openspaceman

Irrelevant; it's supply and demand and what the competition is. If your Unique Selling Point is that you stack the logs artistically and you are in great demand then you can jack up your charges for stacking or delivering at weekends and you keep the customers because they are loyal to your brand, over do it and it lets someone else in who undercuts you. BTW I too work in a wealthy area and in the last six days I have worked in gardens of houses none of which could be bought for less than £4M but I doubt it has made the chap I work for any more than a modest suburban garden because there are dozens of "tree surgeons" working locally.

Not droopy enough for me, I was going on lebanon.

I like the idea that a TPO can infringe a persons rights and that they should be able to abate the nuisance but would like to see a bit of case law before I would chop away. In Surrey I used to come across a fair few big oaks many years after they had been protected and had badly impacted the enjoyment of a garden now they were shading most of it and the LA TO wouldn't countenance removal.

Looks like something like on a BV202 artic snow cat

No it's just that you want to keep as much leaf to contribute to growth, when I'm walking through young planting I'll often just snap the tip of a co dominant stem. I'm thinking 5+ years but the main thing is to keep wounds small and before any heartwood is formed in the branch. The reason for formative pruning is to produce a clean stem, the advantage is that then there are no low down branches for someone to come along and hack off once they are loo large to heal sensibly, it also means no poor branch unions low down will fail in the future as a tear out with bark inclusion.

Don't cut it off yet but disadvantage it by reducing it at this stage. Then once the tree is fully established start lifting in stages keeping the crown to 40% of the height. Aim to get all your formative pruning done before the stem is 4" diameter and while branches being removed are small diameter.

Keep the old pot, chances are it is recoverable.

It's even more difficult on a modern car, not only do the immobilisers and alarms drain power but the ECU puts the car to sleep in stages, so you have to wait an hour or so before checking and the you mustn't disturb anything by opening doors. The modern way makes a thing of the fact fuses have to have resistance to work, without resistance they wouldn't get hot enough to blow. so each different amperage fuse has a different resistance, measuring the tiniest voltage across the two little windows at the back allows you to see what current is draining via the fused circuit by looking at a table published for each fuse.

The thing to check is does the voltage rise when the engine is running? Even with a little crankshaft mounted permanent magnet charger it should get above 13.2V after running for a fair period. After a day of non use a battery should still be above 12.8V. If it falls below this when not in use there may be a phantom load discharging it. Check that by taking off a terminal and seeing if it still drops at the same rate.

Descriptive, I've never thought about a name for it

That's about half the price of what I can see online and the ones most similar to my Elwell from Slovenia are a tenner.

@gary112 do you buy your handles and ferrules or make your own? Reason I ask is that when looking around for a rasp I came across my old pickaroon and the rusty Brades billhook I found in a fire site, they haven't seen the light of day in over thirty years and I think I'd like to replace the handle which came off when I snapped the tang. This billhook was the one I used when sorting PSR for TDUB as I picked them up and drimmed the odd snags that had been missed when snedding. You can just make out the file marks used for measuring.

You googled that, poor girl, so did I. I'm glad that can't still happen as I have a depressive granddaughter. Anyway I have spent a few months thinking I was coming up to my three score and ten but just realised I am the same age as @Stubby for a little while as we were born in different years. Thinking back I don't recall any houses being heated by town gas, it was only used for cooking, and actually lighting in one farmhouse, in homes I visited. My father would not countenance town gas in the house as one of his relatives had died of CO poisoning when rats gnawed through a lead gas pipe. He relented and changed to gas central heating soon after natural gas became available.

Do you know where the phrase " go and stick your head in the oven" derives from ?

Bull. The town gas works were mostly contaminated by the tars and phenolic compounds that dropped out of the retorts, the coke initially went off for industrial use and the CO, H2 and small amount of nitrogen was piped out and burned cleanly. Later the coke was reacted to CO and H2 in a swing process using superheated steam. Smog was a combination of products of incomplete combustion of coal in open fires and sulphur burned to sulphates which reacted with NOx. It looked greeny and had a definite tang to it as it hung over the bomb sites in London

The complete opposite of the new companion to spotty dog then, I advised against and would like to see the current breeding practice stopped but... Not only the breathing problems of a "short head" but cannot be bred unassisted and numerous other problems, not to mention aggressive to and terrorises the old man but he doesn't like to be away from her. Still a dog is for life and she always jumps up and settles with me when I get in which is nice. When work restarts we're likely to have them most of the week. She refuses to walk from home unless I carry her at least 100 metres or we go somewhere by car when she relents and manages 3 miles okay.

The top plate angle is too obtuse but also the reflection at the corner plus the look of debris on the tooth suggests it is blunt. It may be from "rocking" the file.

Look at the cutting edge head on in good light, a sharp edge reflects no light.

Something must be blunt to cause a friction burn

The first point is that though it's a £30k machine the thieves will probably only sell the bits for a tenth of that, what's left over will be put in the back of a scrap car on its way to the crusher never to be seen again. Whenever I phoned up JCB for parts I was always asked for the serial number, which struck me as a sensible first step, but any career thief would know another similar machine's number so this is likely only to catch out a buyer. One thing about the engine management on these machines is that if you cannot start the engine they are difficult to move, so when ours were stolen on two separate occasions they had been left on trailers. The other thing is as long as they are out of reach of Hiabs then there was an immobiliser built into the engine management , it was time consuming to enact and also to disarm, it re armed after each time the engine stopped. It then took minutes to restart, so the blokes either left the machine running all day or simply left it as key start.

This is my Elwell, given to me by a chap I was working with 30 years ago, very little use in my attempts to lay hedges it resides in my logstorre to chop kindling. I brazed the nut on the tang when it became loose and recently dribbled some epoxy resin left over from a repair job to firm it up.

Best wishes for wife and yourself. We had a 6-300 with the Hatz engine, I loved the machine but not keen on that engine. Best thing from my point of view is that if it ingested a railway clip the damage was mostly limited to a blade or two whereas with other chippers the flywheel and all the blades and anvil were goosed.

Interesting hand bills, how did you get those nuts on the tangs?

I gather modern forwarders computers do the same thing with a conventional configuration. I only used a Mowi 300 mounted on the TP 12" chipper and that was controlled off one joystick, I cannot remember how the functions worked and as it was toward the end of my working life took a bit of learning but it was surprising how well it worked but for the problem of not seeing the mouth of the feed chute.

I thought 5 or more workers on site, so if there are other firms working in the same development...