openspaceman

Not what we were taught in economics but yes I cannot abide waste.

I see this but in your case is there any danger of people disposing of them improperly? If not what problem do you have with landfill or incineration?

I never saw the film but the walk out of Corrour past the grey corries and down Glen Nevis and Steall was on my agenda till my walking companion fell ill. Me if I were more than half Scottish and lived there I would want out of both and expect a lower income as a result.

Twenty plus years ago, when I decided there was no point cutting softwood as the machines had driven down the price, we were getting £8/tonne for cutting selections of sawlogs, bars and pulp from third thinnings onward and £4 for extraction. I was still extracting hardwood pulp for £4/tonne when Sudbrook closed. Can I take it from your price the fell and extract should now be about £18/tonne?

Vandal ? I used to wholesale logs to a chap whose yard had the barn his father used, it was sign written around the door "?? Osborne Firewood Faggot and Pimp Merchant", anyway it was being used by an archery target manufacturer and he was using a similar machine with the blades removed and somehow mounted two spools of twine on a flywheel. Straw was fed in the feed and PVA glue applied to the twine as it wound around the straw.The rolls of straw passed to a wheel and were pressed by a second wheel into a spiral as more glue was added between the rolls until it was the right diameter for the target. I had to ask what the machine was and he explained it was a chaff cutter

I have always sharpened drills by eye but invariably it is getting both the cutting edges the same length that is difficult. Unequal lengths cut well enough but the hole will be oversize.

same here but not got apple and only audio on samsung

The figure we used was 18.6 MJ per oven dry kg which is 18.6/3.6=5.17kWh. Of course you never burn oven dry wood so if it's at 20% mc wwb then you only have 0.8kg of oven dry and you have to subtract the heat carried away in 0.2kg of steam. In practice there is more variation between different parts of the tree than between most hardwood species, bark having a high ash content for instance. Softwoods tend to be about 5% higher because they contain more phenol like compounds I couldn't find hornbeam in the phyllis database, if you do look into the woods there you will see there is a wide range of values given even for the same species. https://phyllis.nl/Browse/Standard/ECN-Phyllis#hornbeam

The cable should not snap until twice its proof load and that's four times its working load, in practice they snap because they have been damaged or are worn. I never experienced any problem with wire whipping back and the cab was open above my igland winches but there was a full mesh guard on the Farmi 8 tonne 3pl mounted winch. A rope cored rope will normally just fall if it breaks, the problem comes if there is anything that can store up energy that is being tensioned. Worse case is a nylon strop, when that lets go all the energy stored in its initial extension has to go somewhere and flinging the bit of wire it is attached to is one way. A whippy stem will store energy and also a chain as its links deform.

Okay you need to sort this and it may well worry the owner that a formal agreement might appear to lose him some sovereignty of his asset, the agreement will make it clear you are not asking for a share, so your consideration should include payment for the benefits you bring to the wood and hence the owners capital. You should be aware of what benefits you are doing for him, his consideration, and the tax position it puts him in is worth a lot more than you might think. Especially if it means his estate now benefits from being accepted as a commercial woodland, as it is then IHT free. You could do with some input from a land agent that understands tax law, a brief google in fact suggests that the sale of timber is only tax free up to the point it is presented for sale in the round, so sawmilling, preparing Swedish candles, coppice products or even sharpening stakes becomes taxable as income. In the same vein it looks like the costs of harvesting may not be deductible, better advice needed.

This is what I did last year when I had the house windows and patio door replaced with double glazed units. Mine is just the doors for sides and one door for the top, open front and back and it works well, the only problem is 4m3 is not going to hold enough for a seasons burning so I shall double the size with some clear PVC corrugated sheeting.

As long as the "understanding" has its basis in a contract this is fine, each party knows what their consideration from the contract is. I too managed a similar sized broadleaved woodland, for over 20 years, on the basis of a gentleman's agreement with the landowner. It worked fine except he gave the estate to his eldest daughter and her husband took over. I lost only a few thousand pounds in work in hand, so it mostly hurt my ego rather than my pocket and I had plenty of other contracting work at the time. The other thing is there was talk on one of the small woodland groups of a person in a situation like yours being seen to be the "occupier" of the woodland, which, depending on the dedication status of the woodland, could mean produce would not attract any tax on sale. I don't know how HMRC would view any added value element on the sale. Great thread and good luck

I agree they do seem to dry fast and the chief thing against them is having to load the stove more frequently. Most punters won't burn them because they have been told they "creosote" the chimney; anything will deposit tar if it's wet AND/OR smouldering. I only burned hardwoods for my first 35 years because I mostly worked hardwoods when I was contracting and after that I raided the wood dump of the company I worked for and only chose the better hardwoods. This last three years I have taken all sorts from arb jobs I have been working on. I was surprised how low the moisture content was of a 40 year old norway spruce butt I brought home in March 19. Winter felled it was less than 50%mc wwb, I think this was because it was the bottom of the stem. I have just dried a couple of pieces, one was in my wood store a couple of layers down and was 10% mc wwb, the other sat outside but not at the top of the heap, so only slightly damp from rain and was 22%, which is good but not as good as being under cover. Of course these figures will rise as the winter goes on. As I mentioned in another thread I was surprised that a piece of sweet chestnut off the top of a shortwood stack of western red cedar was 47% mc wwb whereas an adjacent piece of WRC was 30%, both on the stack for a few years. I shall risk burning the WRC this season but not the s chestnut. A similar piece of WRC from inside the shed since September was down to 23%. Since I have only had a wood burner with a glass door this last year I really do appreciate burning logs of <20% mc, I can maintain a good clean flame with minimal air and for the first time wood is heating the whole house.

It would make more sense to keep it horizontal and use an axial fan to blow over the wood, you'll want a few inches of insulation all round and a first in first out system as the wood nearest the stove will dry much quicker than that further away. Convection is a fairly weak effect. IBCs on scaffold pole rails pushed in from one end and extracted from the front at right angles? I'd think you'd need several IBCs in a tight tunnel

It looks like the chassis has bent at the point circled red as the engine should pivot in the other plane to tension the belts shouldn't it Pete?

That depends on how you define "work"; yes there will be some drying but the efficiency of heat in verses water loss may be low. You can go between the extreme of blowing ambient air through the box of logs to not blowing any air and heating the logs to ~120C, both will dry the logs, the first in months and the latter in 24hrs but neither will be the most energy efficient. We measured our efficiency in terms of heat supplied against the theoretical latent heat of water removed, we didn't monitor the electricity the fans consumed. With the high temperature kiln we were about 50% efficient by our definition, I reckon one could do much better.

The last thing you want is airtight as you need to vent the moisture. The problem is how do you get the most moisture removal for the heat you put in and generally that;s why you need to circulate the air in the container and dump a portion of moist air at a lower temperature than the temperature in the kiln.

Too right otherwise the hopper metal flexes and eventually fatigues and breaks off

I take your point but the Valtra was hardly standard as it looks like they had a direct drive from the diff to the rear wheel, to get the gearing up, and removed the front wheel drive for similar reason. I guess this is why 130kph was as fast as they could get with a 40kph gearbox (assuming a normal reduction in the trumpet housing of around 4:1). Mind 130kph with those tyres and no suspension could get a bit exciting.

It#s not ideal as it has a high moisture content and when dry is very light, so it burns away quickly. The reason to cut and split it is so air can blow through it to dry it. It's a funny business deciding what's best for your fire but as everyone here will say if it is dry any wood burns okay. I've a recent surprising thing about wood stacked outside. I have underestimated the amount of wood I need now I have arranged for my little stove to heat the whole house and not use the gas central heating. So I have already made a big dent in the 4 cubic metre glazed log store I built. To supplement my dry wood I have scavenged a heap of western red cedar bars that was stacked in a wood four years ago. The WRC is acceptably dry and burns fast and hot but you do need a good few logs in the fire at all times, a dry bit of sycamore will burn by itself. At the top of the stack was a piece of sweet chestnut 4ft long 8" diameter and with its bark intact. The thin sapwood band under the bark was pulpy and the logs felt heavy, so I weighed and dried one, it was 47% MC which is wetter than if it was winter felled. That same piece of wood kept under cover would have dried in a summer.

Dan's right, get it cut and split then stack it in a covered airy place and it will be dry enough in a season

Air bubble or combustion gases?

Yes the petrol powered one will be too slow compared with a simple 3pt linkage mounted one. Even with a small tractor a 6 tonne winch with a ground anchor is handy because even if you cannot travel with a log you can winch in and move on in stages. I'm considering a small petrol capstan winch for getting some poorly felled trees out to a place where the tractor can get a line on to them but don't expect it to be particularly productive.

It makes for an interesting problem, we had this when we specified a genset for a classroom CHP some 20 years ago. For economy you want to run the generator at the sweetspot for its size, in our case it was reckoned to be 70% of its peak power but it had to supply a peak load, which meant we had to over size it, problem was that in constant use it meant the conversion efficiency dropped from 40% to 20%. Then we used a synchronous generator, nowadays you would use an inverter generator but they tend to be too small for this use. A way round would be for the alternator to be rated at 15kVA and a smaller diesel engine with a massive flywheel.

I wouldn't say never, pressure washers are ace at forcing grit into bearings.