GardenKit

I know you will all be getting a bit old now, just like me, but are there any members, guests or lurkers who attended Lackham College for the 1975-1976 year? A reunion is planned for the 2nd September.

On the issue of modded saws and insurance. Chainsaw manufacturers, just like all other industries carry massive insurance against product liability and are happy to stand by their equipment in the form that they supplied it, or with approved mods such as optional bar lengths and different chain types. But in the event that the proverbial stuff hits the fan and an injury was sustained from a chainsaw accident the saw may well end up back at the manufacturer for assessment and you can bet your bottom dollar that they will pick up on any mods and back out of any liability. The injured persons own insurance will follow their lead, leaving liability with the person carrying out the mods. With this in mind most dealers will not fit anything other than genuine parts to machines and not attempt to 'make do and mend'. Its just not worth the risk for a few quid profit. Fitting genuine parts and not straying from manufacturers spec gives us a sound 'paper trail' Just saying, from a dealer perspective.

It would indeed be brilliant if the government dropped the £0.58 ppl fuel duty as it would bring the price down by nearly £3 for a 5litre can. The government has been approached over the years but to no avail. But to be honest I expect they have many other more pressing issues at present. But, despite the price, which some see as an obstacle, the sales of Aspen continue to grow, especially so over the last two years.

And unfortunately those facilities would have to be paid for and the price would increase on the volumes currently sold in the UK. Still, if the sales keep rising like they are at present it may not be too many years. But to be honest, i would probably lose 30% of my sales if we went bulk. In general users love the ease and flexibility of the sealed can.

It will come in time. In Sweden and the Netherlands many vendors have Aspen by pump. But their users are way ahead of us in appreciating the benefits and the volume sold is much greater than the UK The arguments against the use of Aspen are changing. Not long ago it was the lack of local dealers; now; with 350 ish dealers that is sorted, so the next thing to moan about is packaging. If there was only pump supply there would be many less outlets. Do you by any chance ever drink bottled water?

I see where you are coming from Dave and i sort of feel the same. But when I think about it I realise its not so daft. Just imagine the cost incurred to us to buy/rent space to store the empties (a full lorry load), then to package them on pallets ready for collection. Then someone pays for a lorry to come and collect them and take them by road and sea back to Sweden (massive amounts of fuel burnt here). Then the space, staff and energy needed at the Aspen factory to sort them and reject any damaged ones (most will look a bit less than new). Then the cost of sterilising them prior to refilling, as Aspen is a very pure substance and needs clean cans. Much cheaper to produce new, clean cans and responsibly recycle the empties closer to home and probably more environmentally friendly. Probably why we no longer return milk bottles or beer bottles too.

The cans are made of the same material as milk bottles and can be recycled with your household waste. I have been putting one in my domestic collection each week just to prove it. Remove the wrap first and take the lid off. However mine all usually go in my commercial recycling biffa bin. I offer this service f.o.c. to my customers too. They leave their empties when they collect their new stock.

Our own sales, and our increase in sales have no relationship to Motomix at all that I know of. I have never heard it mentioned by customers in my shop. Our sales of Aspen is almost all down to our own efforts and promotion of the product. As for the national sales, I do not know, but strongly suspect the picture is much as our own. I would appreciate any feedback on anyone converting from Motomix to Aspen, or indeed, vice-versa.

Figures just released from Anglo American Oil (the Aspen importers for the UK) show that sales for the first 6 months of 2017 are 36% up on the same period last year. This shows that more users are appreciating the great benefits of using Aspen fuel in these progressive, modern, times. Our own sales here at Garden Kit also continue to increase year on year even though I thought we had reached our potential several years ago. Happy users are spreading the word and new customers appear every day it seems.

To be quite honest there are several very good brands of mower and your local dealer will likely sell one or the other. So it may be best in the long term to go with the one from your local dealer. Local service, local spares etc.

To be honest, even though we now service and repair nearly 1000 mowers each year, we have only seen one Viking in the last 10years!! So really cannot comment.

You seem to have covered all the bases quite well. Any of the options will not let you down. Personally, I would go with the KAAZ 48cm. The gearbox problem is nowhere near as bad as it is reported to be, just like anything else you only hear about the ones that have gone wrong. In any case, many other mowers will have had several gearboxes before a Kaaz one fails. Gearboxes have been the Achilles heel of many roller mowers. JD, Hayter and Honda all suffer regular failure of their gearboxes when used heavily. It was with this in mind that Mountfield have fitted a very heavy duty cone clutch in their SP505R V and SP555R V hybrid chassis roller mowers. Although these feature a galvanised steel deck as opposed to the aluminium Kaaz, they are pretty rugged machines and come much cheaper than the Kaaz. They also carry a fantastic 5year domestic warranty, so could well be worth a look. You mentioned the lack of BBC on the Weibang, but in fact there is a Legacy 48 Pro BBC model. These are well built and carry a 5 yr domestic warranty (3yr PRO!!) but are incredibly weighty at 65.5kg. John Deere did used to do a 47cm roller model but dropped it through lack of volume sales. We still sell their R43RVE and R43RS models which are incredibly good, but I keep clear of selling the weighty R54RKB into heavy users at the transmission just is not up to the job and repair costs can be high. I replaced sales of the R47 and R54 models with Kaaz mowers which have proved fantastic. I hope this may be of some help.

I have changed thousands of machines over to Aspen and never had any problems with pistons and pots. Sure, the carbon deposits will lessen in time, but its a very slow and gradual process and the small particles get blown out of the exhaust port. I have never seen damage caused by so called carbon particles being dislodged from the use of Aspen. And even if it was to happen it would most likely be just one piece in one place, not all round as in this case. I would say the key in this particular problem is in post 9031 "i got from a caretaker never had power , poor compression" The problem occurred with the original owner, and by the look of the scoring which is on both inlet and exhaust side, it is due to oil of insufficient quantity or quality having been used at some time. Once this sort of scoring has occurred it will just get worse every time the saw is attempted to be used, even if a perfect fuel mix is used, and self destruction is inevitable.

For the story of stale fuel, follow this link. https://www.garden-kit.co.uk/products/aspen-fuel/why-petrol-goes-stale

Aspen is a very pure fuel and will easily stay fresh for 5 years. But, as with all fossil fuels there will be a tendancy to vapourise more readily in hot weather. This is a well known problem with pump petrol, we have all seen the cans 'balloon' in hot weather and heard the loud gasp of escaping vapour when releasing the cap. It is this vapourisation that can also occur in fuel lines, especially those that run close to a heat source. The fuel in the hose turns to gas and virtually causes an 'airlock' in the pipe. Most engines do not suffer from this but a small percentage can, and very hot weather makes it worse. To counter this summer vapourisation the oil companies alter the blend for summer to make the fuel vapourise less readily, and vice versa in the winter. So summer fuels may well cause starting issues in the winter because the fuel does not vapourise enough, and winter fuels used in the summer vapourise to readily and cause running issues. Aspen change their fuels in the same way as the petrol companies. But to be honest, even though problems can occur occasionally it is very rare, and in 5 years of selling Aspen and around 50,000 litres sold, I have never had a problem reported. Edit, Sorry Axel, you posted while I was still writing!!

It will be very interesting to find the outcome of this little problem. The saw seems to have run perfectly on Aspen until now, so it is reasonable to assume vapour lock in the present heatwave. But Aspen is more resistant to vapour lock than normal pump fuel, so the same saws running on petrol should be suffering more. Its easy enough to test though, the saw should run perfectly in the cool of the early morning with the problem manifesting itself as the day heats up if vapour lock is to blame. It should also settle down in a day or two as the heatwave passes. But its easy to get carried away wondering how Aspen is effecting it and losing sight of the fact that other things can go wrong with a saw, even a newish one. The carb could be working loose, the spark plug could be breaking down, or the carb could be contaminated with sawdust or similar from the filling process. So firstly see if it improves in cooler temps, but if not then look for the other issues. Good luck.

As long as the machine runs well there can be no detriment, except when running on pump petrol which is detrimental anyway in a small way. There are very slight differences in the density of Aspen and petrol. These occasionally give rise to tuning issues in some highly sensitive machines. So if it runs fine on Aspen it may be just a touch off tune on petrol, and vice versa. A compromise tuning point may be required.

Yes, very environmentally friendly Mull. The alkylation process takes place at oil refineries. Gases produced by the crude oil distillation process and the cracking plant are often just burnt off in many refineries, but some refineries now have the facility to combine these otherwise waste products to form an alkylate liquid. This liquid is the cleanest petroleum product that can be produced, although the process is not cheap. The alkylate is then mixed with other components to form a finished product that is ready for use in most small engines. Better for your health, the engine and our environment When you use Aspen alkylate petrol you avoid virtually all of the hazardous substances – such as benzene and aromatic hydrocarbons – that can cause serious health problems. The engine also feels better; spark plugs and cylinders stay cleaner, for longer. And Aspen does not go off during storage, so your engine will start even when it’s not been used for a long time. There are plenty of environmental benefits too. Alkylate petrol, for example, produces 40% less ground-level ozone (smog) than traditional fuels. So the double bonus to the environment is that the gases are not being burnt off into the atmosphere, but are being turned into a very pure product which produces much less pollution when used in small engines.

The thing is that most of our small engine horticultural stuff does not have efficient catalytic converters, most have no 'cat' at all, so they are massive polluters. All cars however do have large and expensive 'cats' which clean up the emissions from standard pump petrol. Also, alkylate fuel is made from a further process at the top of the towers and only a small percentage of alkylate can be produced from each tonne of crude. You have to have petrol in large quantities in order to her small quantities of Aspen.

I can answer this from my own perspective as an Aspen dealer, even though we are only a very small business. 1) We do make good money, not on the margin per can which is quite low, but on the volume we do it adds up nicely. Our Aspen profit pays the annual rent on the premises. 2) Our footfall through the door has shot up with customers returning for fuel. This gets them back in the shop frequently where they can tempted to purchase other items. 3) Our serviced work is now more reliable, simply because of running on Aspen. Customers are much happier with both our products and our service work. They spread the word amongst friends that there machinery has never gone as well as since they used us, but most of this is down to Aspen. 4) Customers feel that our new machines perform much better than other brands they may have used. Some of it is due to our choice of brands, but most is down to the Aspen fuel. 5)We get many less moaning customers going on about machines that don't start since service, as most starting an running problems are down to pump fuel. OK, we don't get as many fiddly, tine consuming repairs to rectify stale fuel, but neither do we have to repair these things under goodwill even though the failure was due to the custom adding stale fuel. 6) Our working environment has improved incredibly since using Aspen. 7) In short, we love the product and so do our customers.

Dan, Aspen have come up with the figures, believe me. Unfortunately I do not have these figure to hand in a format I can publish. You can find a basic version here Aspen Fuel :: Aspen v Premium Unleaded The salient points are that the worse offenders are the the Aromatic Hydrocarbons which make up around 35% of pump fuel, whereas Aspen only has 0.01 %. I attempt to show simple example of how machine emit these fumes, in this case with a mower. 1 hour of lawn mowing with regular petrol produces the same amount of toxic benzene as around 100 hours of lawn mowing with Aspen alkylate petrol, or looking at a different way, 1 mower running on petrol produces the same toxic benzene as 100 mowers running on Aspen Aspen alkylate petrol is up to 99%* cleaner than regular petrol. Virtually free from harmful substances such as sulphur, benzene and aromatic hydrocarbons. *With respect to the amount of hazardous hydrocarbons

Agreed, the road fuel duty is unfair and accounts for just over £0.58 per litre (roughly£3.00 on a 5l can). It would be nice to see it removed, but I fear that there is just too much on the political agenda at present for any consideration to be given to such a minor matter in the grand scheme of things. Maybe after Brexit???

Fair comment Tom, the X750/754/758 tractors are excellent and are ideally suited for commercial mowing of large spaces where the best mulched finish is not required. But in more confined areas that need an excellent finish then the Stiga Park Pro comes into its own. And of course, the JD is considerably more expensive than the Stiga. "Horses for Courses" [ame] [/ame]

Its the same old story, and the same old answer. There will always be operators who consider the use of Aspen and then dismiss it, which is fair enough, everybody thinks differently. But its not fair for those who have no wish to use the product to then trivialise the product and the people who use it. Yes, it is an expensive product, but there is no 'daylight robbery'. The production costs, packaging costs and distribution costs far exceed those of standard petrol. Sales across the UK have rocketed over the last few years, but nobody has ever been forced to buy it!

The Stiga Park range is quite diverse with machines from £2500 to £10000. Its true that the cheaper ones are suitable for domestic use and although they stand up to light commercial use, they are not best suited. Which is why there are 3 Park Pro models, including the 540IX mentioned. These are in fact true Pro user machines with an incredible build standard, so have no fears on reliability. The issue with the height adjuster is down to an 'out sourced' actuator, a few of which have had problems. Tomtop mentioned JD,which are excellent mid mount tractors but £ for £ they do not exceed the quality of the Stiga. And if you want to mulch then forget the JD, their ability to mulch is far inferior to the Stiga, which has the added bonus of pivot steer and front deck, I sell both Stiga and JD, so my comments come from experience of many machines and users.