openspaceman

Me and TCD too, not to mention the wastefulness.

My problem with these various means of making char that get discussed is they are wasteful of the heat energy in the wood. If you have dry woodchip (G50 W30) it is feasible to run it through a standard wood chip stoking furnace, utilise the heat and have the char as a byproduct. A chap in Canada, Alex English of Burts nurseries, did it with a chain grate and I followed his lead and made a very ashy char with a Kob 500kW(t) boiler. Some 70% of the heat energy in the wood is in the pyrolysis offgas, we even ran a simple gas turbine using offgas from a pressurised kiln fired with veggie oil and made decent barbecue lumpwood charcoal, mind the capital cost of the gear was eye watering. The challenge I was wanting to address was taking fresh arb arising woodchip, dry it, make a biochar and utilise the low grade heat.

Something must have changed as I just wore prescription spectacles with plastic lenses. Mostly I was IWA but and ordinary mesh visor with other PPE was all I needed when sawing.

I've posted about why birch gets wetter as it rots in the round before. As our poles were to be turned on a lathe in the round any deeper affected the product. The point I would make is the effort of making the stripes would be better put into converting it to firewood straight away. Birch is amazingly good firewood as it splits easily, dries fast and burns well plus because the bark is oily it lights up very quickly. If I stoke too many bits on my stove the bark will overcome the supply of combustion air and it can produce black smoke like if someone’s thrown an oily rag on the fire. I've lost the thread where someone was asking about putting big or small pieces on the fire, if they are dry it probably makes little difference but I have noticed if I put on a big lump that was too awkward to split it produces a wispy white smoke for a while, whereas adding a small cleft log while the fire is flaming doesn't. I put this down to a couple of things

That makes best sense but having said that I was presented with a Stihl 361 which went in the river whilst running. It sat in the workshop for over a year before I was asked to look at it. The flywheel key had sheared and @GardenKit did me a deal on an old stock flywheel, which I fitted and the saw was still working fine when I was retired a year or so after.

You called?

It has to cut all the way through the bark to white wood, we used a striping tool made from a hoop of bandsaw blade, one stripe up to 3" diameter and two for 6" IIRC, a chainsaw cut too deep.. It was foist on us by the toff that owned the turnery business when he cocked up the extraction, I did it for one load, ruined a pair of work boots (no steel toecaps required then) and bought a County to do all future extraction. I also started selling to an opposing turnery works just to spread the risk. I wouldn't dream of doing it with a low value product but at the time turnery paid 50% more than pulp and firewood was a very limited market.

Stripe not strike. It means the moisture can get out otherwise the wood rots inside the bark, it really applies when the wood cannot be immediately extracted. I would imagine it is unnecessary with mechanically harvested wood as the feed rollers do an adequate job.

a quick search suggests it's not actually unlawful as long as you comply with The Sludge (Use in Agriculture) Regulations 1989

When I grew up there was no recycling but most homes had fires and all the paper got used to light them, similarly there was no plastic packaging other than celophane. The only reason I don't burn much paper now is that it produces more ash, so it's more convenient to put it in the blue bin. I only lived in a house with a cess pit for two years, hoped to buy the place but it was a tied cottage. That was raw sewage that had to be tankered away, I thought a septic tank needed cleaning less frequently as it was basically only a sludge that built up over a year or so and was less environmetally unsound @eggsarascal?

The biggest single thing I don't like about my daughter's is that you need an oven glove to open the door. My Morso can be opened bare handed, it also has a bigger firebox, Mind it was double the cost of the Stockton.

I don't fully advocate this and in @Squaredy's case it would contravene the incineration directive, fair enough in a domestic stove though. The thing is we should have confidence in our refuse disposal system such that it is either incinerated cleanly in a purpose built facility or landfilled in a sealed cell which is monitored for leachate. In fact since I realised tea bags needed plastic in them to be thermally sealed I dry them and burn them or put them in the black bag rubbish. Actually for the last two months I have reverted to leaf tea. A young lady I am unduly fond of criticised me for my woolly thinking about plastics when I queried how come life forms had evolved truly amazing and complex molecules, like chlorophyll and DNA, yet had not managed to make simple polymers like PVC or polythene, could it be that they had been previously synthesised and found not to be conducive to life?

Yes, it's used as an arse covering exercise so that the grunts get the blame. Our guys got handed a multipage risk assessment which they were expected to read and comprehend while travelling to the job and had to sign that it was understood.

I've got leanings toward wanting a fairer society but as I've got older I've thought wouldn't it be much simpler if murderers were topped.

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.