kevinjohnsonmbe

Serious kit! What sort of price tag does that crane carry / day? Dare I ask??

It's a keen observation. Row of 10, locally, historically significant TPO'd trees. The funny thing about TPO's, in my opinion, is that you can face prosecution for "doing" something unauthorised, but there is no penalty for NOT doing something that perhaps you should have done. Best guess from ring count is +/-46 yrs on the re growth. That should have been re pollarded on a 3-5 yr cycle. So, having visited the site (a school) on an unrelated matter, I asked if there was an inspection regime. The answer is self evident. So, 1 tree required a 5 day exemption due to the immediate hazard, since the TO visited to assess that app, he was able to take a view on the TPO app for reduction of the entire row. Is it ideal to cut back that hard in one hit? Of course not. Was I surprised the TO approved it? Absolutely yes. I expected a staged reduction over maybe 6-10 yrs. But given the decay and historical construction stresses the trees had been exposed to and the high risk target areas for failure I can totally understand his decision. I left as much of the smaller re growth as possible at the pollard head. Longer term prognosis for the entire row of 10? 50/50, maybe. There's fairly advanced decay, bacterial bleed and such a hard hit on the reductions... Time will tell.

I'll do it for the wood! (No, seriously, interested....)

Stunning weather last week for this task: Not quite looking forward to this weeks weather though!

How do you get it onto the bottom 3 point link substitute bars? Is it a manual lift?? Will there be a holding bracket for the top mounting point?? Hope that makes sense... Good thinking on that set up, has got me thinking.....!

I wondered if GoPro would slot into IMovie. It Does, and so does AR Drone. I found IMovie easier than GoPro when it came to editing. Just banged the whole job in from GoPro and cut it down in IMovie. First attempt attached below:

IMovie is straight forward to use. Just done a stills/GoPro/AR drone compilation with background tunes. It's taking ages to upload though. One thing I would say, the "standard" video edit is frame by frame and so you have massive segments to cut. Then there's a "detailed edit" tab which breaks down individual frames. Way too fine a level of detail for my sausage fingers!

Truck in the last pic is a beauty!

Legend! Good on you Jon! I had a wild one at an arctic driver on a blind bend, single file road going way too fast. Met me coming the other way with pregnant wife in the van. He hit the brakes so hard the cab almost came off the front of the truck. I was so wild Mrs had to grab me by the belt to stop me going out the window and up the side of his cab. He kacked his pants and reversed 300m before I calmed down. Phoned the old bill and the heavy transport company boss - it's not their first incident and they should know better. They got hammered on tacho fraud shortly after.... Karma can be a harsh bitch!

A good mantra:

So, demo cancelled because they sold the demo machine 😒 Bit of a flap on now, need to decide what machine to blow some wedge on, find it and buy it before end F/Y.

I had the BIGGEST ever 'can you just tag that on the end of the job' today, I'll take a pic and maybe start a whole "could you just thread" to see how far fetched some customers can be!

It's just a variant but I like: If it flies, floats or f***s, you're better off hiring it!

Beautiful day today, Spring is on it's way (hopefully!!)

I was up a bloody Lime tree!

Experience is important, no question. But without suitable training and certification you're rather constrained in where you can work.

A fair observation but I'd say it's not so much the "region" but the person that makes the difference. Both the person doing the work and the person paying for it.

Get a grip man! Of course they'll laugh at you, they'll try and make you work for peanuts, just laugh back and tell them you dance to your tune not somebody else's. Farm director gets fine after dangerous work at height | Media centre - HSE

Careful what you wish for...... We may well end up with a Milliband / Sturgeon alliance..... Then we'll all be fooked!

Mate, you probably need to re-visit your course notes and have a look at your LA highways website!

Good post that, well considered and thorough!

That's a good one John! I've had exactly that "charge" levelled against me - supposedly doing work at the weekend to avoid the beady eye or control measures of local authority. It was a site clearance for development, yes there were TPO's, yes there was local opposition to the development (which actually resulted in me engaging the community liaison bobby to warn those that were in danger of breaching the Public Order Act to behave themselves like decent human beings) Even the magistrate who lived directly opposite the site was involved in a campaign of indignant letter writing and complaints that work was being done at the weekend to avoid LA scrutiny! You'd like to think a supposedly upstanding member of the community, and presumably an intelligent human being would have realised the "charge" was no more than the last desperate attempts to kibosh a lawful development. Or did he really think that the work done over the weekend (to avoid LA scrutiny) would magically be "undone" and invisible to the LA come Monday morning?

Obviously not a quick job that would have suited 10 minutes on a ladder but an example of the impact "Joe Public" with a camera phone can have! Unsafe roof work leads to court | Media centre - HSE

Thank you!! I was struggling with that one.....