openspaceman

Can anyone bring me up to speed on quads' use in woodland. A friend has a wood 4 miles from home so it needs to be fully road legal and pull a small trailer of tools. Preferably petrol, automatic and with a roll cage. I've never used one so want to know about costs, insurance, tax etc. My guess is a compact tractor makes more sense but would welcome views.

Could be or they may have a conductor in them to power up repeaters, I don't know. One of my daughters' boyfriends father was researching ground penetration radar for the MOD a long while back, more recently a late friend was getting involved with research at West London University where they were turning from mapping root systems to detect cavities in wood on old oak (timbers on Victory IIRC) the claim was it could detect annual rings as well. As I said if any electromagnetic radiation leaks out then the CAT can pick it up. Ours were optimised for mains frequency, radio frequency and the generator frequency, I suppose the more different frequencies you could tune it to the more chance of locating something. The problems that arise with some electrical supplies is if they both live and neutral are switched off at the supply side and the earth is well shorted to ground so any induced currents are dissipated. Then there is no noise to detect.

Yes but I don't know what it is that they emanate that a CAT can detect

We used C Scope Just remember it is a cable avoidance tool, it doesn't prove anything is not there. As to fibre optics I'd be interested to know how it finds those. It looks for electrical "noise" which can be from signals passing in a conductor, AC travelling in a conductor or induced currents in an isolated conductor from another electrical source. The ones we had had three detection settings, 50Hz, radio frequency and generator. Always best to scan on all three. It won't find gas or water pipes unless they have a conductor in or buried with them, even then you would need access to one end of the conductor to inject a signal. I buried some old cable when I installed a gas supply on site. The generator setting is interesting and there are two detectors in the Cscope, one above the other, so it can tell the difference in time it receives the signal on each receiver and calculate the depth.

10 years ago my boss was doing heathland clearance with a terrain chipper and reckoned it cost £15/tonne to chip whole trees. More recently I watched the last firm's solid arb arisings being chipped after I had failed to sell them into the firewood market. We had a 12tonne 360 with selectagrab and a Heizohack running off a 400hp tractor and barely managed 100 tonne/day and I reckoned that was costing over £10/tonne.

Me too but we ate an awful lot of rabbit meat. Yes, I was only unemployed for the two months before my 65th birthday, picked up a few occasional jobs since. I dislike the culture but hate no groups, I'd reserve that for people that do me or my family injury. Not only bankers, and to my mind this is far more significant, I mean tax avoision by the richer people, than the costs of benefits.

I think you are unlikely to find one in use and then only near very high security places. As no one came when I dislodged it I assume it was redundant.

I used the wrong word, it was a seismic listening post, a black dome sitting on a 1 metre square concrete pad connected to an adjacent telegraph pole. It was obscured by rhododendron I was mulching and had been deliberately left off maps.

As i was a lone worker not recorded in those days, the firm never supplied anything apart from an address and oral instructions. It was a minor problem compared with other things I hit, the seismograph in the middle of a woodland in Berkshire springs to mind.

I arrived at a site in Southampton with the Awhi and tracked to the piece of scrub I was clearing, I picked up 100ft of Matador cable within 5 yards. I doubt a cordless grinder would have tackled that. I always carried a portapac of Oxy-acetylene and a small 2t genset and angle grinder just for such eventualities.

Traditionally it was a condenser followed by the flare or in more sophisticated plants, like the german one that produced acetic acid from beech at the end of the 19th century, the true gases (H2, CH4,CO,CO2 N2 and lighter vapours) after the condenser/fractionating column went to a large single cylinder SI engine. It must have been high maintenance as the tarry gases would have contaminated the oil and coked up the combustion chamber. I read that two men would get in and clean the valves with pick axes. Starting simply you could use the smallest diameter pipe that doesn’t restrict flow for the flare, with a Y junction at base and collect the tarry acid (pyroligneous acid) at the bottom. Spray water on the top so it is wet all the way down using a pond pump. You will need to dismantle it occasionally when hot to burn off the residues. Also it will contain phenol like compounds and these are potentially carcinogenic.

2.3 miles from Chobham centre and 5.3 miles J11 M25

Perhaps you two might like to drop by me for a cup of tea?

MPFC fan?

but he says he is a lumberjack and he's ok

Do you have buttered scones for tea?

As I said wood gives off volatile organic compounds, they give it its smell, these compounds react with oxygen to break down and one of the products is CO, CO2 is also formed but as it is not toxic its not a problem. Pellets are made with fresh wood, this gives off more VOCs than aged wood, they also have a very large surface area and their dust makes more, so there's lots of substrates for reactions to take place. It's likely these VOCs and other volatile solids that the microbes eat and make a woodchip pile hot, after a while the heap cools down and in the same way over time the pellets would stop producing CO. It came as a frightening revelation to me as a firm I snagged boilers for fitted a pellet store which contained 20tonnes in a 2 storey room above the boiler, Above that was the control room and buffer tanks. The manhole above the pellets was not sealed and potentially I was exposed to CO when I was working in the control room. I was only there a few hours but worse was that the control room opened out onto a landing with 3 flats. This was a prestigious development opened by the London Mayor but like many green initiatives it went tits up after 5 years (long story) and the pellet boiler was ripped out and gas combis installed in the twelve flats.

We seem to be having differences today Saul. CO2 can be given off from a number of pathways but it's not toxic unless it has displaced all the oxygen. CO is lethal at 0.3% within 30 minutes as it binds up all the haemoglobiin in the red blood cells.

Me trying to interpret your hieroglyphics the first of which appeared to be somewhat effeminate

I can go right off people WTF do they mean please support girly's blouse?

As Gary says there are not likely to be high levels of CO2 and there will be oxygen present so asphyxiation is unlikely even in a recirculating kiln with no fresh air entering. In sealed ship's holds there have been cases of the air being used up by microbes living off the wood and even with extremely dry wood in pellets lethal levels of carbon monoxide have built up where the volatile organic compounds have only partially oxidised. The other case where people have been asphyxiated is in sealed grain stores and possibly silage towers where all the oxygen has been used up by the respiration of the grain or microbes eating the silage. CO detectors are cheap enough if you are worried.

Because the tree can better react to wounds while active. In this situation it becomes a bit like a hedge which needs a couple of trims a year. The owner of the adjacent property has the right to remove anything trespassing over the boundary so the tree owner has no say in this. I suspect the tree owner will only have an issue if the "trespass" becomes actionable, by damaging the house, at which stage the costs of abating the nuisance will be down to him. If the adjacent land owner isn't happy to keep trimming then I agree with MickD and stihlmad

That was my thought too but would still think summer pruning was better.

I've not seen a chip fired one but if you have 9 grand to spare Thornhill do a pellet fired one. In principal there's not anything special about a chip stoker, Veto used to do one that slotted into a combustion chamber at the larger scale. A pellet burner burns chips fine as long as they are dry, the problem is that the auger is too steep in the ones I have seen to feed the chips without jamming (this steepness is to allow a long drop into the fire pot that acts as a fire stop).

That'll be Huddlerafield, Sussex from your profile