openspaceman

You changed my ration to ratios but put in a grocer's apostrophe:001_rolleyes: Yes there is always spare oxygen in the exhaust of a diesel but I wonder how much the excess air is reduced by higher (and constant) pressure injection via a common rail? The original concept of a diesel was that combustion took place at constant pressure rather than the constant volume of a SI engine. Now with the variable air mass provided by the turbocharger and quicker combustion the volume-pressure diagram must have moved toward the constant volume. A diesel still remains a source of black smoke if fuelling for maximum power because of the nature of the diffuse combustion of the fuel droplets. They burn in two stages, firstly the hydro carbon is stripped of its hydrogen and later the carbon particles are burned (or not if over fuelled). Whereas a premixed petrol:air mix has all the oxygen necessary for the complete combustion of the hydrocarbon molecule intimately next to each other, hence the blue flame, if over rich some carbon particles glow in the heat, just like a candle flame. The old bunsen burners in the chemistry lab were a good demonstration of varying between diffuse and premixed flames.

Matty are you talking of spark ignition engines? Detonation is when a premixed fuel air mixture spontaneously ignites before the flame front initiated by the spark reaches the unburnt mixture. It's why for a given octane rating the cylinder pressure must be limited. So with a fixed compression ratio if you up the inlet manifold pressure to cram more air in the pressure at TDC becomes too high. A diesel is different in that the fuel is injected into an already hot mass of air and the rise in pressure is controlled by the rate at which it is injected, this is why diesels run much higher compression ratios than SI engines and because the pressure from which you can expand (i.e. push the piston down) the gases is a direct relationship with power diesels are better at getting motion out of the expanding gases, with a couple of caveats one being that diesels never run at stoichiometric rations, and two because the combustion is slower some of the fuel is less effective as the volume above the piston is already increasing as the fuel enters. Both these last points are partially addressed by common rail and electronic injectors.

So are you going for a room sealed kit to draw the air from under the floor and vent any radon through the fire? This house leaks like a sieve and all the suspended floors were replaced with solid before we moved here so if we ever made it more airtight with double glazing and insulation I'd have a problem getting a direct air supply.

That's room sealed, is the kit an extra? What make?

I cannot answer question about practicalities but yes to get more power you would need more fuel to burn in the increased mass of air the intercooler would get into the engine. Volumetric efficiency would still go up slightly with the same amount of diesel. As mass of air consumption dictates power out of an engine and cooler air has more mass per volume colder air is better. This isn't the case with wood burning as fuel surface area and heat exchange tend to be limiting.

Marketing is all to do with the name: Does Port Orford Cedar last as well as Western Red Cedar? I was surprised to find it used for arrow shafts.

The Ifor definitely weighs 960kg, the reason I had to weigh it was the policeman said one of our lads was not displaying an O licence disc so we would be prosecuted along with the driver. I had to prove the trailer, unladen, weighed less than 1024 kg which exempts it from O licensing. I think the mistake I made, for which I apologise to OMT, was that our Carton was the 8018, a true beast of a machine but it needs a sympathetic operator and be in good adjustment to preserve those polychains. With the little experience I had of stump grinders the smaller the mass and engine power the more critical the teeth should be sharp, once you get big and cannot get bounced about it didn't matter as long as there was some TCT left on the cutters. Sharp teeth mean less stress on the engine, a point I never managed to get across to upper management or the fitters who would not sharpen the teeth in situ on the smaller machine (8018 had green teeth which were a problem to sharpen but I thought also too hard on the polychain).

Perhaps the newer one are lighter, the tracked one at the old firm weighed well over 3500kg tonnes on the ifor triaxle when taken to the weighbridge and the ifor weighed 960kg as I had to get an unladen weight for the policeman.

That weighs over 3 tonne though, so moving it about needs a lorry too

I agree and if you wittle a wooden plug no plastic litter either

Ivy is a wonderful habitat, I'd only consider removing it if I needed to inspect the tree regularly. Even then I'd want it done very carefully as too often I see chainsaw cuts right through to the cambium.

This will be all new properties I take it? Should be easy with a concrete block and beam floor which seem in vogue now. What wood stoves are available room sealed, like gas boilers with balanced flues?

And me on the pole pruner, good old araldite and a bit of glass fibre fixed it, but best to flush the tanks out and put mineral oil if you're going to leave them till next season.

Yes it's the change in state from ferrous to ferric salts. In this area of Bagshot sands (lower greensand series I think) the streams run orange from a bacteria that lives off the ferrous salts and takes on the rusty colour as the ferric salts are excreted. Wet patches like Bob describes aren't unusual after the hydrology has changed which can be caused by something simple like circus trucks arriving in wet weather. I made the mistake of driving the County across such a field where I had previously made hay and bellied out in a few yards.

Have a try with this photo of a local battlefield taken this morning. save it and open it in an image viewer, I have had to revert to a windows emulator running Irfanview which I recomend as a useful download. Then goto the menu toolbar and select "image", then "information" , then "exif info" then "view in google earth or geohack" and you will see how owners treat an SSSI and NNR Actually given the previous history this is not a bad thing as it's how the place evolved.

Yes that was Selective Availability it randomly diluted the precision by about 50m., Nowadays if you stand in the same spot for a couple of minutes it gets within 2m if you have a good constellation of 4 or more satellites in reception. What I found was the GPS trace always showed a sequential route from tree to tree such that there was never a case of a tree being marked on the wrong side of its neighbour even though the whole trace could be a few metres out from the map. I don't see why the I phone would be different from dedicated standard GPS as they all tend to use the same chips. Differences in accuracy are obtained by being to receive different information, often by integrating a differential channel local to you, A stationary base station receives the same GPS signal as your hand held device, as it knows its position precisely it can calculate a correction for the incoming GPS signal (due to "noise" and deviations caused by atmospheric effect)it then broadcasts the correction to a differential enabled device which gets the accuracy down to a few centimetres. We did hire a Trimble with a pole and a receiver on top for some other jobs, which I did not participate in, but the additional accuracy wasn't warranted for vegetation management.

Yes on a samsung smartphone at least, just switch location tags on in the settings menu. Before I had a smartphone I would take a photo of my garmin GPS clock, this would enable me then to synchronise my photos to my GPX file of my track. There is a bit of shareware that then geotags the photos from the timestamp and any offset calculated for the difference between the phone clock and GPS time. It's over 5 years since I did the survey and resurvey but the firm had no budget for any special equipment.

I too used a simple system, I was required to tag 5000 the trees for a simple triage survey, so I took a photo of the tree and tag with the GPS of the camera on, I also kept a GPX track of my survey which I could distribute my photos along. One field in an excel record was hyperlinked to the photo.

Well you can only have edge trees on the edge, so unthinned stands with, say, 30% of length in crown will take years to develop a root system that an edge tree will have grown with. Anyone who has done a line thinning will have seen adjacent suppressed trees falling over in subsequent years. I'd have thought giving the neighbour fair warning of ones intentions would be enough as I don't think the neighbour could prevent the felling. Just over 30 years ago I took the decision to store some 90 year old coppiced beech, the stools were too old to regrow and the stems at 8" QG and below weren't big enough for sawlogs. At the time there was a good market for small clean beech sawlogs so I hoped by now they would have got a good price. Two things worked against me, the collapse of the beech market and the 87 storm which took the lot down. I suspect untouched 50% of them would have survived but still have little value.

Can anyone give an isbn reference for this book? I thought there was a precedent but cannot remember it. It would depend on whether it was reasonably foreseeable that removing trees on which trees on neighbouring land relied on for mutual support would cause trees to fail. I cannot see it happening in a gardening situation and if it were a forestry plantation nearing its top height for the winthrow hazard then a prudent neighbour would fell them anyway, thus mitigating any damaging consequences.

I never did better than 1500 and it often dropped to 500 and I was 40 years younger then.

The company had always been registered as waste carries. Applying for the several exemptions I needed was a paper exercise and no EA personnel came to inspect the premises whereas the planners have.

Mostly experience with the yard I managed for 7 years, still some open issues so not for discussion of specifics. One thing emerged which may be of interest, major civils companies would not accept virgin timber cleared from their work sites was exempted. So they required waste transfer notes and a chain of custody which forced the need for the waste exemptions even on this virgin timber.

Yes from the EA perspective virgin timber is not a waste, hedge cuttings are, but the exemptions depend on planning permission and storing wood is not an agricultural use of a field so a change of use is involved. Which means making an application or getting a certificate of lawful use after 10 years with no enforcement. So a firewood operation may not need an exemption but will require planning permission, along with which comes a rates liability. Given that a waste is something ordinarily discards from the activity the logging operation may be producing wastes which will require exemption. Essentially there are different exemptions that cover wood, S ones for storage, T ones for treatment and U ones for the final use. D ones are for if you wish to dispose of it on the site, as mulch or burning for heat for example. Not many firms I've seen comply with the requirements and EA don't pursue unless someone has wound them up.

I understand. Yes mostly the tyre disposal cost was part of the new tyre and fitting transaction. In my last year working for a small firm I looked after the workshops alongside my other duties. So for the last two years I have collected all the old scrap tyres which ended up on the site and delivered them down to our local tyre recycler by the transit load and I paid 75p for car tyres, £2 for transit sized tyres and £8 for lorry tyres, I did not buy any tyres from him. When I unexpectedly took retirement rather than demotion I left a legacy of 1 forwarder tyre and about 8 rubber tracks from chippers which were going to cost a lot more to dispose.