openspaceman

It's an interesting problem: look at the way temporary traffic lights are now LEDs and battery powered whereas in the past they were a small diesel genset and incandescent lights. Household demand for electricity for IT equipment has also gone down with flat screen tv/monitors, fluorescent (spit) and led lighting. With a 4kVA inverter costing around £500 and allegedly about 90% conversion efficiency I'd be thinking in terms of some asynchronous generators into a 300V DC bus with a relatively small battery for peak lopping and low demand maintenance. After my early experience with a Lister startomatic and inverter I got involved with a small remote classroom that catered for about 5000 pupil visits per year, mostly outside work but start and end in the classroom where there were 2 permanent staff and a plethora of volunteers. Power was from a 5kVA air cooled Lister twin which had racked up 40000 hours. After much debate and threats from the professional staff it was decided to go for a grid connection, some £50k to be raised by an appeal. No luck with that so we fitted a new watercooled 10kVA set and watercooled manifold to run as CHP in the winter. The big jump in power was because staff insisted on being able to run a kettle without browning out the IT system (server and 3 PCs? The heat delivery was moderately successful but the conversion efficiency fuel:electricity went down to under 20%. In fact the cost of fuel alone per kWh was the same as we would have had to pay for grid electricty (about 7p in those days there are just over 10kWh of heat energy in a litre of diesel). What we should have done was insist the water boiling was by propane and used a UPS to condition the supply to the IT system. I left when it was decided to redevelop the woodland with a large more permanent facility to cater for more visits and justify the capital cost of a grid connection. The irony is that they had previously turned down the request for a concrete pad and cell mast which would have provided a free interconnect and £4k/annum licence fee because it would damage the ancient woodland site.

We had the same happen on a motorway trip, most unexpected and the blokes couldn't say what had caused it, I suspect they stuck it in third instead of fifth

No it was the strop holding the pulley up the tree, the anchor line then also attaching to the pulley. Yes they are 3000 drums and driven plates. I'm beginning to doubt I'll ever run the holder as a skidder again, the 3000 controls are seriously worn, I had kept them as spares just in case

£800! It's my favourite big saw, the 076 is pathetic in comparison. Drinks fuel, too heavy to carry about so only came out for felling ad xcutting, I used to debranch with husky 262, my mate used 044 but I found that too heavy. Fantastic with twin heads on a mill

There were some massive damages paid out by the railways from setting corn fields alight that very soon into their active life they were managed by gangs of men with fagging hooks. It took 40 years of doing nothing before problems from trees were recognised by which time the public kicked up a fuss when they were cut down. Which other countries used 3rd rail conductors? I suppose the problem is lessend with overheads (as well as increased efficiency).

Okay if you can cure the problem by firing technique this is the best option. The thing looks more like a (poor) heat exchanger with a fire dumped in it and lends itself to attaching a Veto chip stoker where the loading door is, if they can still be found.

I just dug it out and my lucky carabiner, both used for arb from 1973 but bought for rock climbing several years before. The stubai held me when I peeled off inverted vee but I cannot find the moac chog. The hiat was my attachment to the rope and harness. When I started in arb, before moving to forestry, I would free climb to the top anchor using rock climbing methods and protection with runners and then converting to double rope technique. I had largely given up climbing by the time screw gates were deprecated or LOLER became a consideration.

I did some and I 'd use a fairly long strop on the pull back pulley and anchor that such thet the force on the spar was only downward. As you say it was such a faff and the double highlead pulley would twist and need lots of fettling we only did it for a couple of coupes of alder and willow. It needs a gentle touch on the pull back line brake just to keep the pulleys off the ground, very little chance of keeping the tush out of the mud, you need a skyline for that with a locking carriage. The 3000/3 is crown and pinion and not as suitable as the 4000/2 which has a bronze worm gear. I do still have a couple of drums and clutch plates somewhere from one where I broke the gearbox. I'd have loved to develop it to make it quick to deploy and more usable with a mechanical tension system to avoid the power wasted in the haul back brake but the costs were so much higher than forwarding or skidding and our sites not high value timber that I don't think we used it after 1987.

Nothing like a bit of corroboration to get the point home.

Pays my wages, till Xmas at least.

Rather simple then, the main problem strikes me is the direct contact with water in the side walls. Also a simple on off switch for the fans isn't sensible, can the thermostat be changed to a programmable one that has a couple of fan speeds? My boiler has primary and secondary fans speeds linked which is daft as you really need more primary air as the wood gets wetter. Does the air simply enter at the back and then exit up the fire tubes? I think I would experiment with reducing heat loss to the side walls even if the is reduces the boiler output.

The system evolved with advances in technology. I'll never be an apologist for nitwork rail but just consider the improvements in timetables and accident rate in recent years. The faults are to do with the governance not the technology. The internecine battles between network and tocs keep more lawyers in employ than engineers/technologists Also bear in mind up till 1963 trees were generally not allowed to grow lineside.

Before reading about dmax problems here I had not realised DPF regeneration was done this way, according to the article posted in the thread they have used the ability of a common rail system to squirt a bit of fuel during the exhaust stroke to reheat the exhaust and get the particle filter hot enough to burn off soot. I had always assumed (from having removed one) that particle filters were a fine matrix of ceramic coated with a catalyst. The catalyst is there to lower the temperature necessary to burn the soot. As I have said elsewhere these small bits of carbon are actually quite difficult to burn and you only have milliseconds while the exhaust passes through the filter Anyway the article suggests that the biodiesel fraction hits the cylinder walls and runs down into the sump oil because of its lower volatility. It suggests the particle filter regenerates at 600C Apart from my thinking the exhaust gas temperature of a naturally aspirated diesel shouldn't get above 550C and a turbocharged one will be lower because useful work is done in expanding the gas through the turbine why not just have another injector in the manifold to regenerate the filter? With the ford ids software you can query most of the sensors so if other engine management software is similar the delta pressure across the filter should be readable to give warning and maybe regenerate the filter off the vehicle?? Whilst I'm fairly sanguine about NOx from diesels in our climate I do consider PM 10s and 2.5 a health risk because of the chemicals in them, even though I drive a diesel van which has no particulate filter, at least its delivered between 60 and 70 mpg for the last 287k miles. A bit of a ramble because I haven't though much about engines since I made my mother's imp difficult to drive by filing the head down with a surform.

Perceived wisdom is that you get little drying between October and April because not only does the cold weather reduce the capacity of the air to remove moisture but moisture migrates through the log slowly. My experiment seems to show that in the early stages at least in summer temperatures, the water migrating through the wood is not slow enough to limit the air removing it from the surface. I may try and repeat the experiment if I get some fresh felled wood. If you can arrange enough air flow and prevent re wetting then the wood will gradually dry in a winter. The thing is in general using a fan energy to move the air is too costly unless it is preheated.

That's bad, as you say the oak is dry then the white smoke is unburned pyrolysis offgas, the black is soot from a seriously air starved secondary burn. Looking at the combustion area it looks like the side walls are in direct contact with water?. What's happening is the cold sides are quenching flames before they burn out, also I guess excess air is further cooling the fire. You need some better mixing and a means of upping the firebox temperature, some fire bricks perhaps but this will decrease the heat exchange area, the fire tubes look a bit pathetic. Ideally the combustion should be able to complete before entering the fire tubes. When you say 70 degrees does this refer to the water temperature? Ian has already mentioned back end protection, basically its a recirculation device controlled with a thermostatic valve, just like the thermostat in a car engine to keep it at the right temperature. Have you a temperature gauge on the flue anywhere? The temperature at the bottom of the stack needs to be around 150C

I still use the 1970 Hiatt D screwgate with a loop of 1/2" cable laid nylon as an emergency tow rope in the veteran pug 206.

I've seen that said here but not observed it. I'm certain the initial moisture content will increase as air from the wood diffuses into the water. As this happens the log gets heavier and eventually sinks (actually depending on time of year oak and beech sink anyway). I do think it likely some sugars are leached out of the wood and thus possibly make it less attractive to bugs.

I will try and dry them this weekend. I also intend to pull a piece of ash from my wood stack and dry that. My reasoning is that my logs, dried on a shelf in my acrylic corrugated roofed workshop will bear little relationship to the log in the stack where the air flow is limited. I haven't found my results from where I had a straight through air flow from a pc fan blowing over a 40W light bulb onto a birch pole cut into 6 150mm long pieces so I may run that one again.

Latest weighing, you can see how drying slowed in the wet part of the summer and now weights are on their way up again. Pine seems to be most sensitive to ambient humidity

I think someone has paraphrased that for the hard of thinking. Leaves get impacted onto the line by train wheels, train wheels have little friction anyway so reduce it and the wheel locks, each time this happens a flat is worn on the wheel but worse is this flat then becomes the place where the wheel locks next time, so eventually the wheel needs changing. Same happens on a car if you anchor up in a cloud of tyre smoke, flat spot on tyre makes it un usable. Eventually the compressed leaf material forms a skin on the rail that increases the resistance to the track circuit signal the runs from one rail, through the axle, to the other rail and this confuses the track sensor and fouls the signalling. This latter problem is one reason why signalling is moving to axle sensing, which counts the number of axles into and out of a section, a bit of a bummer when you put a trolley on one side of a sensor and take it off the other side

The bushnell takes about a second between triggering and then taking a shot, which is where the little hikvision POE vidoe recorders score as they loop record and save 5 seconds before the trigger event. Bushnell picture quality is far better and the discrimination of the pir is better focussed, so less false alarms. However my bushnell display has packed up, it still takes shots but I cannot change the settings.

I have not damaged a genset by overloading it, in practice the over current protection has tripped or the engine stalled but probably not worth the risk as you both say.

It probably is, fully loaded. My 4kVA welding genset won't start my 2kW compressor when the air tank is up to pressure but it will run it to fully pressure from empty. Most grunt will be required when the ram stalls at full pressure, why not try it and see?

The BBC producer next to where I started work had one powered by a lister startomatic in 1974. It was built by one of the electrical engineers from the national grid research place, as was just up the road in Leatherhead. Great fun playing in his workshop trying to make things on his myford, he passed away last year.