openspaceman

If you cannot justify a hydraulic splitter you probably cannot justify a screw splitter also. Screw splitters can often prise apart ragged sections between knots where a hydraulic one will fail but they produce a poor looking log. If they fail to split a bit they just bore a conical hole but even if the piece splits it will often not fall apart, needing further work with an axe. It's probably best to wedge the ring vertical between two flat ones and rip down with the saw, rotate it through 90 decrees and repeat. This will produce "woodwool" rather than normal chainsaw flakes which you will need to clear frequently, make sure the saw clutch can get rid of these stringy bits without binding.

They are reputedly rebranded CTEK ones that cost over £40 on ebay. They look like this: Once they are connected you cycle through the functions by pressing the left hand button. When it is charging a red led is on and green lights when charged. It is safe to leave it on all the time but you are advised not to charge when the battery is connected to vehicle, in practice I have had no problem doing it in a vehicle.

Lidl or Aldi occasionally sell a Tronic 3.6A intelligent charger for 10 quid which is good for all but the profoundly dead batteries. It is protected against overheating, wrong polarity and over charging. It has settings for gellcells, motorcycle and car batteries as well as a winter setting.

...and this is the rub, as it desiccates it becomes more palatable, so animals eat it, this is why it is dangerous in hay. When green the animals avoid it. So even if the plant is dead animals should not graze the field. Also it's a biennial so the plants you see flower this year were seeded two seasons ago and the ones that are just rosettes this year will flower next.

Lamberhurst engineering (TN3 8DS 01892 890364) still keep some spares but if it is an oil seal it will be available from a bearing dealer and plastic gasket replaces most paper ones.

Are there any field scale tulip fields visible from roadside in UK? My daughter has had to cancel a trip to The Netherlands for a flower festival and I wondered if there was a sight worth seeing in the eastern counties.

It was a requiremnt in some cases to preserve "nightwater" as this once allowed to go stale was used to filter through fresh dry wood ash would react with potasium carbonate to give potassium nitrate, saltpetre. Not only was this the oxidant in gunpowder but also the ingredient to preserve and flavour ham. Oestrogen from urine collected at convents was original ingredient in the contraceptive pill

Dimethyl ether would be a good diesel fuel if injected rather than pre mixed. It also has the advantage of being easily synthesized from carbon given cheap (nuclear) energy. wd40 is a safe alternative to get a diesel to fire if it has a fueling problem.

A diesel engine works with a full cylinder of air which is heated during the comprssion stroke to above 300C. At this temperature the droplets of oil light as soon as they are injected and continue burning smoothly until combustion is complete. To do this succesfully the piston rings have to prevent the air escaping into the crankcase and this is achieved by them having a square edge. The ether in easy start delivered in the air intake becomes premixed with the air and it then detonates throughout the combustion chamber as the compressed mixture heats up. The shock from this knocking is the same as pinking in an si engine running on too low octane fuel and it can erode the edge of the ring and air can get under the rounded edge, hence losing compression pressure.

BTU is just the old imperial measure of heat energy, possibly in use before Joule demonstrated that motive energy and heat energy were the same. It is the amount of heat necessary to raise the temperature of one pound of water through one degree Fahrenheit. All energy units are interchangeable so using madisons handy converter: 1 kWh=3412.142 btu=3600000 Joule=907184.7 kilocalorie 1kg of bone dry wood contains between 18.6 and 20 MJ or 5.166667-5.555556kWh which is 63465.83-68242.83 btu. There is only one imperial power in the world today and they still use imperial units.

The standard way of determining calorific value is by burning the substance in a bomb calorimeter. The whole apparatus is immersed in water and enough oxygen to burn the wood is in the vessel. The rise in temperature of the lot is used to calculate the cv. All plant matter has a similar cv at a given moisture content and after the ash is subtracted, softwoods tend to be a bit higher as they have higher lignin and resins which have a higher cv than cellulose and hemicellulose. The thing I like about alder is it dries easily, keeps well and is easy to light. It grows straight and is easily processed. Oak takes a while to dry, it is used for barrel staves because it resists moisture movement tangentially plus the sapwood is about as perishable as poplar.

It should be on a label on the driver's door jamb. I cannot check one atm but its 67psi on front and 44 on back IIRC for 195r75c16 on a 350

We used to send first and second butts to Nidd Valley, which was a long way to haul from Surrey. The coloured stuff pesumably was used for settee frames. Yes but I suspect it was used a lot more before plastics, it was valued for treen and dairy work, I cannot say what the demand was as even this may have been a low volume market. It was valuable for veneer and of course fiddlebacks if rippled. I grew up in the steam train era and the carriage interior wood was all a deep mahogany brown, I was surprised when I got on one of the carriages being restored by the Bluebell Railway to see the panels were a light tan and sycamore, presumably the patina had developed from pollution and tobacco smoke.

Was the square cut out to check for ripple? A polish chap I worked for had the deplorable habit of doing this to standing trees. The butt looks like it has flecks from squirrel damage?? Anyway the saying was fell it Xmas eve, deliver it Xmas day and mill it boxing day. The inference being that all this should be done quickly and in the winter. The old guys also said the sawdust should be brushed off the boards and they season vertically but I don't know the reason for this latter unless it is to do with the compression from stickers.

Alder for blackpowder alder buckthorn for fuses aldershot for soldiers

I do like the look of that valve, mine has suffered badly from hitting " contraries"

I cannot imagine any way one could arrange logs in such a way they could occupy more space than when they are randomly dropped in from a processor. As to regulation; I work in a sector that is heavilly regulated, the net result is the client whose system we work to has less choice of firms qualified to do the work because the entry level to the system is expensive and the jobs cost considerably more than in more normal environments. When I worked with commercial biomass installations the designers fitted heat meters to the system, the plan was to pay for woodchip on the amount of hot water it would produce. No suppliers would supply on this basis bar one special case. It was a shame as there seemed to be a ripe opportunity to cut transport costs by electing to be paid on the meter.

Yes it sounds like a seal has failed on one of the slew rams. If you can get them off and there is no scoring it's a straight foward job

Be aware its relevance to firewood logs is loose in that it deals with measurement of trees and the relation of volume to weight. Its purpose is to provide practical mesurement for sylviculture, the practice of growing trees for their timber. Firewood logs are a luxury good not a primary energy source. Production of firewood logs requires a high labour input, each time a piece of wood is handled adds to this labour cost stacked firewood demands even more handling.

If you allow 50% air spaces the volume of loosely jumbled logs in the above example would weigh 343.75kg which fits reasonably with the original poster's experimental value of 366kg for slightly higher mc logs. Of course there are lots of other unknowns, for instance if the crate were larger there would be proportionally more weight in it. Most of this is explained in the forestry mensuration handbook (Forestry Commission 39 "blue book"). One could do the same for other hard and softwoods. Then you would have to consider differences in calorific value and this varies between species and parts of the tree (smaller branches have proportionately more bark and this has higher ash content). Perceived wisdom is that oven dry hardwood has about 18.6MJ/kg (5.166667kWh/kg) whilst the wood of a douglas fir has more lignin and resin and will be about 20MJ/kg (5.555556kWh/kg). After that you need to account for stack losses and these will be mostly interrelated and due to moisture content and excess air (higher mc wood needs more primary air and hence leads to higher excess air values).

Yes. To clarify; I bought a 1990 ex mod ragtop V8 110 in July 1998, put a hardtop on and ran it till 2009 when I stopped working for a living but I kept it sorned with a new MOT every year until I sold it last weekend. It had 80,000km on the clock when I got it and sold it with 165,000, it needed no major mechanical work in the whole time I used it but I did have to replace a couple of outriggers.

The problem would be in overcoming the float valve which stops you over filling the tank, so you would need a pump capable of working in lpg at ~80psi

I ran one for 10 years, parked it up for the last 5, and sold it last weekend. At the time it was far cheaper to buy and convert than buy a similar diesel and it had similar power (109bhp v 111hp) subsequently the diesels have developed far more power so mine was a bit sedate. I do have an RR engine with about 150bhp but never fitted it. See above not necessarily higher performance. If you factor in the service interval and the clean burn using lpg (a mate sent some oil in for analysis and could extend oil changes to 20kmiles verses the diesel every 3k) and I was getting 14mpg on lpg when a diesel would do about 25 mpg the fuel prices were very comparable. Mine were under the driver's seat and in one of the jerry can lockers (ex MOD) gave a range of 150miles with no compromise on off road driving. I thought it was getting worse in Surrey with a couple of outlets closed down.

Probably too late to change but I had big problems with a bottom unloading silo. The drag arms being run off the auger sheared the auger after 4 years. The sloping auger will increase stress. I'd look to putting a second motor to drive the arms. This set up is fine for pellets but arb chips have a propensity to have a negative angle of repose i.e. a cavity will form rather than chips drop to the sweep arms.

sold my 110 hardtop last week and it did me well for ten years. no major repairs and never let me down in 80k miles. Only let it go because I hadn't used it since 2009