openspaceman

If one can dry the wood down below 20% in the summer months and the barn is weather tight they will regain moisture but not to above 20%. I see kiln drying as more of a cash flow mitigation and space saving if you want to keep producing all year round. There's a moderate sized producer, <600m3, by me that has logs stored in temporary tent like structures and roundwood stacks, 600 yards away is about an acre of redundant glass house it's a shame the two don't meet as they could guarantee the logs would dry if under glass by June. That would mean they were stocking about £60k for 6 months with no return. Assuming the sales season is 15 weeks long with a kiln working on a fast cycle of 7 days (ours took 24 hours and self limited at 16% mc wwb) you have no cash flow worries and convert and deliver at a weeks notice. Finding a sweet spot in between to maximise solar drying and minimising kiln fuel is the aim. I always reckoned on 5% waste so burning this for the kiln is costless apart from paying off kiln capital.

You're a joiner so would have been used to measuring dryness on a dry weight basis. The chips in the devices are probably all the same so it would be sellers of meters for the fuelwood trade that are at fault for not pointing out the difference. wwb dwb 10.00% 11.11% 11.00% 12.36% 12.00% 13.64% 13.00% 14.94% 14.00% 16.28% 15.00% 17.65% 16.00% 19.05% 17.00% 20.48% 18.00% 21.95% 19.00% 23.46% 20.00% 25.00% 21.00% 26.58% 22.00% 28.21% 23.00% 29.87% 24.00% 31.58%

They are plainly expecting woodsure to police it, trading standards will only get involved when a customer checks moisture content and kicks off , then this business of using moisture meters designed for lumber and dry weight basis being used for logs will show up.

Of course one can it's a matter of additional capital and operating cost

Hooray it must be a few years since I mentioned this.

cheaper to take the reading you have from a moisture meter that is calibrated on dry weight, say 21%, divide it by 100+the 21% 21/121=0.173553719 or 17.36% rounded down

Not all pallets are treated and because they only have a short life it is unlikely they would have arsenic in them as that was mostly in CCA treated fencing and building timbers. All modern pallets have a logo on them and ones that have HT for heat treated, DB for debarked and KD for kiln dried should be safe to burn. Corner blocks not made of solid wood should not be burned nor ones stained or painted. Dealing with the nails in the ash is a PITA

It looks like this part 1124 790 9100 Is no longer available and I cannot see a HUZL copy, does anyone know if any of the other stihl hand guards fit, my friend has two 084s with this part broken and wants to borrow mine but I'd rather find the part.

I never saw him after that day, he was trying to curcumnavigate the Isle of Wight and apparently never made it. Watch those steel fuel lines they'll probably have rusted through by now. The Aussies did re engine them with a V8 and because it is shorter than the straight eight B81 there was room to put a step up gearbox in to get the output back to 4000rpm. As it is driven by one differential the strain can build up to do damage if used on grippy tarmac once you turn a corner.

Step up gearbox in between? Action man put a K60 in his, nearly turned turtle going off the side of the slip at Itchenor.

That butt at the back looks like it would have made some windsor chair bottoms.

I was trying to explain that english elm, ulmus procera, is now known as a sterile hybrid or variety of ulmus minor. Brighton has a number of species of elms in its parks and streets that are hanging on though the disease is endemic and still killing them. One of the species is ulmus minor the smooth leaved elm and that drops seeds that are fertile. Whereas the english elm has no resistance and cannot develop it as it is all one clone that can only propagate vegetatively, by suckering the smooth leaved elm has some resistance and may be able to develop more resistance because the seeds carry genes from two parent trees.

I think the scolytus beetle feeds on the twigs as soon as it finds them but the tree reacts to the single celled fungus and isolates it in compartment one., You often see little black sections in the cross section where this has happened as the tyloses formed by the trees defences are filled with suberine, a complex resistant chemical. The tree survives this attack because it has plenty of other twigs to carry leaves. The problem for the tree arises when not only do the beetles feed on it but they also breed in the bark, this happens when the phloem becomes wide enough to support the breeding gallery and is sufficient for the grubs to feed as they fan out from the main gallery and then bore their way out. During this time the fungus has entered the sapwood and the tree reacts to it, if the reaction occurs in the whole sapwood ring the laying down of tyloses blocks all the vessels and prevents sap getting to upper parts so the whole crown wilts and dies. The reason the english elm (introduced by the romans) is susceptible is that in common with having genes to produce tall straight poles it is dependant on this years sap ring, which is now blocked, a bit like an immune system that over reacts in humans causing sepsis the trees defence mechanism has killed the crown, but not necessarily the root. At least that is my understanding from 45 years ago, science may have moved on a bit since.

Sorry I misread your dry weight as 313 rather than 315 383-315=68 68/383=17.75% mc wwb 68/315=21.59% mc dwb So your moisture meter looks accurate for this sample and seems to measure mc dwb

See corrected calculation further down the posts wet weight 383 minus oven dry weight 313 gives water content 70. Water content 70 divided by wet weight 383 gives fraction of wet weight that is water 0.182767624 which is 18.28% Moisture Content Wet Weight Basis (mc wwb) Water content 70 divided by oven dry weight 313 give the moisture content expressed as a fraction of the dry weight which is 0.2236421725 or 22.36% Moisture Content Dry Weight Basis (mc dwb)

Yes English elm was named ulmus procera, it is now classed as a hybrid or variety of ulmus minor and is sterile. I have collected seeds from the streets of Brighton and successfully grown from them. I must have dropped one on the path beside the house as it keeps growing from the crack betwixt house and concrete path.

Was he the one that peppered someone’s posterior with lead or was that the father?

That by implication answers my question that you use a probe of some sort. I've never owned a moisture meter so use oven drying until I see a comparison I'll not know which basis the moisture meter uses.

How will you check them? One of the things @Woodworks and I have previously discussed is how moisture meters are calibrated and the same holds true for the tables of equilibrium moisture content he cited. Most lumber drying measures moisture on a dry weight basis. I think the recent legalisation for firewood is measured on a wet weight basis?? Now if the example of 21% moisture content being in equilibrium with air at 90%RH is based on moisture as a percentage of dry weight then that equates to 17.4% wet weight basis. Also look down the chart for cities in america, are they all seriously dryer than UK as not one of them shows an EMC of higher than 18%. I'd like to see a real experiment of a log of moisture content determined by oven drying suspended in free air under cover outside. @Mike Hill mentions airflow and this is far more significant than one might think because diffusion alone isn’t enough to move moist air away from the log. My little experiments with single logs point to this also as they seem to do better than logs in my log shed. I should have weighed some sample logs and marked them before embedding them as I filled the store in May. Just consider how wet roads dry out in a day without rain even in January, so drying is still taking place mid winter albeit not much but if the wind is free... A m3 stack of beech logs at 21% mc wwb probably weighs about 280kg and has about 53kg of water, to get it to 19% means removing 6.25kg of water and the latent heat of evaporation that needs is 4kWh ( the heat in a1kg of 20%mc log), the trouble is that if the moisture in the logs is homogeneous the temperature would need to be high enough to get to all the log and the heat losses from that could exceed the heat needed to vaporise the water. One way would be a first in first out queue blowing warm air from the first out end with maybe4 days log deliveries in the queue in an insulated tunnel to polish off the few kg of moisture. We can have a separate discussion on how come there is a need for legislation and about selling wet wood when everyone knows dry wood burns well and green wood doesn't. It's a bit like gun law once garage forecourts stop selling wet wood then the people burning it are likely not buying it but getting it free and burning on an open fire.

On 6 Jan I brought a freshly felled piece of beech 1287 grams to the side of the stove at 48% mc and two days later it was 33%. At the same time I brought a piece of holly into the house and it was 16% from my log store. This is similar to what I have measured from my log shed since I built it a couple of years ago. Last Wednesday I washed my winch rope and strung it up in the shed, today, despite rain on and off all week, it feels dry but then I am in a dry part of the country.

Arthur Cundey made two posts here 9 months before I joined and looks like got no responses, a bit of a shame as Cundey peelers featured in many yards and sawmills. Back to the today’s post and those angle grinder attachments; I have not used a cutter on an angle grinder other than the arborcut chainsaw tooth thing but find a cheap £50 750 Watt electric planer with disposable blades does a safer job of removing bark off single poles where the curve means a 4" wide cut is adequate. It's a damn sight better than the sharpened spades we had to debark potential telegraph poles with.

Trouble is now I'm finding it all too easy to fall into being a couch potato and online warrior and this makes me wonder if I would have kept as active as I did if I had taken a desk job early on.

I agree, it is surprising considering the trade is a bit of a luxury service industry, but can think of many reasons for this not least of which is that people have a bit of money which may normally have been spent on travel etc. This comes back to the way we as a wealthy society fail to provide for the parts of society heavily affected by changes. Just as we didn't plan an orderly retreat from mining, steelmaking, shipbuilding etc. and let those parts of the country, once the core earners, become relatively poorer than the elite finance professions centred on London. Instead we have created a situation where labour is is made inflexible by H&SE requirements for expensive certification. No we will never have a great reset, it's not human nature, but I'd hope for a bit more compassion as well as resilience and of course looking at those activities that are causing problems to the environment.

It has to increase but the worst thing is that if the site does not have a neutral return back to the point the three phases separated all that current travels back by earth. This is because when you put a balanced load across a 3ph supply the sum of the currents is always zero, so no separate neutral required, all the current runs in the three phase wires. If one phase is missing something has to be provided to return the current when both of the available phases are the same instantaneous polarity. I never got that far which is why I chopped trees down.

It's kW but as long as the motor rotates with little slip and no load very little current will be drawn until you impose the load of your saw motor onto it. Not having 3ph available to play with I am not sure but the second phase is 120 degrees out of phase with the other so a quasi rotating field exists, in much the same way a single phase induction motor uses a capacitor to create an out of phase lead coil until the rotating squirrel cages induces it's own or a copper coil creates a lag in a shaded pole motor. See above. As for imbalanced load I'm not at all sure but 15kW implies 62A at a power factor of one so yes there could be a problem at low power factors You've lost me there, I can see using a transformer on one phase can create a 90 degree lag which would create a non symmetric rotating field with the other two but two transformers? and my maths doesn't do the sums of sines any more and it's too late for me to go back to A level maths again.