openspaceman

48 minutes ago, pleasant said:

It's a fairly newish generic chinese product. Marketed under various brand names such as, Mitox,

 

For example:

Mitox 60D Select Hedgetrimmer

MITOX.CO.UK

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The 60D is a powerful, lightweight, double sided hedge trimmer, with a reliable 25.4cc engine and 68cm double reciprocating...

 

Same machines were also marketed under the mountfield, gardencare and cobra brand names. (and homelite- as mentioned above) Wouldn't spend much money or time on it.....they never ran right when new....constantly needed the mix adjusting...and that's if the carb wasn't a fixed jet, which a lot were. Remember selling them for £149 (ish) and that wasn't long ago, so not great money.

Thanks, you've nailed it. From the faded plastic I thought it was much older.

9 minutes ago, Trailoftears said:

Do you have an image of the carb purge/charge bulb?I remember them as a horizontally placed item rather than the now usual vertical top-down bulb in most m/c these days.

I'll try to remember to take more pictures tomorrow

12 minutes ago, Stubby said:

Could be tiered magnets on the flywheel . Put a picture up and someone might know ...

Picture up now; I checked the magnets and they seemed to be strong enough.

I was cutting a boundary overhang in a mate's garden and was wrapping up when he asked me if I could fix it.

Initially I could see no spark at all and suspected a poor coil but when I tested the primary at 1.5 Ohms and the secondary at 6k Ohms, which seemed about right, so I had to wait and spin it over in the dark and saw the faint spark.

So I resorted to the ether...

2 hours ago, nepia said:

A pic might help... 😊

Sorry, added now

Does anyone recognise this old hedge cutter? The air cleaner reminds me of a pole saw marketed under the Oregon brand in the 80s and it does have an Oregon branded spark plug. The blades have hardly any wear so I don't think it has had much use.

It has a very very weak spark but starts with a shot of ether and then runs okay. I have re gapped the coil to flywheel magnets from 0.5mm to 0.3mm and that has made no difference. It will restart immediately from hot but after 5 minutes it will not fire at all with its own fuel. As a first step I'll change the plug but I suspect a carburation problem exacerbated by the poor spark.

I am hesitant about fiddling with the carb yet as I do not recognise the type, it has no H or L screws that I can see.

I wonder if the coil is a generic one as it looks like the 32F ones that are fitted to a number of small 2t engines.

59 minutes ago, nepia said:

I've never heard of fire applied to a tree as being part of Euc lifecycle (doesn't mean it doesn't happen) but certainly some species need fire to open their seed capsules - gum nuts - to release the seed within

I was told the fire related strategy was to do with the seedling establishing a root system such that the shoot could be killed off by wildfire which flashed through but the root would survive and this may happen a number of times, the root becoming better established each time. Until finally it could send up a shoot high enough to be above the flames with the stem protected by the bark.

This was supposed to explain the poor stability of gum trees planted here when the stem grew away quicker than the root, meaning it was poorly anchored. The chap that told me this said his method was to coppice the tree for a few times before selecting a stem to grow on.

2 hours ago, Mik the Miller said:

Been offered a damaged (seller thinks the piston has a hole in it) Stihl 391.

I was looking for a Meteor piston rings and pot ...   but they don't seem to exist

First heed @peatff and @Muddy42 as clamshell designs are a pain to work on. Second it's one thing repairing a saw you like but another with an unknown fault that's on offer but I'm a sucker for that.

If you do take it on then establish what is wrong before looking for parts, dlastore.com was my source for meteor pistons but take a few days to arrive from Greece and always check the price of OEM first, L&S will get them even if on back order.

5 hours ago, peds said:

On that point though, farmed oysters and mussels are generally considered a net plus for the planet at the moment on account of them cleaning the waters from our river estuaries on its way out to sea, and removing carbon  from seawater dissolved from the atmosphere and turning into shells at a remarkably efficient pace. I'm sure I don't have to remind the enlightened congregation here that ocean acidification as a result of an excess of dissolved carbon caused by rampant CO2 levels in the atmosphere will one day, if left unchecked, render the seas inhospitable to life and incapable of producing the vast majority of the oxygen we breathe.

I eat meat but don't like a lot on my plate as I prefer a lot of vegetables.

I used to walk along Penclawdd beach in north Gower, it is entirely made up of sea shells and the shell fish catch must have been huge. At the same time a mate was doing his degree in marine biology and sampling shells, in the Tawe estuary, for their heavy metal content. At the time he reckoned the shells were getting within 10% of an ore grade worth refining. He also figured an increase of one part per million of lead in the sea had a dramatic negative affect on shell fish.

The sea, like the fluid in our bodies, has to remain faintly alkaline, the more it gets toward neutral the less able crustaceans are to fix carbon to carbonate. The more CO2 dissolved in sea water the more carbonic acid. Surface waters are in equilibrium with the atmosphere with regard to carbon dioxide in the ratio 45:55.

33 minutes ago, Stubby said:

Just heard that Alan Waters has recently passed away . Good old woodsman and charcoal maker in the woods at West Dean . Very interesting old boy who was still working  in his 80s . Some on hear will have known him . The Village Idiot was one I'm sure . @the village idiot

Sad news; I didn't know him well but we used to chat at shows. I had not realised he was that much older than I.

14 minutes ago, Whoppa Choppa said:

The position for Forestry is bend over and be shafted by Euroforest.

No changes in 40 years years there then apart from the name.

May be

Larger eight-toothed European spruce bark beetle (Ips typographus) - Forest Research

WWW.FORESTRESEARCH.GOV.UK

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Information about larger eight-toothed European spruce bark beetle (Ips typographus), a pest of spruce (Picea) trees and...

56 minutes ago, GarethM said:

alfalfa grown in the circles

If they are drawing water from aquifers faster than they recharge it is not sustainable either.

7 minutes ago, Steve Bullman said:

Yep seen stuff like this before. All this talk about eating only grass fed beef and not from these farms is all well and good but the simple fact is there’s too many of us to feed. Farms like this are the only way 

We will definitely have to disagree about that where's @farmer rod?

The issue is also about feeding cereals fit for human consumption to cattle

2 hours ago, sime42 said:

Cattle farming, Texas style. The scale and nature, (or lack of), of it is a bit obscene.

The fallout from this form of intensive farming affects dairy and beef farming here as people erroneously attribute the same carbon and methane emissions to the, largely, grass fed cattle in UK when they try to persuade people to avoid beef and dairy products.

Not to mention Rishi wants us to have hormone fed beef.

1 hour ago, AHPP said:

 

So you want an insulated burn chamber in which a fuelair mix burns for 1.5 seconds and then collect heat from the flue root or somewhere?

Yes but as some heat is conducted through the refractory it then passes through the metal wall to heat the room.

On the big industrial wood chip boilers that I worked on the initial off gassing stage was quite cool, about 500C, so as not to damage the feed system and grate ( exhaust gas recirculation was also used to keep things cool). The secondary combustion then took place in a highly insulated tube where all the offgas was burned out at high temperature and then this led to the boiler tubes. The exhaust was then sucked out at a few degrees over 100C. This burned chip at about 35% mc but we often received wetter.

1 minute ago, AHPP said:

 

 

Is recovering heat from exhaust better?

Difficult question; if the stove is properly designed and run then the exhaust should only be warm enough to carry the combustion products up the chimney without any vapours condensing out, if combustion is perfect there is only water vapour to condense. The main thing is that the flame should be able to burn out completely without impinging on any cold surfaces or meeting any cold draught, the heat exchange then takes place after this. This is why modern stoves are refractory lined.

Perceived wisdom is that all the massflow should reach 800C and have a residence time of 1.5 seconds for clean combustion.

I have not filled a boiler this way but the sand also conducts heat away from the fire and thus protects the metal from burning. You could also put a vermiculite sheet between the flames and the boiler. This would keep the firebox temperature up, good for clean burning. The big problem with back boilers is that because they are relatively cold, always sub 100C, they quench he flame and this is a big cause of particulates.

9 hours ago, stewie1046 said:

Sorry missed out question- it’s a herald hunter- with an integrated back boiler . Can we use it as a room heater only - is there a safe way to do this?

Perceived wisdom is you fill the boiler with dry sand and don't cap the top exit so it can breathe

3 minutes ago, adw said:

All this talk of Stihl, why not a Husqvarna 545 .

I was going to stay out of this but I agree, whilst the Husky 550 and the Stihl 261 would be the professional choice for carrying around all day and felling, snedding and cross cutting pole sized trees the 545 is entirely adequate and cheaper plus being less revvy should last a bit better. It's only when you start cutting rounds for firewood over a foot diameter that it's worth having the grunt of a 60cc saw.

2 hours ago, Spruced said:

Job was going great until......

This is why I liked the Heizohack for rough commercial work, the blades wer cheap compared with others and having them shatter  often meant more serious damage to the rotor was avoided.

17 minutes ago, bmp01 said:

 

😆 ....sharp intake of breath.... did you just 'dis' a Stihl ?  😨 

 

 

😁Yes I suppose so but then I have never tried a home owner Husky and if it weren't for the surplus 262s I would  have about an equal number of Husky and Stihl work tools.

In the day I preferred the bigger stihl saws and bruscutters and the 60cc and under huskies for forestry work and domestics. Back then the huskies had a bad reputation for hot starting on a hot day.

It's a while since I had to deal with transport and it looks like you intend to go the commercial HGV route complete with having to comply with MOT, Operator's licence and tachograph regulations as well as running on DERV. I do not know the weights and capabilities of a unimog in this regard.

Now while it is considered a road haulage job to forward timber from roadside to base it is still considered a forestry operation to forward timber products from the wood to a base (with certain mileage restrictions).

The Unimog could then run on red diesel and agricultural tax as long as it is registered as an agricultural machine and the trailer would be limited to a gross weight of 18 tonnes.

It is worth bearing in mind that long ago when the chap who used JCB fastracs to haul woodchip into a power station in east anglia was prosecuted and fined a substantial amount , for using red, he found that it was more cost effective to use fully road legal HGVs than when using Fastracs because of the much lower lorry running costs, despite road tax and DERV, because the payload was higher and the wear and tear on tyres less as well as the higher maintenance costs of the fastracs.

41 minutes ago, Mark Bolam said:

No reason why an independent assessor couldn’t come to a site and ‘refresh’ say 4 already qualified, experienced guys

After 1991, when I had paid for my assessments and those of my employees, I never heard of refreshers but my employer paid for two five years apart in my last job. Each refresher was with several other employees or labour only contractors. I was on best behaviour and didn't yoyo start a saw once and used the opportunity to add operating chainsaw from a mewp .

5 hours ago, Will C said:

The stihl 201 with the external clutch can do it as well. 

Yes that has an outboard clutch which screws on, I had to check the exploded parts diagram though.

4 minutes ago, Stubby said:

So we are all imagining it then ? , When it didn't happen to us ?

I feel some cheap red wine coming on.