it is a very short grain timber, and is also heavy. This means that you need to increase the section to achieve the same strength, and it is heavier already. Good for hard wearing, clean surfaces such as kitchens. Not used as much as it should be for flooring my view. Alec

Quite a few. Depends on what the building is (function, span, building control involved) as to what is practical. Alec

Sorry for the delay - the paper wasn't published when you asked, but it is now: http://www.sisef.it/iforest/pdf/?id=ifor1224-008 Alec

Thanks All for the thoughts, and apologies for the delayed response - computer is dead and I miss things on the iPhone, so I am periodically catching up using my wife's computer. Not definitive, but I think the prize goes to Graham. Haven't used it much as I've been brushcutting rather than strimming, using the other machine, but a test run had it firing up and revving out fine, all symptoms gone. Next time I'm using it, if it starts doing it when worked for a long time then I will try loosening the fuel cap off and if it picks up immediately, answer is definitive. Alec

If you can post up a picture of the cut area, side on to the cut, as that will help give a definite answer as to whether you made the cut at the right point. In general, when you cut bits off a tree it usually reacts by growing vigorously to try to recover. With something like this, the best bet is to rub the shoots out when they start to form. If you can still rub them out (by bending them downwards, so that they pull out at the base, rather than snapping partway up) then do so. If not, cut them right off as short as you can. There will probably be another crop or two to deal with, and then a few more occasionally on an ongoing basis, but it's a 2min job to look it over every now and again and take anything like this off. The tree looks to be fine otherwise, so I wouldn't see the need to replace it if you are happy to do the above. Alec

Hi, if you've got the saw number, does that mean the Teles model plate is still present? If so, it should have a model number and date stamped into it. It could be something like SW4, SWB or SW7. Is it a one-man or a two-man saw? It should be possible to work it out from this. Alec

Is that to put your popcorn in? Very nice Alec

Poisonous, yes, but only if you eat it... There are lots of plants which are similarly poisonous - yew, laburnum etc. There are also a fair few with more enticing fruit such as deadly and woody nightshade, or arum. It's an attractive plant in the right setting, so unless there are small children around who are not trained not to eat strange things, I would leave it alone and enjoy it. Alec

Some things will root well if you take cuttings now as root development takes place over winter. Others will take better if you take cuttings in late winter and give them bottom heat. You want something free draining to keep air and water around as the roots grow - you can get things to root in water but usually the very easy plants in full growth. I would go for perlite/sand, perlite/peat or sand/peat - again, some will take better in one of these, some in another one, so a bit of experimentation needed. The main thing is to keep the roots growing while the top is dormant, so a sheltered, north facing aspect is best. I would grow them on for a year before planting out. You can give them care and attention then, making sure they have enough water, the right nutrients etc. and develop a good, strong root system. If you are planning on using rabbit guards then they will also be big enough to grow out of the top better by then. Out of interest, why cuttings rather than seed? For most broadleaves, seed is a lot easier unless there are some very specific characteristics you are trying to preserve. Alec

If you look at Chainsawbars ? chainsaw chains, chainsaw bars and chainsaw accessories you can enter your saw and it comes up with quite a few options for length and make of bar, and style of chain so you should be able to get what you want. Alec

Something similar to this already exists: Arbory Trust - Burial Ground Alec

True enough - English Elm, or as it should probably now be known Ulmus minor var. Procera is definitely not, but U.glabra almost certainly is and U.minor may well be. Since they hybridise naturally, elms of the Dutch elm type would be likely to be too, although not the specific Dutch elm x.hollandica as that is a cross between English Elm and Wych Elm. Anyway, tall, imposing elms have been around for a while... Alec