openspaceman

On the surface it looks like you will not be self employed, just paid by an employer that wishes to avoid dealing with PAYE and NIC. To be truly self employed means finding your own work, amongst many firms or private clients, planning your work and taking responsibility for it. Not least amongst the considerations the tax man will consider is whether you can get someone else to do some of the work for you. Aside from that aspect, if you are rigorous with your tax matters you need to gross at least 25% more per day if self employed, after legitimate costs for tools and consumables, than doing the same work on PAYE. I never did .

All problems I unsuccessfully tried to address while I was contracting. And yes my tractors were horribly vandalised. Now I see tractor-loader-trailer combinations travelling to work sites each day from a secure place, they exceed the speed limit but this seems a small risk in comparison and the modern tractors are a dream to drive on the road compared with a 1970s County. I could see the trend soon after I started contracting I give you a timeline, all open to correction and addition: 1870s Timber reaches its maximum value in real terms (some 60 times the current real value), it is the universal fuel, structural and utility resource. Small distributed local woodland resource can be worked by a couple of men and a horse, onward transport limited to a 2 tonne two horse cart means the harvesting cost of a single tree is competitive with that from a large clearfell. Sawmills in every town so transport distances short. 1900s Coal becomes cheap to transport on railways, coke from gasworks fuels steel output steel already dominates industry, Concrete from portland cement becomes competitive. Wood no longer dominant structural material for building or transport, mechanisation driven by wars increases production and manpower increasingly moves to industry. Scares about coal production being limited by supply of imported timber leads to massive subsidy for reafforestation, especially absorbing labour during the depression. Tarmacked road network begins to impinge on wildlife migration, ultimately leading to massive meta population loss in small woodlands. 1970s when I started work, a number of centralised industrial wood processors making use of the new small dimension softwood resource. The short-lived era a motor-manual chainsaw harvesting and agricultural tracor extraction has just begun. Maximum lorry payload now 20 tones ( artic gross at 28) and 6 wheelers with grabs with payload of 12 tonnes are just about economic. Local mills closing but still abundant so small blocks can still be harvested, increasing amounts of softwood thinning. Niche markets enable sorting to sell higher value things like psr, bars, turnery poles to markets up to 100 miles away. Mid 1980s Win-blow provides a fillip for struggling sawmills but size of resource to be harvested triggers import of large numbers of scandinavian forwarder and harvesters. Lorry payloads increase to 29 tonnes so this becomes the minimum load worth harvesting. Landowners happy with small payments for thinning as small machines gently driven at appropriate times not disruptive to other woodland uses. Money is tax free. Early 1990s GATT is the death-knell of small sawmills and even makes some older pulp mills uneconomic. All niche markets using wood for thinks like brush handles close because of competition from imports and substitution by plastics. 2000 on harvesters have driven down harvesting costs to make motor manual felling uncompetitive, any ethos of growing quality timber goes out the window with onset of cutter select thinning. Woodlands producing less than 1000 tonne coupes shut the gate. Machines have to work whatever the ground conditions to amortise capital cost. Need space for 5 artics a day to remove produce. Produce assortment reduce to sawlogs, bars and pulp. FC reinvents itself as a conservation and recreation body (IMO once there was no perceived strategic need they should have been dissolved and work distributed to planners, NE and EA). Rise of the "trusts" employing only green wellybooted graduates who will not entertain the old woodlanders for work, The rise of the conservation volunteer and woodland arbwork and loss of the knowledge that most woodland species of flora and fauna depended on a traditional harvesting regime rather than cutting to waste.

Interesting: on what grounds? As far as I can see B2 is general industrial and covers sawmills. Have you carried on the use for more than 10 years?

I've no problem with that but if there is a gene associated with not having children it dies in a generation My greatest regret moving from teenage optimism to my current decrepit state is that the world didn't get to be a better place and it seems to be because we are genetically programmed to get more individually than accept a fairer share, this leads to the rise of corrupt systems which take too long to defeat. A lesson learnt since Pandora's box was opened is that if humans can do something they will, it takes a long time for the effects of this to be overcome, by a global consensus, look at the time from Big boy to SALT, aerosols to hole in ozone to ban on freons and now the inability to control the increasing proportion of CO2 in the atmosphere.

I have no yield figures for robinia but in general legumes sacrifice a bit of growth to support the nitrogen fixing nodules, so on nitrogen deficient soils they should have an advantage but I think things like pine have a different strategy for coping in low nitrogen, indeed in general trees cope with lower available levels of mineral nutrients because their roots can exploit lower levels. Whilst willows have been bred for src with high dry matter yields ( 10 tonnes/ha dry matter) they are expensive to harvest compared with single stems and a lot of minerals are carried off, which is why for a sustained series of rotations single poles harvested largely bark free see to work in hotter climes.

I think this is the machine used on a carr which I did the tail end work on, according to my mate it was good when floating, digger not really adequate for size of machine (couldn't be bigger and float). on land it was cumbersome with very poor turning and in the boggy interface it worked like a whisk. Indeed the site was damned dangerous to walk through 2 months later as a crust had formed over the gloop.

Yield class indicates volume increment. heat energy is related to dry weight which is basic density times volume and softwood basic density is largely less than hardwood.

A guy near Hooley had one, discharge into the field as a squarish block that retained its shape remarkably well

You need to look in through the inlet port, there's either a grubscrew or circlip that can be removed and then the piston pulls out. A&E Hydraulics Ltd seem to ba the latest reincarnation of the company that trade from Hookstile trading estate Farnham and they probably reseal rams. Seals can be got from Steerforth in Aldershot

We cut the smaller stuff to fall out of the canopy, where the bigger stuff risked damaging the crop trees (beech trees which had become suppressed) we ringbarked in order to kill the pine standing. It didn't kill them even though the saw cut did completely ring the tree and they are still standing 20 years later (land was sold to LA for openspace and they ceased management) and most of the broadleaves have become suppressed in a predominantly pine woodland. Picture at http://arbtalk.co.uk/forum/picture-forum/65337-odd-thickening-cherry.html#post996098 showing suppressed beech in background

Yes I agree but the set up you showed is hardly 1 man portable, my 5hp honda power pack I can carry a few yards but not any good for tabbing into a boggy site. The hydraulic recovery winch probably weighs a cwt too. I've just had a look at the hydraulic option on a Tirfor tu16. Very expensive but looks doable as a diy retrofit. Getting the compliance sorted would be the problem under PUWER assuming winching but not lifting. The self reciprocating ram looks interesting as the controls seem to be built in. It would me fairly simple to do something similar with a ram mounted spool with twin detents. Strange that they use a double acting cylinder as it makes the force different on each stroke unless they set differing port reliefs on the spool at less than the main pressure relief.

Yes it's a toss up between the quadchip and timberwolf for lightest at around 1100kg. The forsts and jensen are about 200kg heavier (Jensen will allegedly supply a lower power model to get the weight down a bit). This means on a B licence to keep below 3.5 tonne and carry 2 men and kit you are limited. The alternative is to load machine on truck and pull a small 750kg trailer with spout, saws, working equipment etc. Generally when working with tracked chippers one doesn't have to cart arisings away. Forsts have savage tracking controls compared with others which can make loading them exciting.

Cannot help with pricing but when we did this in scots pine regen we cut at waist height and let the tree fall out of the canopy but still standing, and then moved on. The bigger stuff we ring barked but it was kept alive by root grafts. I have previously posted pictures of the ring barked trees showing diameter increment above the cut 20 years on.

My mistake you are right, I took mine in an imp.

1968 when I passed my test, Morris 1000 was still popular as the traveller.

Buy something like this: 63mm Hydraulic Pressure Gauge Base Or Rear Entry Available-Free UK Delivery | eBay and a piece of hose with adaptpor to fit it and a TEE piece between the pump and the load. Splitting force will be pressure times area of piston e.g. if ram has piston of 75mm diameter and the pressure relief is set at 200 bar then the area =PI()*(75/1000)^2/4=0.004417865m^2 times 20000000 Pascal gives a force of 88357 Newtons which is equivalent to a weight of 9tonnes acting vertically down.

Yes and it's probably best to spread it out a bit. The reason being nascent char is hygroscopic, it absorbs water from its surroundings, and when water changes from it's vapour state to its liquid or solid state it give up energy. This is exactly opposite to drying where in order for the water to leave wood some energy has to be supplied to turn the water to vapour. This vapour has to give the energy of vaporisation as heat and the result is that if the pile is deep it is insulated from the surroundings and the temperature goes up, fresh char will auto-ignite at about 200C. Similarly being black char is a good absorber of radiant heat and it can absorb enough heat from the flames of a nearby fire to ignite.

Chris Adam's retort was aimed mainly at the third world. Because his starategy is to license the drawings for a fee I have never seen it in detail but did think it depended on a metal plate for heat transfer. In January Chris announced a mobile model based on two 205 litre (45gallon) barrels. I wonder if he has copied and scaled down Yury's ekolon model, this uses several cylinders filled whilst upright and then inverted over a common manifold, the idea being to run them sequentially to avoid needing any support fuel. I have tried this successfully with one barrel in a burner and on a much smaller scale charred some seaweed this way for a growing trial. It has a number of merits in that the barrels are cheap and with a suitable alternative flame path (perhaps automated with the use of a flap controlled by a bimetal strip) the barrels could be kept at around 600C outside which should increase their life.

Respect, I would have stayed at home

Go for it then, an advantage of softwood is that if it is debarked or split it dries very fast in the sun and dry would is the best wood for pyrolysis for a number of reasons. ..and timbernut when I said it didn't travel and was friable I meant it didn't stand a lot of bumping or handling as it turns to dust but agree it does the job in a barbecue.

It was the whole CPSC bit and IMO any other certificate won't be an investment. If you're not on a building site or FC land you may get away with just proof of training.

No it was more of a dictatorship

A couple of lads I worked with went to MI Training at Godstone, even the dopey long haired yoof got through

Define usable? It probably won't be saleable to the barbecue market, softwood is too light, doesn't last as well and too friable to travel but it's ok to cook on. I made some sticks of pine char that would light with a match and burn out on there own to just white ash, wrap a few in cerablanket, stick them in an old tobacco tin and they work as a hand warmer.

The Viper was technically a kiln rather than a retort. The output looked more "coked" than the shinyblack the market required. IMO kilns offer some advantages over retorts. I think the big Simcoa kiln for making jarra charcoal for silicon smelting was interesting but even that was shutdown.