WorcsWuss

Is it My bad, I thought Ddrt was 2-1.... Ref flying capstans and buying cheap poly rope, avoid, too much heat for poly... Poly rope is OK for pulling stuff and natural rigging...

Like this...

Does anyone else tie off their tag lines with a 3-1 pulley & hitch set up to prevent pieces from swinging back...? I make sure my groundie does this if we're working in the woods lowering stuff by power lines or the road, stops the limb swing back where it came from if the groundie trips over.....

I thought the idea of the RW was to protect hitch cord designed to work in DdRT when working SRT with twice as much friction, by splitting the friction on the line between the hitch cord which controls descent and the mechanical RW which balances the system & halves the friction within the hitch cord itself? I didn't think it was a back up device, purely something to prevent hitch cord burning out....? But I don't climb SRT so could be a million miles out!

I agree... I had a crane on site the other day [for steel not timber] lifting some columns into place, not very big, 12m long, about 3/4 of a ton each, and I noticed the riggers didn't use tag lines. This was fine generally, except on one they lifted the flange was under another steel, so it didn't lift cleanly and swung round when it came free, they controlled it OK by hand but I would have been far happier if they'd used a tag line to control it remotely.....

Presumably because he HASN'T bought a new winch to go with them and was brandishing a dirty old one at her... How old are your others Neil...? Our littlest is 15 months now, biggest nearly 11! Mrs is on about having a 4th... I've applied the MPV formula to the situation and we've reached our limit... Figure 8 & barrel knot have been tied in the end of it.... just need to deal with the slack now....

Good thread Adam. I enjoy rigging, it makes a dismantling job far more interesting than just cutting & chucking. I don't go big though, I like to stick to what I know. I have a laminated chart I made of green weights for common species & diameters I deal with which lives in the box so I can double check my lengths before I get too carried away. If I'm dropping something which will swing I'll usually negative rig it and get my groundie to let it run and slow it in a controlled way, I'm terrified of ending up like some of the guys on youtube who rig above their head and then for whatever reason the rope doesn't run and they end up getting battered by a swinging butt.... several times.... Being tuned into my groundie is the most important thing for me, he needs to know what I'm doing, what I want him to do and I need to have the confidence he's going to control the drop in the way I expect him to and in the way I have made the cut. Kit wise I use a small ISC cast pulley, 16mm Marlow onto the tree, 12mm Marlow lowering rope, a Buckingham ali portawrap and various strops & sewn loops. I also have a dirt cheap poly which I use as a tag line or fixed line to swing things round.... or for tying the groundie to the back of the truck if he doesn't let something run and I get pinged off.... I'll follow this thread with interest, I don't do a lot of rigging but I appreciate the art of it, particularly the less is more approach, I find some of the fancy multiple rope & hardware systems used to drop HUGE pieces a bit convoluted and pointless [to my inexperienced eye I must add], but purely out of curiosity I'm interested to see what does get dropped with the same kit I use by more creative riggers than I....

On my laptop I am informed the route has tolls... surely they mean 'trolls'...?! And apparently it's only 13.2 miles / 35 minutes by road... so why did they take up 3 and a bit hours of my life walking it when they could have just taken the 614...? Bloody hobbits....

My god, could this be the upturn we've all been waiting for?! My insurance went down as well earlier this year... I think it's because the Brussels Sprouts have made our long suffering WAGS pay a bit more instead....!

Ha! The Twig! That's the funniest thing I've seen all week!

Defra are an absolute shambles so I wouldn't expect anything of any real use to come out of this. Top level predator control needs to be carried out in order for the natural order to be maintained. However, this is not that, it's dabbling, and probably in the wrong place, so I couldn't give a hoot whether anything comes of it or not. Predatory birds, badgers, foxes etc do all need controlling I agree. But as has been alluded to, the most effective top level predator also needs controlling, and that's us. But since we created warm homes and developed medicine, our weak and feeble bodies have been allowed to survive far beyond the original design limits. And our feeble minds have caused both cruelty and oversensitivity towards our wild cousins in equal measure. Fiddling about with a few Buzzards [and I can see both sides of the argument here as a shooter, farmer and lover of wildlife and the countryside, particularly 'big birds'!] will not make a huge impression on that needed to restore the balance of things..... In my view they need to sort out badgers first, that's a very real problem still costing animals and people very real suffering and the tax payer very real money....

I've never been nicked, but I did spend a morning with the mother of all hangovers riding around in the back of a police Astra looking for a misplaced car, I felt decidedly green by the time I was rolled out onto my drive... I'm a good boy now, I even have uniformed officers round for barbecues....!

Or woman's name, depending on which forum it is they've joined....!

If in doubt, use a member....! Try Rob, he's very helpful... Chainsawbars ? bars, chains and chainsaw accessories

I would post in this thread, but I did some gardening the other day and I fear I may have been made dead from being alive....

Looking out of the window at this time of year a career in arb seems awful tempting. But when it's sleeting and you're slogging your guts out to scrape by it's maybe less so... I think 20 to 30k would be optimistic unless you could bolster it with other income streams. Eggs in one basket it will be tough to make a decent living straight out of the box, maybe if you could get onto relief shifts while you learned the industry and built up some contacts and experience you could get close to your target earnings. Consultancy, as with anything, demands experience. If you want to follow that route you should explore what and how things are done and carve out a niche in a fledgling field, perhaps looking into new methods of coppice management and biomass production for energy generation maybe, something which has the potential to grow [pardon the pun] rather than an already well established strand of the discipline. It's still a buyers market out there, so you're going to need to be realistic in your aspirations, you'll be going up against guys & girls who have lived & breathed the industry since they were 16 or 18, if you're going to compete with them and make a decent living you're going to need to do something special. And on a separate note, I doubt very much whether anything you can get working in the private sector would be better than the pay, conditions and pension you get in the public sector. Even if the government do manage to sort out the mess that is the public sector [and god knows they have an uphill battle on their hands with the bloody Labour led unions making it difficult for them] and inject some sort of reality into it, you're still going to be incredibly well off compared to the private sector which funds you....

Brilliant tractors Swinny, everything Gardenkit says is spot on. 6700 was a bit underpowered, 7700 was a marvellous machine. Fords of that age were a bit of a Meccano kit so easily fiddled with. Ford's DP was better than MF's MultiPower & IH's T/A. Q cab is all pressed sections and they are notorious for rotting out. Replacement cabs not easy to come by but there are plenty of folk out there making replacement sections / restoring them, pick up a copy of Classic Tractor....! Very envious, would love a 7700.....

Lee, you might be better off looking into a 'proper' website. They actually cost a pittance and are far more future proof than the free ones, not to mention ad free. You'll get a proper email address with it and you won't have to spend any of your time setting it up or trouble shooting it... My experience of the free ones is they're only free for so long, then you have to either pay up or lose it, not good for a business... I'll PM you the details of a close friend who does stuff for me, has his own server etc, be worth dropping him a line...

Typical Land Rover bitsa, looks OK to me... bit rough round the edges but nothing which couldn't be sorted... I'm looking for a 300 tdi auto disco to cut up in a 'similar' fashion to this [trialler], it's a good cheap way to get a Defender I guess, make one from a Disco!!!

That's how a friend of mine does the garden sheds he builds, it's been there for years.... not sure it ever gets emptied!!! Concrete blocks laid on their flat onto a concrete base and a liner laid into it. If you wanted to do it a bit better you could paint a damproofing membrane onto the blockwork first before you line it... Alternatively, for doing them one at a time....and depending on the diameter of your posts... these might JUST fit.... need to cut the centre strut out of the deep trough.... Double Cattle Feeding Trough | David Ritchie (Implements) Ltd - Agricultural Hot Dip Galvanised Water Troughs 2440mm long | David Ritchie (Implements) Ltd - Agricultural You would probably find that for a small premium Ritchie [or similar firms] would make a tank to your own dimensions within reason...

It has, many times... By the by, used MS200T's are aplenty on eBay, make sure you don't buy a stolen one... some say the best climbing saw ever made, I can't comment on that, but that's certainly the most popular and common solution... I have a Tanaka thing, which is OK, but I do wish I'd bought a decent second hand 200T instead....

It's bloody hard to make a good living at it, I struggled, even 10 years ago and with hedgelaying and general agricultural contracting thrown in for good measure... Well, I couldn't make a living grand enough to support my wife and children anyway... thinking about it, I was actually quite happy with it.... Bloody expensive women with extravagant taste... the ruin of many a happy career!

This has turned into an interesting thread. In my 'other life' I price construction work. Sometimes it's tendered, and when it is we're rarely the cheapest, but if we are it's when up against bigger firms with a higher overhead. The same applies to when I do my little bit of tree work, my overhead is far lower, I have no chipper or tipper, just a Discovery I pay for anyway and equipment I have built up over the last 16 or 17 years... And I don't go after work I can't do with the kit I have, so no waste away or massive trees etc. I'm also conscious of going up against pros, so I don't advertise, only work for people I know on jobs I'm comfortable with [i recommend others on complex stuff or waste away jobs] and I don't set out to undercut the market rate. As has been pointed out, what I charged on the Euc 'sounds' cheap, but if it was a 2 man pro team working to the clock, you'd probably have done it on your way home [it was a 'fit in whenever' job and it would only have taken you an hour or so if you really put your foot down] so £100 would have likely been the 'most likely' market rate. Obviously teams seeking to make a living from that work with a higher overhead would have had to charge more, and someone just starting out and trying to build up their book would probably have charged less. I just charged what I thought was fair [not to mention as much as I could get away with under the circumstances!] and enjoyed doing the job....

Ah, got you..... The stuff my daughter has been climbing has nothing to 'climb', so she body thrusts up into the crown... I think she prefers the abseiling back down bit!

Brilliant! I'm forever losing the bottle opener in the cutlery drawer, reckon I can keep track of the chainsaw....! Anyone worked out how to use one to get the cork out of wine bottles yet...?