openspaceman

Maybe but has he a right of way for a vehicle? Post 87 we had the case where a wood was blown and it was last harvested in WW1 (ring count and hawser marks on standing trees) there was some debate with adjacent land owner whose land the track ran over whether vehicles had previously extracted produce as opposed to horses. On a similar vein the FC owned a farm with house and buildings, they had planted up all the fields and sold the farmhouse and buildings with about 10 acres. They retained a right of access over a couple of hundred metres of drive. We bought the thinnings but the new owner prevented access for lorries because he had built a concrete road which he said would only take a 10 tonne vehicle, FC backed down and we had to cross the road with agri based forwarder and slog uphill through the woods.

I'm not familiar with the 410 but it used to be the case that only the 2 bigger Stihls would run a mulching blade and I wouldn't want not to be able to put one on.

You fit a rubber tube (or one way bleeding device) to the nipple and dip the end into a jar with fluid in, slack off the nipple at the slave cylinder and pump a few times keeping and eye on level. then tighten the nipple. In point of fact because the run from the slave to the master is always up on LRs air bubbles tend to rise by themselves (this is not true of brakes) so if fluid has leaked out of the system (slave seal gone) topping up and leaving over night is often enough.

The scheme I quoted is for next year, the 2013 season has finished. The point is one should not hold, mix or use more pesticide than required so disposal should not become a problem. It's just the same with empty containers, they get very expensive to dispose but if they have been triple rinsed in the field they can be put in ordinary commercial waste.

There is still the opportunity to use it next year under the emergency authorisation Bracken Control - News

http://arbtalk.co.uk/forum/attachments/firewood-forum/134284d1378807626-log-splitter-hydraulic-pto-57199638_604082ade9.jpg This one looks like one could attach a PTO to the back end. I've looked for a pto pump with drive through as my little tractor just doesn't have enough flow for my small processor.

My credit must be bad then, I can only buy through dealers and local dealers neither keep stock nor parts books.

Same here in Surrey but it's the bus company's own vehicle and team, I guess the red tape of getting highways to deal with them isn't worth the trouble to them.

Yes but cannot remember when I first had one, barley sugars were the first I remember being readily available after sugar ration stopped.

Where from?

Here are a couple of shots of fruiting bodies at the base of a 70 year old pine. These trees have suffered from heathland fires and more recently the use of a mulcher to revert the land to heather (and consequentially devastate the archeology of previous ancient agrarian regimes). You can see the damage from the mulcher or the 360 used to remove the surface litter. When felling I generally only came across Phaeolus schweinitzii on older trees and the presence in the butt was accompanied by a strong smell akin to Jeyes Fluid.

I cannot help with costs, they belong to firms I do work with. The quadtrack wasn't liked as it didn't feed as well as the others, appeared to have a high CofG and seemed a bit flimsy for the rough and tumble of utility arb. Service and back up from both firm's is excellent but getting spares for the greenmechs is a hassle.

You mean the TR6? Now that the teething problems have settled down it seems to be well liked. I have only used one for 30 minutes but the lads rate it. I do like the Jensen spider though, it has similar controls to the Forst, and I think it's better than the greenmech 1928s but possibly not as good as the bigger older 223?? for ground capability,

Yes I think it has to be wrapped in plastic and buried back on the site it came from. Otherwise it's to go to a licensed site and they charge separately for the estimated plant content and a lesser amount for the soil, as this does not have the landfill tax because it's inert. There are cases where the soil has been sterilised in situ with steam and also by being excavated and heat treated but I've never found out the results. It was a field I tried to get involved in but didn't get antwhere with the big waste companies.

Steph, I doubt many toxins survive the high temperature of a clean burning furnace, Products of Incomplete Combustion ( soot and smoke) do tend to have carcinogenic properties and are implicated in acute repiratory infections (the major cause of infant mortality in households cooking with wood in the undeveloped world). This is how smokers contract lung cancer, the sooty particles are small enough to embed in the lung tissue. Also woody biomass has a fairly low mineral content and little heavy metals. So whole tree woodchip is cleaner than most coals to burn. What is true of bark needles, leaves and buds is that they have higher moisture content and higher ash. Therein lies the problem for a hot furnace, because 50% of the ash is species of compounds derived from the alkali metals, Potassium, calcium and some phosphorus these end up on the grate or in the flyash ( most phosphorous compounds leave as a gas so I doubt they feature in this problem), they have a strange property in that they lower the melting point of the remaining silica in the ash. This is similar to glass making where soda is added to sand to make it melt earlier. Now this fused ash causes a few problems, one it oozes over the grate and blocks air passages as clinker and the other is that it is carried as droplets onto the heat exchanger surface where it sticks to them and cuts heat transfer. This is more common on furnaces burning agricultural residues, like straw, which have much higher ash content. There are a number of fixes for this but the pragmatic one is to use crude technology and put up with the problems. This is why in the rush for NFFOs 20 years ago Fibrowatt invested in 1940s steam ship boiler designs for their power stations. Apparently one could see the slag dripping off the superheater tubes. I think it is also the reason the advanced fluidised bed design at Slough Heat and Power was often broken. As I said the green bits do contain the trace elements but chlorine is not significant (other than in certain agri residues like beet pulp IIRC). Whilst it sounds like chlorophyll contains chlorine it doesn't. The words both drive from the Greek for green. Chlorophyll is an organic compound whose structure is similar to haemoglobin ( the compound which carries oxygen in our blood) but with a magnesium content rather than the iron in blood. Whilst burning biomass is a major source of dioxin in the air I think this is from open fires and particularly seasonal burning of grassland rather than burning woodchip. Generally I don't think stoves and boilers emit much and they don't get hot enough to synthesise dioxins from mineral salt on the timber i.e. dioxins are most likely formed by incompletely burning an organic compound containing chlorine, PVC and neoprene being common culprits. This sounds like slagging but you have also identified one of the problem of fines in the woodchip, it blocks the interstitial spaces which the primary air needs to get through to pyrolyse and gasify the wood on the grate. This also causes hot spots where newly formed char then burns out at 2000C rather than gasifying to CO at 1100C. So the grate gets hot enough to oxidise and the ash liquefies producing the slag that interferes with the grate. Yes it's composting which is a form of slow combustion, as John says the spores can be a health hazard plus of course you are losing calorific value. In the days when we had big chip stockpiles for paper making it would be compacted by dozers in layers, like silage in a clamp, to squeeze out the air spaces. You'll need to get the chip down below 25% and probably as low as 17% to stop these moulds working. To some extent the heat from the composting will carry other moisture away with it ( aerobic composting turns the biomass to CO2 and water vapour which rises as a saturated gas, I've never done the sums but this CO2+H2O can probably accommodate more water as it rises through the heap. Some of the conditions will be anaerobic and methane will be given off. This is why some wood chip heaps are covered in a fleece, it keeps the surface warm, so water doesn't condense and run back into the heap and allows vapour through but is not permeable to rain or dew. From the little I hear now they have limited success. Apart from forced drying the best bet is to chips after a summer drying in the round. Arb arisings have to be chipped and transported green and my first move would be to screen it to remove fines <2mm and the longer >100mm if I could figure the economic means to do so. Arb waste ship also tends to be poorer quality with jagged edges and this combined with the mould means the angle of repose in a silo can be negative, the silo looks full but there's an empty cavern over the sweep auger. My virtual friend Alex addresses this problem with innovative reciprocating wall and travelling augers for his feed system.

I think 9 probably allows for air space, trolleys and passages. There is no ideal, it's down to heat source, air movement costs, time. I think your figure is to do with kilning lumber without degrade, this does not matter with firewood, although sweet chestnut does shatter at higher temperatures. Easy way to check is with an electric oven, set it to your desired temperature and put one log in, you'll need to get it out and weigh it frequently which will aslo ensure enough air changes but my guess is that if the oven is set to 70C to allow loss of 10C from your heat source you will barely do it. Consider that you have to do two things, deliver enough hot dry air to the surface to evaporate water and get heat into the middle of the log to get the water there to move, it's this last bit that is the problem. A sycamore woodchip will dry in 2 hours at 40C in dry air but a 6 inch log will take a week. 12000 @ 50% means 6000kg water and 6000kg oven dry wood 7500kg wood at 20% contains 1500kg water you need to remove the difference. 50kW is already a rate of energy use so the per hour would be a rate of change of power. Your numbers are OK but you haven't allowed for the time taken between delivery of heat to the wood surface and that heat getting to the wet core and migrating liquid to the surface. They would wouldn't they (paraphrasing Mandy R-D). Commercial operators won't concern themselves with the workings, they'll look at the "box", cost the inputs and price the outputs and see if they can sell that at a profit.

It was the expansion under constant pressure that he was looking at, to reduce shock loads. Though he considered coal dust and some sort of lock hopper I didn't think he used it, opting for peanut oil instead. I think Sulzer went into production for him first. He was using an aerosol ( compressed air) to inject it and this robbed some of the volumetric efficiency. I imagine this was because high pressure liquid pumps were hard to make and maintain. Again this problem of injection into a high pressure was one reason for the use of semi diesels, particularly in boats. Internal Fire museum in Wales is the place to look at some of these early designs and Paul can talk one through all the developments.

6metre container 2.4 by 2.4 outside, what inside? Say a usable 28m3 at <50% stacking ratio as the stillages have worse edge effects, so at best 14 solid, in practice we only achieved 18 solid m3 in 12 metre container. Why this choice? OK but it means you have delta T losses across two heat exchange surfaces. ..and do what with this low grade heat, the humid air will be less than 70C and yet another delta T loss across the heat exchanger, you'll be lucky to recover it at more than a few degrees above ambient. Even power stations dumping heat to a cooling tower just vent it. How do you arrive at that? Sensible You need to redo your sums, to reduce 12000kg of 50% mc wwb to 20% you need to take out 4500 kg of water and at 75 degrees this will need around 0.65kWh of heat per kg of water, best you might hope to achieve is a 50% of you heat input even optimistically you have to deliver 5.85MWh into the kiln plus losses through the kiln surfaces. You need a premium market to justify the capital and O&M costs, can be well worth doing if you have a commercial bent.

We agree I disagree, it's a comparison of it's resistance to auto-ignite, the spark still ignites it and the flame front then runs through the mixture. A low octane rated fuel will reach it's autoignition point from the heat caused by the high pressure developed in front of the flame. This detonation causes a sudden rise in pressure which can damage the engine. The ideal is for the flame front to progress quickly through the mix and then the hot gas pushes the piston down. The opposite is true of diesel which has a low octane rating and a high cetane rating, this means it burns at a fairly low temperature but as the diesel is sprayed in over a few milliseconds the pressure build up is controlled by the rate at which the fuel droplets are burned. Oddly Rudolph's aim was to counter the shock that spark ignition engines suffered with poor fuels by introducing the fuel gradually rather than premixed. I disagree, the flame speed will be the same, it could possibly burn cooler (as you say lower calorific value, but this could be down to the weaker mix). Agree Actually high leaded fuels did have an advantage for 2 strokes if they overheated or the petroil mix was lacking oil, they ran a bit longer before they seized.

Why? Ethanol has a higher octane rating than any petrol. Generally the higher the octane rating the lower the calorific value. That's why a JAP 500 grasstrack bike had to have 40% bigger main jet. Engines are better designed nowadays, so a cooking 4 stroke motorbike engine then would typically have a compression ratio of 9.5:1 and a carburettor that was always near enough right. Hence a pre disposition to pinking (detonation of stagnant fuel:air mix in advance of the flame front). Better control of fuel:air mix, better mixing better turbulence (squish) in the combustion chamber means a 9.5:1 engine can run on 95 octane rating. My wife's MG only gets 95bhp out of 1800cc, pinks on anything less than 99 octane rating and is outperformed by my pug 206 diesel. Generally compression pressures are lower in 2 strokes as the compression doesn't properly start until the transfer ports are closed, so 2 strokes traditionally work on lower octane fuels.

I agree but it's quicker to tip a load of chips than unload cord. Also no need to strap the load down. Cord is cheaper to dry in stack without contamination.

These people were always a help to me when they were just off the A3 Briggs & Stratton Engines years back I got my Enfield spares from the sister company

It's not so much the wood that's burning hot, it's that the wood at the grate has turned to char, this them reacts with primary air to get the high temperature which heats the grate. Even then the grate doesn't melt, it gradually oxidises. That's why a cast iron grate lasts longer, the sites for oxidation are filled with little graphite crystals which protect the iron. The grate is cooled by incoming primary air. As you say, dry wood doesn't need much primary air because it has a far higher volatiles content than a coal fire. Little primary air means little cooling effect.

What will be interesting is to see a photo of the crossection to see how the two fungi have walled each other off.

You have made your decision but I wondered if anyone cared to debate the surmountable problems of burning chipped arb arisings domestically. Capital cost is the issue. I said that moisture content was the major problem but talking to Farmer Rod today he pointed out that dry woodchip can get so hot on his grate that the ash actually melts and fuses to the grate, something I'd only seen on small burners using coke.