openspaceman

I normally won't indulge myself in this sort of thread but this one caught my eye as I have a bit of an interest in the Environment Agency and their pension scheme. Yes the government will have appointed people from commerce to head this first steps agency as they try to devolve it from government. Plainly such people will have a background and bias toward industry rather than policing the environment. I don't see we, the public, can do much other than see the governance remains within the law. Now biochar is something we can involve ourselves in because whether we believe climate change is anthropogenic or not we can agree that doubling the atmospheric CO2 content in 200 years with an amount equal to 45% of this atmospheric increase in CO2 dissolved in the surface waters of the ocean, which is having a demonstrable effect on marine life, is unlikely to be a "good thing". Because the additional CO2 from fossil fuel use has not been dealt with in the normal flux of the carbon cycle, for whatever reason, our intervention in turning a small portion of the annual carbon fixed by photosynthesis into a recalcitrant form can make a difference to redress the balance. A young Dutch girl concluded from a desktop study at Bangor that were we to carbonise plant wastes which are currently composted or burnt we could offset 10% of UK's carbon emissions to atmosphere. When I was more involved, before having to take up employment because I am a poor business man, it was EA rules on applying wastes to agricultural land that prevented large scale application of biochar from wastes because the jury was still out on whether it was beneficial and there were concerns about run off entering the surface water system.

My brother in law bought one, as a Daiwoo, about 10 years ago (X plate), as you say it had a merc engine, automatic, towed well and had a long guarantee. He didn't do may miles and scrapped it at around 100k (mostly electrics and autobox problems) last year.but it did work out fairly cheap motoring overall.

All the best for your speedy recovery Sean

It's not banned for commercial use once it's thoroughly in the wood. The point is because it is phenolic it is a carcinogen, so best to handle it with gloves. This mutagenic propensity may be part of its effectiveness. Horses don't seem to gnaw creosoted timber like they do the copper based ones. Nowadays creosote isn’t coal tar derived like it was in the days every large town had a coal gas plant so it may not be as deadly as then. If you are treating an absorbant timber and have no access to a pressure chamber you can hot and cold dip it. The principle is to have dry wood so the cell sap spaces are empty of liquid, heat the post up and the air in the clls expands and leaves the wood, allow the wood to cool in a bath of creosote and as the air in the clls contracts it sucks the creosote in. Pressure treament systems apply a final vacuum to suck out excess creosote (VacVac process) as creosote is expensive and to leave a dry surface. In the old days having the creosote catch fire was a regular occurrence, I would have liked to try a flash steam coil to run the heating and reduce this risk.

I agree with Matthew, the current offerings of treated softwood don't seem to last long. We a getting failures on some in less than 5 years. I have both chestnut and hold and cold dipped treated softwood still ok after 40 years on a sandy, well drained soil

I agree

Yes, time flies as you get older. My medicals and re assessments coincide now and I thought my IWA was last done in Dec 13 so I did a quick barcode scan to check.

You can get the qualification by having training and assessment at your own expense but you won't be able to work without a sponsor. As the competencies need renewing every three years with medicals it's not worth doing independently IMO. All the vegetation companies are competing for workers so they expect to provide training but may expect to be repaid if you leave.

I haven't hired one for a while but it was about £25/week including weekly servicing plus delivery. £400 buys a theford cassette toilet, runs off 12 Volt, uses Elsan fluid, flushes and you take the cassette out and dump contents down a foul sewer. We have them in welfare units and they seem relatively easy to clean, I confess never having used one for a dump but no worse than a site loo.

I never had a 4 pot one but I did always intend to buy one and was out playing with one last Saturday (which I think was the 974). Anyway the extra weight in front of the wheels was useful even if it meant the nose ploughed when descending a steep bank onto the ride.

Back in the day, when using tyres to start a fire and then quickly heaping brash on to lighten the colour of the smoke, anyone who knew the job used a cup of petrol. Petrol reacted with the rubber quicker and got it burning whereas diesel just burned itself out unless large amounts were used.

I've know this "deflagration" to happen with a number of different boilers, incluning blowing the roof off a boiler room at a newly installed wood burner in a school. What normally happens is a heap of wood smoulders in the firebox without a flame. The whole system fills up with a mixture of secondary air and pyrolysis offgas from the heat in the firebox until a newly formed bit of char gets above the auto ignition point of the gas and sparks the lot off. This is because char can burn at around 200C without a flame but the offgas needs a spark or flame to set it off unless the temperature is above about 500C. The warning is that the chimney belches a yellow-grey smoke before the deflagration.

Me too, small charities are a law unto themselves often with much cronyism involved best avoided unless one of the cronies.

I'm pretty certain the Heizohack reverses and this will be because of the self feeding characteristic of a drum chipper. I'll have to look more carefully at the disc chippers but I think they do just stop. This latter makes the control easy and you just need to dump the oil flow to the controlling spool block. Feed stop and reverse still being on the original block which is re enabled once the governor is back up to speed.

Interesting idea but doesn’t it need something instantaneous AND the slight reverse to pull the load off the knives. The electronic route looks simplest but I could envisage a mechanical governor "balls out" when up to speed but pushing a diverter as the speed dropped.

Very bad luck Andy. My best wishes for the future from a total stranger but virtual acquaintance

Yes I think you're right, places open to public are covered by road traffic act. A strict interpretation would make working on trees in a supermarket car park liable and I've tracked chippers using red across many car parks, so where is the line drawn? The NFU found out about using a tractor for non agricultural purposes when they were nicked for pulling a billboard past a party conference in Brighton.

AFAIK you can run what you like on gasoil on private land, the offence is only committed if you are using it (or admit to having used it) on the public highway when you must use DieselEngineRoadVehicle fuel. Had they lowloaded the tractor to the site...

...and I would think the OP's was a similar case but was the fine for using the tractor in the school grounds or driving to the job on public roads?

My 1004 with the wartsila crane the roof was more conical and the slew rams went round with the crane, I didn't keep it long as the 1124 with cranab 4510 is better, I've owned that for 37 years now although it hasn't been used much for the last seven.

Edit: No because you would need the +E for the C1. So next sensible step is C+E

Perceived wisdom with the Sprout Matador ring press was that particles should not exceed 40% of pellet diameter.

yes but many have C1+E by grandfather rights and they will have a note 107 on their licence which only allows GTW of 8.25tonnes so if the chipper exceeds 750kg you need to downplate or have lorry less then 7.5 tonnes.

Many happy returns, I've some way to catch you up. Wife obviously wants to keep you working!

Yes I should have clarified my post earlier: once the chipper exceeds 750 kg the licence to drive the 7.5 tonne truck has to be C1+E. If your test was before Jan 1997 unless you have taken a C1+E test you will have a note restricting you to 8.25 tonnes. So IMO the next logical step is to go full C+E