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openspaceman

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Everything posted by openspaceman

  1. Call that 250 metres and assume the climber, plus lift, top out at 100kg needs 68Wh with no losses. One can buy 18V cordless drills with 4Ah batteries but I bet you cannot get all of the 4Ah out of them.
  2. Read it now and was much as expected, the spruce being the lowest of the softwoods goes with it having a white heart. It proves for all practical purposes there's little in it and moisture content is the dominant factor when buying by weight. One of the photos is an oldie, it looks like it was our original import of envirofire pellet stoves running in our unit.
  3. Wood is a mixture of cellulose, hemicellulose and lignin, lignin is phenolic, i.e. the carbon has formed itself into rings rather than the chainlike bonds of cellulose and hemicellulose. These phenolic rings contain more energy. Softwoods have more lignin than hardwoods so have more energy and I would think the browner heartwood of larch, and others like douglas would be the highest cv.
  4. Perceived wisdom is that woodgas (from the total gasification of wood) needs to be created at above 800C in order for the tars and vapours to be cracked to simple gases, CO, H2 and CH4. Whilst big wood distillers did run large ic engines (and a gas turbine is ic) on the offgas it was after the vapours , like vinegar and alcohol and creosote had been recovered, the residual tars were often a long term pollutant of the site for years after. They also had to decoke the engine on a weekly basis with picks and shovels Making charcoal in a retort tends to be around the 500C mark.
  5. Firstly lop and top dry quite fast so using a flame curtain will produce you some lumpwood, you can always burn the fines for some additional heat elsewhere. As Woodworks says the branch logger output seems ideal (though I have only burned a few bags of slabwood). Chunked up it would fit in a simple device, shame you are too far away as I have most of the bits and pieces to find new homes for. There is easily enough heat in the offgas to both dry and pyrolyse the wood but the limitations are in the retort. This is not a problem with dry wood but if the wood has even moderate mc then the drying has to take place in the retort and it just takes too long to get the heat through the container wall and into the retort, a kiln does not have this limitation. With both an issue comes from the moisture affects the offgas, lowering its calorific value and making it difficult to flare. So it makes sense to take wood hot from the kiln and into the retort.
  6. That's especially true of the 7.5 tonne winch on a Matador! Ted, the chap that did my loloading before he retired, said the cookes with the open gears pulled more than the 10tonne Boughton but the gears would break in very cold weather. He knew as he'd come out of the army and worked extracting timber until the boss got out of timber, finding formula one more lucrative. I would terminate with a wedge eye socket but a soft eye splice works well with a C hook
  7. No need to get hung up about a wet system to transfer the heat We did this and ran the offgas to power a gas turbine but the complexity increased the capital cost out of all proportion to the energy value
  8. This is so right. It's also the reason people can never have enough money. Also think of all the greats, e.g Winston Churchill that lived with it. Coping is knowing you'll pull out of it and avoiding risky situations when the black dog bites. I have had two avoidable injuries both when my reactions were adversely affected by my state of mind.
  9. It makes so much sense to get some value out of the flare, up around 70% of the calorific value in the wood can end up there. Do you intend for the brash to be the initial support fuel or for it to make into char? The quickest char volume I ever made was with 3 month old oak lop and top, after the cordwood and timber was gone, into a ring kiln using the pit method (now referred to as "flame curtain" by biochar makers). The heat from this could be entrained into a gas:gas heat exchanger and an induced draught fan, using a thermostatic air bleed to keep the temperature low enough. You do need dry wood to sensibly make charcoal because water slows everything down, it takes far longer to dry wood than it takes to pyrolyse it. What area are you?
  10. The only job I did for him was winching a tree away from the A3100 at St Catherines. I've not heard of him since he went to Oz.
  11. As another pointless aside or two: There were two trekkasaws operating around Dorking The one you show with the long rails and a shorter one owned by the bloke who owned Biwater and then Denbies vineyard. I assisted with the latter when it was give to its operator before he went back to sea. I had great difficulty in counting the turns on the handles that raised the rails and keeping both of my arms in sync. Also one very cold day John fired up the Ruggerini and we started the mill but the oil was so cold it immediately blew the pump from trying to suck oil, the oil was glittering silver from all the aluminium as the pump disintegrated. Paul Elsey was a clever young man and a very early adopter of CAD. The day I met him I was up an ash tree in a garden beside the road and he stopped and asked me for the stem as he had not tried ash on a new bandsaw he had developed.
  12. It's an original trekkasaw, I can't be sure about the blokes but I think it is the son-in-law of the chap that took them on from the late Paul Elsey, Atkinson IIRC. He owned the Quarry at Betchworth from which they operated. At the time, or shortly after, the founder of Fuelwood, Richard Slatem, was the marketing manager. Afterward the chap with the Trekkasaw operated out of Ockley, I loaned him my timber tongs and then lost contact.
  13. I know you are being sarcastic but it was the first industrial cancer recognised in boy chimney sweeps, then there was an increase in the incidence with young American motor mechanics and the reason was oily rags in pockets from wiping dipsticks etc. so having it flung on your trousers is a known risk. When I worked for a local firm in 1976 we had to use it as chain lubricant, luckily I didn't stay there long. Between the filth from that and Arbrex clothes and I came home filthy.
  14. That's right and some always ends up on your trousers, it's attributed to causing scrotum cancer.
  15. The pumps give out but it's normally the worm or pinion worn. Pump is 15 quid plus VAT and postage from Jonesie but pull the old one out with a 6mm screw and make sure you line up the inlet and outlet when you tap the new one in.
  16. The filters are replaceable and contain activated carbon to remove aromatic compounds, like a DPF on a diesel engine they sense when the filter needs changing and I suspect the filter is over 50 quid.
  17. Yes but for the inspector it's a good case for time limiting his work and having PI that pays the legal costs. I cannot guess how many hundreds of times I've driven past that tree since 1967 and not given it a second glance. What was the failure, roots or stem?
  18. Buy Dyson Pure Cool? Link tower purifier fan | Dyson Shop I think Kevinjohsonmbe mentioned something similar for a family member with allergy. This is a bypass filter, it takes a small amount of air from the room, filters it and then issues it at high pressure to entrain more flow. You could make something similar with some PC power supply fans in series with a HEPA filter. I quite fancy making a wet scrubber in combination with a small dehumidifier.
  19. They actually don't look that blunt for a stump grinder but with so little power and weight I imagine they have to be kept tip top for it to be effective. If the wheel is unobtainable as a spare I'd have it off, measure it and get a silhouette on a piece of card in the hope that when worn it could be copied. You can sharpen in situ with an angle grinder, relieve the backing steel with a normal disc and then sharpen the TCT with a diamond disc, don't sharpen the front and maintain the angles.
  20. I've only known it on ford engines and not on full revs but they all locked after inversion. Left upright for a day or so and the oil drained back, a modern engine with tighter tolerances may hold the oil longer, and then turned by hand to ensure it was free and it fired up okay with no apparent damage, I still have the two tractors and both work
  21. OK I see now, you were referring to the buttress and floor rather than the stem at the measurement point. If the building has value then the tree will need to be removed either way unless the floor is very solid.
  22. I agree the last thing you want is localised hot spots in the head as steam bubbles form, best to keep coolant running past it till it's given up its heat after hard work. One of my counties has a habit of doing this after a road run so I left it on fast tickover for a few minutes. Actually water is a poor conductor but has high thermal capacity, when it boils it takes up more heat but the steam bubble which is left has a much lower heat capacity so the adjacent surface cannot lose heat to it.
  23. I don't understand this; if the tree is growing the measurement would decrease, if it is leaning more it will increase
  24. What about the water? scots pine is about 1tonne/m3 green but abies less.

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