openspaceman

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...

Six Bells? lovely food

No and though I know it is useful I generally managed, it was just turning into and out of racks where I had problems 1974 County 1164 with rotating seat and FMV290 grapple loader, I never felt it needed more power but then I never transported timber on the road (trailer has no brakes).

My 9 tonne moheda with greedy pins can just carry 2 bays of 2.4m (8ft). About 5 tonnes of softwood and up to 7.5 tonnes of a heavy hardwood in thinnings. Without a reversing seat it would be a pain in thinnings if you want to move 50 or 60m3 in a normal working day. I wouldn't dream of having to get out and operate crane from the trailer, both from convenience and safety. When I was cutting and extracting and only doing 10 tonne a day not having a reversing seat was just about acceptable for a young man but a real pain in the neck now. Nowadays I would want to use a reverse drive tractor or small forwarder but definitely a 40kph box if returning to base each day. In the day I left machines on site, suffered a fair amount of vandalism as a result, so wouldn't feel keen to do it nowadays. Common knowledge (2 joystick with buttons) controls are de rigueur nowadays though I remain more adept with six levers.

It's a shame I don't get down to Black Dog any more and I've been blown out of felling some ash for my brother's widow in Cheriton Fitzpaine in favour of a local other wise I'd bring it down for you to try first.

I've wondered about stellite tipping them but again they would need grinding back to the cylinder. It can be done with stellite cored wire in a mig welder.

Yes a good case for considering reducing to monolith if the owls are likely to use it again

I didn't seem able to find much detail, it seemed to be a well intentioned vertically integrated system making use of all the components of the waste, the volatile solids element ( that bit which heats up heaps of mulched greenery) producing methane and then all the residue being dried and compressed into pellets/pucks/briquettes for combustion. I suspect, like our charcoal, heat and power project, the capital cost escalates to make commercialisation non viable. We have seen in field devices for making straw pucks fail after initial field trials because even though the straw is dry the forces are too great for a mobile machine. Not to mention trying to harvest on a steep rocky hillside. All that energy creamed off in the biogas process would still be available as heat if the whole biomass were burned and less problems dewatering and drying the residue. They seem to be hooked on the holy grail of generating electricity from biomass (as we were indirectly). I'm all for utilising waste heat from such a process for buildings but with a simpler pyrolysis and co producing the char as a saleable product for soil amelioration.

Probably when turkey oak were first introduced within 50 miles of english oak

What more is there to say except me too

IMO the fungus was already in the sapwood before you cut the boards and the white you see is mycelium out foraging for some fresh wood to devour. Only solution is the sticker the boards and dry them fast under cover.

When it comes down post us a picture of the cut stump please

The chap I help is getting a lot more work and it's domestic arb work but that's because we're a service industry and in my area work for the extremely wealthy. Many businesses have done well during the crisis, Tesco and Amazon profits have soared so the senior management have also done better. It's the people near the bottom that live hand to mouth that are suffering.

Yes I guess you would call it maple, Scotlands national tree, it's a sycamore to sassenachs. IMO if it fell on a brick built house it probably wouldn't penetrate more than the roof but the single storey bit.... I still pass a house that, with the help of a crane, I lifted a similar 3m3 stem and associated crown sycamore 33 years ago, you can just make out the outline of the now faded new tiles in the line of fall. I would like to see the junction of those two stems.

Which suggests there is a flow divider or priority valve in the circuit. A very real concern, it normally bursts a hose before damaging the pump. The diverter would have to make the new circuit before breaking the old one, else a pressure relied across the pump.

I think @Woodworks has a similar machine, perhaps he knows the circuit. In the absence of the circuit diagram all I can think is to have a solenoid controlled diverter that was only enabled when the processor operator allowed. This would stop the conveyor.

Does the conveyor run constantly or slow at all when the saw or splitter are in use? What you want to do is catered for by having a spool valve with a high pressure carry over to a downstream spool but it's hard to see how to make that work without a new set of spool valves.