openspaceman

How does the engine compare weight wise, it probably loses you 1/4 tonne of payload and you'd be massively undergeared using a standard transfer box and diffs?

Perzactly! A lot of people do have them though. My boss trialled a system that used a walking floor trailer as the silo for a golf club up north which was a lot cheaper than the concrete underfloor ones that filled with water when the trap doors seals weren't cleansed out, I never got to see that before the company folded. I like the look of the travelling auger and joggling wall for handling chip that has a negative angle of repose. Seeing how much chip seems to get rehandled it shouldn't cost too much to screen out the out of spec material, especially if you want to sell at a premium, it's something I've never been budgeted to play with.

The beetle is the vector for the fungus and normal codit applies in resisting the attack I think. So if the beetle feeds on the bark then the infection rapidly runs up and down the current annual ring. The tree reacts by producing tyloses and you can see these in a cross section of the sapwood. These effectively block sap movement so the twigs fed by that sapwood wilt. The big problem arises when the phloem is thick enough to support a breeding gallery, this infects the next years new sapwood. The trees defence mechanism blocks its sap transport and kills the crown above. The english elm which I am familar with is a clone, possibly introduced by the romans because it produced a straight pole and a lot of heartwood early on, this is possibly significant. As it has a high heartwood formation it is highly dependant on the current years sapwood in later life. Thus bigger trees killed themselves in reacting to the fungus, younger trees sent up suckers Younger trees have no sapwood and can withstand the loss of the current years sapwood. The elms I see felled nowadays, U glabra and variants of U minor are not like english elms , they have much less heartwood for the same size. When felled we often see the black stains of tyloses laid down from previous years infections that these trees have survived. So you can keep english elm clones going vegetatively by coppice and layering/suckering.

How do the crane scales work? In round terms: 0.5m3 bundle at 70% solids gives 0.35m3 solid so with a basic density for spruce of 0.35 tonne/m3 each billet should contain 122kg of oven dry wood. At 15% mc wwb that would weigh 144kg. Fresh felled norway spruce will have 180% of this as water so the green billet should weigh 343kg I suspect the stacking is less than 70% and you have less dry weight in the bundle than my calculations suggest.

Fines can become a problem on silo type unloaders, it's counter intuitive but if the silo is never completely emptied each new load deposits its fines on the remnant of the last load. As the sweep arms move the fines filter through to the bottom and into the auger. If there is not enough scouring action by the chips in the auger they build up under the auger and compact. This can eventually push the auger upward. In one of our cases it had two consequences: 1 it jammed the auger up against the top case and caused a trip overload, 2 eventually the flexing of the auger caused a fatigue fracture. The point about the balers, exemplified by the fibrepac which was brought over for ARBRE in 2000ish was that the bales could be loaded on standard flabeds with existing forwarding equipment and they did dry in a stack in the open. I can understand the stone and dirt contamination problem. We made some decent charcoal from hardwood lop and top and the fibrepac would have been fine for this. In 2000 it cost around £250k and did about 80 1/2 tonne bales a day so I doubt the economics stacked up compared with the competition at that time which was to harvest (premature) clearfell for the sawlog and bar element and then leave the 5" and down tops to desiccate before being harvested by a terrain chipper. Whole tree chipping can mean too much mineral is carted off a nutrient deficient site and with the speed of modern harvesters my guess is you are better off running the top on through aggressively to leave a pole with stripes of bark removed to lose moisture. The <25% of the crop left as twigs, buds etc then providing food for the bugs that keep the soil vital not to mention a mat the forwarder can travel on which also reduces soil erosion and silt.

coppice them regularly

I think it makes sense, after all you don't find gas boilers that are not room sealed and I can see the business about draughts but claims for better efficiency? Say you have a small room, 3m by 3m by 2.4m high, heated by a 5kW stove running flat out that stove will consume about 18m3 of air. The room has a volume slightly more than this but it also needs a couple of air changes an hour, so why not use the warm satle air in the stove before it leaves the building?

Maybeso but that is a son sequitur in this context and I have read your later post. The op asked about the legalities of of delivering roundwood with a tractor-forwarder. He realised it should not be done with rebated fuel, Peter suggested it would be "totally legit" if he used DERV. My response was to "wing it" on rebated diesel because it was no more or less unlawful than on DERV, the point being that other laws prevent haulage with tractors for non exempt journeys. Indeed if the yard and tractor were part of an agricultural or forestry enterprise and the wood came from the estate it could be an exempt journey. You may well be right about the chances of prosecution for both offences being low but equally the chances of being checked may be low, depending on the local police, because many such journeys can be exempt depending on the starting point. If we are talking about risk: I was only stopped once, for a faulty numberplate, and that was probably because I made the mistake of venturing into the Metropolitan Police area and they were unfamiliar with agricultural tractors. More recently I have been aware of £250 on the spot fines for non exempt use of red diesel in a tractor and mower.

Not unrelated in the context of what the op was asking. If the tractor/forwarder is taxed as a tractor it can haul goods using red diesel if it is part of an agricultural,forestry or horticultural operation. If it is not then it can be driven on the road as a tractor using DERV for other purposes, like gritting, snow clearing going to sites or rallies etc.. If it is doing none of these things but is being used for haulage for gain then it has to be compliant for that use. If you know of any exceptions I'd be pleased to know.

As I said the rates tend to be about 40% of the rateable value. The rateable value is its notional rental income.

I'd wing it. If you put white in then you're open to question about whether you need operator's licence, tacho etc. If you forward from stump on a harvesting job to place of delivery then it's all likely to come within the forestry exemption but picking up from a yard to a delivery is without doubt haulage.

Storage is likely to be B8 but splitting probably B2, cost to rent will vary greatly with area and the business rate will be about 40% of the rent, many councils offer small businesses relief. If buildings have not been rated by VOA keep your head low.

Bluelizard in Crawley have been okay for me.

More likely chalk added as a filler but I think dalmations crap uric acid which makes **** look white like bird droppings.

I remember someone on this forum loading a flatbed with 8ft beech logs as a return load for a steel haulier, there was no headboard and just demountable bolsters with each bay held by 2 ratchets. Lorry driver decided to play chicken on a narrow downhill road but anchored up when he lost, top of front bay slid out of the bolsters and landed vertically in front of 5th wheel taking out all the air hoses. That became a very long night.

depending on whether the two oil reservoirs can share oil there may be no need to disconnect pump. Will the valves, pipes and rams cope with the extra flow?

My interpretation is that if you sell on 30th September you will maximise your return, the new owner will still have to pay all September's tax when he renews. The alternative possibility is to SORN the vehicle prior to sale.

Timber hitch round the trunk and a sheepshank to connect to vehicle, then everything will come undone when you want it to, after giving it some welly.

The MCS accreditation is a new tier in the marketing, it costs money to get and to keep up, similar to the NPTC stuff, so of course it increases costs and the fitters will want to amortise their costs over a short a period as possible. Also the travelling distances tend to be great as there are few MCS people and installations all over the country. I saw this with solar PV and look how those prices plummeted when the grants were halved. I found it an easy decision, especially as I don't qualify as we have gas already.

As I read it the government always gets a whole month of tax for every transaction or is there a work around? Say you sell a car tomorrow, you lose till the end of the month, new owner still has to pay from beginning of month till tomorrow.

I actually do not think it is a bad a danger as HETAS make out but they had the ear of government when the regs were updated. Most solid fuel boilers were traditionally coal/coke and the energy density and flame temperatures much higher than wood so the capacity to vaporise more water. Another way of doing this would be to have a separate vented system running through the wood burner and a plate heat exchanger into the pressurised system, with its pump triggered by a thermostat on the boiler side.

Actually some things still can be but not fencing, The modern stuff is just an organic copper salt and as you say doesn't last. Even the old cca stuff was often not treated well so only a thing skin was protected.

No I meant £5/tonne free on lorry. It's ungraded green (probably 0ver 50% moisture) arbwaste with lots of bark, buds, leaves and needles. I know I could get £100/tonne delivered for clean chipped wood to G30 and dried to W30 which values my green tonne at £74 if I could screen, dry and deliver it but how high would my costs be?

Price for chip free on lorry is about £5/tonne to me at present, it used to be £18/tonne less than 2 years ago. Chipping costs between £10 and £16/tonne so getting a small amount for it as firewood makes better sense to me in Surrey