openspaceman

I had much the same, long time back as we move to this house in 1979. I was cosy in front of the open fire with the latest of several scotch in my hand thinking the fire was drawing well. A passing motorist came to the door to show me the blue flame. This is a difusion flame from carbon gasifying in the flue, once it gets hot enough any CO produced lowere down is reduced by hot char to CO, and then combining with air at the chimney. There used to be a good display of this as you entered Swansea via Jersey Marine, the carbon black company had a pure CO flare which you could see at night. Anyway I was too merry to do much, little chance of blocking the throat, so I called the fire service. They pushed a spray head up on ordinary chimney/drain rods trailing a garden hose which was supplied by a stirrup pump in a bucket of water. Little drama or mess. The chief danger is from the flue being damaged, ultimately making the chimney unstable but more insidiously allowing combustion products through cracks into a room upstairs, not applicable then as it was a bungalow.

Mine was a Danarm DDA110, though branded british they looked the same as Pioneers from Canada, just painted yellow instead of blue. Bit of a pig up a tree. Moved on to a new Husqvarna 280cd then for daily running 162s and 240s and ended up with 262s with 268, 272, 288, 2100, 084 as occasional saws in between.

It shouldn't be possible nowadays as winches have to fail safe. Boughton stopped producing a direct drive one in the 80s. Both the incidents I mentioned were before 1986 and involved tractors from the 50s or possibly earlier. It's still a hazardous trade though.

Not to mention drivers' lemonade bottles

I agree And that started a major firewood business Same as most hardwood and a bit less than most conifer weight for weight Matches burn mostly the wax they are dipped in, poplar (aspen) probably chosen for strength:weight ratio and non splintering

When you strain a wire rope it deforms by elongating and squeezing its core, this is energy stored and it is not much IMO. It must give this energy up as unwinding and heat in the core. Older wire ropes used in trawlers were apparently more springy and hence caused much damage when they let go. Breaking wire rope whilst skidding is unspectacular but if it lets go when winching a tree it can be spectacular because the energy is stored in the bowing of the stem. It follows that the danger is in the bit that breaks attached to the tree rather than the winch but in my minds eye I don't recall an incident of this. I was never on site when serious accidents happened and there were only two with guys I worked with because their firms hauled timber for us, both with fordsons and cooks or boughton winches which worked directly off the PTO controlled by the foot clutch, essentially no dead man's handle as required now. I think the spades lost anchor in both incidents. In one the driver got off and the tractor winched its way up the beech stem to the attachment and broke, writing off the tractor. In the other I never found the detail, even though we all met up in the pub on a Friday evening it became taboo because the driver was killed when the tractor crushed him. After that I think only the owner of the firm drove that tractor. When you strain a chain it's stored as deformation of the link, as chains have more shock absorbing capability than wire rope it stores more energy, as it gives up this deformation I suspect it all ends up as movement at the broken bit. Nylon strops are the worst because they store lots of energy as they deform and if they are attached to something that can break off they catapult that broken bit with all the energy. This is why using KERR to debog a vehicle can be dangerous. Polyester strops have little shock absorbing and hence break suddenly without releasing much energy. All above my comment and opinion and open to disagreement.

I'm 3 times your age and a dropout from UCW Swansea, been happy with forestry contracting for the first 20 years but fairly deperate for the last 15, now desk bound. My advice is get the qualification. Plenty of time to change direction after. Cardiff engineering dept was big in biomass combustion, biomass to energy is part of treework. We partnered them in an interesting project to run a gas turbine, it worked but they got all the dosh and nothing left to commercialise it.

I would expect the bigger danger to be from any elastic energy built up in what the choker is attached to. The choker will have a proof load which is about half the expected breaking strain. The choker proof load should exceed the winch bare drum pull. Good 7mm choker chain has a breaking strain of ~6tonnes. Yes we frequently winched trees of all sizes over before 360 excavators became common.

Still have that number in my 'phone. I didn't realise he was hauling again.

I araldited a 135 4 cylinder that had frost damaged at one of the pedestals that the clamp for the injector bore on, 1972 and it was still ok when it got exported to Pakistan some years later. Subsequently I used a local metal stitcher on a Holder gearbox, in those days (1986ish) he charged £10/inch of crack. I see there are several firms offering the service via google. The technique is to clean the crack and pull it together, or indeed insert a new piece. Then a series of pairs of holes are drilled either side of the crack, with a slot machined between them. Into this a tapered dumbbell link of nickel is hammered, these progressively bridge the crak. To make it leak proof overlapping screws are threaded into the line of the crack and sealed in with loctite.

I sent a PM! We found the trouble with the Ryetec was it got so heavy on the back wheels the frequent long trips off the heath made significant ruts. Not to mention the heaps of cuttings dumped under trees.

I doubt you are alone from the trucks I see. In fact I am astounded people I deal with don't attract more attention.

Pine trees off sandy heaths seem to collect sand in their bark, you'll notice the spark as you cut through in dull light, converslly cut smooth barked species like hornbeam or beech coppice on wealden soils and even cutting a bit of clay inclusion doesn't dul, them much.

Watch the line wrap: Planning Portal - Approved Document J First make sure that your local BCO ( or private one such as: Assent Building Control Ltd) will assess the installation for that price, it normally needs to be bundled in with other work to be economic. Schemes like corgi and hetas, whilst being apparently laudable have ended up like the old restrictive practices of guilds. Nominet seems to work the same way, they make it too expensive to register other than through a member and members get a huge discount. They give a commercial advantage in that the fitter can self certify his work. It becomes a form of pyramid where the installer has to have periodic inspections by a verifier and they all have to have a minimum number of installations and attend annual seminars at large expense to maintain their credentials.

Many civils firms insist on compliance certificates and LOLER testing and you won't get past induction without them and CPCS for the machine driver.

Yes that's my understanding but in my post I left off the words "are excepted" I meant Ten years ago the rules were that cranes needed independent inspection (as per LOLER) but 3pt linkage, front loaders, digger and grapple loaders where no one other than a driver protected by a fops/pops/rops cab was within the working envelope are excepted. And I definitely was not meaning to cast aspersions about anybody on this forum's equipment.

I pay about 4p/kWhr(t) for gas and the boiler works close to 90% efficient. 5 tonne of wood at 40% mc wwb dumping flue gas at 160C will have a net calorific value of about 14MWhr(t). Boiler efficiency will be largely dependent on excess air which with wettish wood is likely to be high. I'd not expect much better than 70%. On that basis useable heat into the building with wood at £20/tonne is ~1p/kWhr(t) and doing the same with gas would cost £435 if my maths is correct, that's more than my annual gas bill but I do burn a couple of tonne of wood too. The firm I do some work for sell woodchip delivered in at ~30quid/tonne but chipping costs over £10/tonne so I'm sure they would let it go at this. The difficulty I see is a boiler that will take chogs from arb work, firstly they won't dry (hence my 40mc figure) secondly the gasifying boilers I dealt with wanted straight cord or cut firewood. There are issues with the gas evolution from slowly cooked large lumps of wood. Wood chip stoker costs seem largely fixed in that they will work with 25-150kW boilers but the cost benefit is best at 150kW. The only stoker I have seen built into a boiler that will also handle large logs doesn't seem to be the cleanest burning, I own one and wish I had the energy and money to modify it. The Kobs I worked on would not adapt at all and of course they would no longer be compliant in their type approval. My old boss does still have a Veto head that could have a firebox and boiler built around it to accommodate large logs, it would be an interesting project.

I'll consider the prices right when people no longer chip to waste on roadside work. As far as I can see prices are lower now than a year ago when the delivered in price of chip was the same as the delivered in price of hardwood pulp ten years earlier.

Ten years ago the rules were that cranes needed independent inspection (as per LOLER) but 3pt linkage, front loaders, digger and grapple loaders where no one other than a driver protected by a fops/pops/rops cab was within the working envelope. There is still a duty under PUWER to maintain the equipment in good working order.

As others have said you must check the plate but pre 2004 transit 350s seem to have a max trailer mass of 2250, difficult to tow a >6" tracked chipper behind. Some time after that one could buy a 350 with a towing mass of 2800 but the axle ratio was higher to accommodate.

"Waste" being an operative word in this context. At best you may claim the wood to be clean untreated biomass ( no paint or chipboard glue?). The leglislation will have bearing on the size of plant. 15 years ago I would have looked to the Hurst boiler company in america, I'm way out of touch now. Then it was reckoned the smallest viable plant with a steam turbine was 3MW and cost millions. This is about 30 times more than your need. Most CHP plant need to run 8000 hours a year to be cost effective. There are numerous small scale attempts of doing this by gasification, have a look at GEK from California for a cheap learning unit. Any other gasifiers I'm aware of outside the third world haven't stayed in commission long. Variious reasons often to do with pollution and low engine life. If I had to do it I'd probably use high temperature charcoal if the feedstock were free. The most recent costly project that wasn't quite working was the one at the University of East Anglia. Other possible routes to electricity from wood are direct combustion gas turbines, that worked quite well but relatively low conversion efficiency. Indirect heated GT, Talbott built some but major problems with heat exchangers. Solid oxide fuel cells, been just 2 years from launch by Siemens and Rolls Royce for 10 years now and simple semiconductor thermopiles as used in space craft and russian army, high cost and low conversion, Caterpillar got one working at 5kW on a large truck exhaust.

I thought it was 24ton (24.39 tonnes). By the time you consider other legislation about axles and power to weight ratio you'll see it's pretty difficult to pull an agricultural rig with a payload of 12 tonnes even though many large grain trailers are rated at 15tonnes. Can you get a modern 150hp tractor weighing <6 tonnes?

I have no knowledge of semisynth oils but generally veg oils are better lubricants than mineral, especially at elevated temperatures. Castrol R (castor oil) was the stuff teddy boys added to their fuel to make a bike smell like a race track. Indeed a vsit to a motorcycle scramble in the 60s was full with the aroma. It also adheres to metals better becase it has polarity that attracts it to the metal. I got the impression that it didn't pump qute as easily so , in my case, it may not have oiled as much as ideally.

I was never able to get cherry pips in sufficient quantity but they and olive pips work well as is in a pellet stove.

single stage ground source heat pumps seem to have a COP of about 3 when delta T is no more than 10C, great for spring and autumn. I do think they complement a woodfired system but would still use the boiler for DHW as the heat pump is far less efficient at heating water to 50C.