openspaceman

As has been said it's like an overdrive in reverse, it gives you a lower gear without having to interrupt power. They're normally and epicyclic gear with a cone clutch that moves back or fore to engage one or other gear under hydraulic activation. NB What Jon says if it is like multipower because that had some sort of one way clutch to maintain drive and in normal use this freewheels as the other gear takes the load but when in low it freewheels on overrun. I think early Zetors were International designs but don't recall dual power on IH.

I've had an e-mail from my old boss, he has 15-20t green beech, 6"-3ft diameter it's nice wood but would need a grab loader ! No mention of lengths. PM if you are interested and I'll pass your details on.

OK thanks, thanks much what I am looking at. I also want to move away from Access but am unsure which way to leap. I only need to collate timesheets against purchase orders etc. Yes I dislike office 2007 over 2003 but am stuck with it because the firm is addicted to 2007 spreadsheets, I don't think they've ever stopped to consider the cost of licences across about 30 PCs.

Please explain, are you saying there is no advantage to running XP in a virtual machine or that you do run XP as a client in another host?

So will Oak, Elm and Scots pine but it's marginal. Leave any wood in water long enough and it sinks as any air in the pores diffuses into the water.

Chuck a freshly felled beech ring into a butt and tell me what happens

This PC dual boots Kubuntu and xp. I mostly use XP to be compatible with work but am intending to upgrade PC and attempt to run an image of XP as a virtual machine in Linux.. My reasoning is that XP updates cease after April and if the VM catches a cold I don't lose anything. In practice unless you use esoteric functions in Excel or lots of macros Libreoffice or open office are fine. Web functions that use Active X and .net become a problem as do a lot of government departments websites that don't seem to render with anything other than windows explorer. With a lot of internet functionality moving to mobile and android devices... I always keep a cd copy of puppy available to boot up machines with problems.

At one of the early demos of arable short rotation coppice, some 20 years ago, featured a standard Class self propelled forage harvester being fed sweet chestnut coppice. The multiple blades on a drum didn't look much different from our Heizohacks now,

Yes and the shape of the supply demand curve varies with the type of product. Take cigarettes, I consider them a luxury good because I don't smoke, but to a smoker they are a necessity, so if the price doubles the demand only reduces by a fifth. Essentials tend to have an inelastic demand. I suspect home milled hardwood is mostly a luxury good. These tend to have elastic demand curves, double the price and the demand drops to less than half. The corollary is that a price reduction should increase sales by a higher amount than the reduction.

I think he was referring to Dave Gittings driving an 1164 across the Severn estuary with 8 trelleborgs.

I used to see it more in the bad old days of 245t.

Between 85C and 45C your tank has about 100kWh of energy stored in it, so if you extract that heat over 4 hours you are taking an average of 25kW(thermal).

Yes, with sawn wood you are controlling the RH in order to NOT remove water too quickly. You are also adding a lot more value and the time in the kiln is limited by the rate at which you can safely dry the timber. Drying firewood artificially doesn't have such constraints and to make the most of the capital investment you need fast cycle times, in practice there wasn't any advantage in a load cycle taking less than a day. Even with your recirculating system a knowledge of the RH and temperature either side of the stack is needed to see what is not optimised, as I said my view is that the air was not reaching anywhere near saturated and there was a cost in this in the power necessary to run the fan.

I've only ever used it to get the butt off the stump but I guess the reason they used it across the pond was so that the gob cut came out of the splayed buttress grain rather than clean timber above. I thought this was also the reason for the high fell cut, basically the heavy splay on large north western softwoods was of little value so effort wasn't wasted on it.

Drying firewood is a different ball game, one doesn't have to worry about cracking, checking or surface ahrdening. So it's about removing the most water for the minimum energy input, the energy input is in the form of moving air and heat and the aim is to optimise these. Some months ago Brooney posted his finding which concur with mine and on which we based our high speed dryer 17 years ago. Did you measure the temperature and RH of your 3000m3 air flow before and after the wood? My guess is the temperature limited the migration of the water to the wood surface and that the air flow was leaving the kiln both warmer than it should and unsaturated. If you take ambient air on a winter's day at 60% RH it contains 6 grams of water, saturate it and exhaust it at 25C and it contains 23 grams so at 3000m3/hr the maximum you can remove is 51kg water per hour, we removed more like 300kg/hr on a 24 hour load-reload cycle but actual drying time was much less. Energy considerations are something to consider the above assumes a cop of 1. We managed a cop of around .5 but had we stayed in business expected to get 50% better. .

This is how we extracted pulp up till 1984. Two blokes would handball randomly heaped 39" billets onto the trailer and offload them onto an artic trailer, two lines down the bed and a line across the to to bind them in. Max gross was 28 tonne when we did it, so the load was 18 tonne which was just about a days work. Prior to that we had pulp crates on fore and aft of a super major. We did use the grapple loader and it is quite doable, within a year the pulp mills insisted on 2m lengths, which made disposing of oak cordwood a bit more difficult as loads would get rejected if not straight enough. I think I still have a cordwood trailer but the brakes will be rusted on if anyone wants it. On occasion we would extract bundles on the butt plate by rolling them up with the double drum cables.

Depending on how you elect to pay tax timber sales can be tax free. This quirk of the taxation system is how the big management companies grew.

I've always wondered about this need for balancing with 3ph gensets, I can see a problem with the neutral floating if the windings are star but why else? ...and are they wired star or delta?

You really need to girth them at the mid length. Say they're 50cm at breast height and 20 metres high they would tariff at 20-25 and be about 1.5 m3 each in the stem, cannot guess what the ratio of lop and top is to stem wood on an open grown conifer but the whole trees probably weigh less than 6 tonne.

I was out helping a mate yesterday, sum of our ages 118 years! He did the climbing. He had been cut off for 3 days and running off petrol genset got through 6 gallons. Anyway for safety I have suggested this: Power Transfer Switch any good? Seems reasonably cheap.

Not wishing to derail the thread too much; what happes when the galvanising corrodes off the wire and the wire starts rusting?

I was talking to father in law yesterday about his exploits, at 16 years old his merchant navy ship was bombed by the Italians steaming out of Marseilles, just as Vichy were doing a deal with Germany (he says June 4th 41), many crew swam 1 mile back to shore and some 20 found a fully provisioned abandoned british army base. After recuperating they decided to catch a train to Cherboug and the locals warned them the french police were collaborating with the germans and to get rid of any insignia. They arrived in Cherbourg without being challenged and managed to take a regular ferry to Southampton, yet by then France had been abandoned by the allies. As he was a trained 4.7" gunner (extra shilling a week he says) he was sent to the Falklands to a new ship in a convoy of 20 boats going to Argentina to collect beef. En route, as a passenger, one night they were attacked by 3 U boats operating on the surface and 20 ships were lost. Having slept through the noise the first he realised was meeting men huddled on the deck in blankets after they were rescued. Later in the war my father volunteered, after my mother's brother was killed returning from a raid on Dusseldorf in May 43, he was sent to Burma where he fitted radar to Mosquitoes which effectively won the war on Japanese shipping. He never spoke about it but he was traumatised by what he saw and died aged 84 in a private room after waking the ward with a panic attack that the Japs were coming. His younger brother entered the war on D Day as a sapper in pioneer battalion, suffered shell shock and underwent some nasty treatments, electro convulsive therapy and crude drugs, which probably led to his death from stomach cancer. Their father died in 1948, a chronic invalid from a shattered arm in WW1 with a scot's penchant for booze. I'm so grateful that I have not had to live through what they did.

Yes an AMV can tow two empty trailers or a trailer (laden and unladen) and an Agricultural Trailed Appliance (which this splitter might be if used on a farmer's holding) but not for private use or behind non agricultural vehicles. I used to see a trailed Heizohack behind a silage trailer pulled by a Valtra with roof mounted grapple but recently only the tractor-trailer combination.

Yes its a pot priming incentive, once working it will be reduced like the other feed in tariffs.

I watch ours being done and that's how our fitter does them, with suds, even so I sometimes see sparks. The thing is it only needs something like 300C to take the hardness off a blade. Hand honing with a diamond file on the machine works for my TP, which won't feed twigs at all if slightly blunt, I do wonder about sharpening the feed rollers but it's really designed for chipping roundwood fuel.