Peat

Been thinking a lot about this. Currently living as seasonal forestry worker on someone elses land, but would soon like to sort out something more permanent along the lines of what you've been talking about. I had a couple of ideas, but i'm not sure if they'd work. So with the seasonal forestry worker thing a season has been defined as anything less than a year and you can legally store a caravan on your land, so it seems that you could get away with living pretty much permanently in this loophole if you go away for a bit each year?... But I have been told that you cannot be a 'seasonal forestry worker' on your own land. Could you get around this by trading as a limited company (or similar) and the company buying the land rather than you as an individual? The other thought I have is that the tories have recently bought in a new law which makes it easier to convert barns into homes through permitted development Info here. Seeing as you can build a forestry barn under permitted development, and you can convert a barn into a house under permitted development, seems like there might be a potential avenue here. Although i'm sure there must be some sort of rules about it being used as a barn for a number of years otherwise all the developers would just be building "barns" and converting them straight into houses...

Wet and dry paper on a piece of glass will flatten it. Stones inevitably get troughed because the ends tend to get used less than the middle.

Shingle roofs need a steeper pitch than most other options, 25-30 degrees if I remember rightly. Cleft oak or chestnut shingles can last 80 or so years and are expensive. However you can't get more environmentally friendly if you buy handmade ones from a local woodsman! I installed a roof with that bonded insulated steel roofing that matelot mentioned. Its usually used for commercial building - roof and walls and so the interior surface ends up the finish. It is white plastic coated steel and doesn't look too bad. Anyway it ended up cheaper when labour was included to use this stuff rather than plasterboard, insulation and roofing sheets. I was impressed. Flew up right quick!

Spotted this on ebay. FORDSON SUPER MAJOR COMES WITH AUTOMOWER WINCH (TRY AN OFFER) | eBay

Sounds like a good project. I've done a few builds with living roofs and am not that convinced. They are very heavy and the structure needs to be beefed up to account for this (although log cabin construction is generally very strong anyway) and a green roof is effectively a plastic/rubber roof but made inaccessable by having tons of earth piled on top of it. If you have any leaks down the line then you are in trouble. Sedum is a lighterweight alternative as you don't need soil (or not so much anyway), you can use shredded carpet or similar. I'd go for slate, tiles, cleft shingles or sheet metal. For anyone who doesn't have access to cad software. Google sketchup is a good free 3d modelling program that works well for architectural drawings and more besides

I have often wondered how David Hughes fitted the windows into his timber framed workshop (featured in 'Homework' book). Can't imagine that it was all made out of seasoned oak?!

Can you explain why you've chosen to cut it all like this? Will you re-saw it or do you sell most of your timber as 2" boards? Sounds like a great days work.

Nice stack. Will you just cover it with a tarp or will you be moving it out of the woods? My planks are just under a tarp in the woods but it doesn't seem like the ideal environment for them.

Heres some more photos.

Thanks. I'll try and take some more tomorrow.

A good piece here about pricing your work, by Robin Wood - bowl turner and Chairman of the Heritage Crafts Association.

This is prototype of a cruck framed bird table. Its make entirely out of Ash except the oak pegs and has cleft shingles on the roof attached with copper nails. It doesn't currently have any sort of a stand but I think a nice natural 4 way fork would suit it nicely. Just need to wait until I find one in what i'm cutting...

Some of mine. I haven't been cutting firewood on the sawhorse, it just happened to be in shot.

I'm just testing the water at this stage. In the future I will be looking for first thinning sized larch, Western red cedar or lawsons cypress in Gloucestershire. Can't see this being a particularly attractive proposition for anyone here but the ideal situation would be buying standing timber at something like £5 per cube from an unthinned stand with me selecting the trees to fell. Not going to be huge volumes because I want them for building pole structures, so it'd be a little at a time but fairly frequently. Could be someone with a PAWS woodland who wants rid of the softwood anyway. Any thoughts on whether i'll find what I'm after?

I've recently had a problem with rats and so bought a cage trap. Now I've read this thread I realise I did a lot of things wrong... Caught one the 1st night and shot it there and then in the cage. Then afterwards I thought... are any others going to fall for it now? Just washed it down with cold water and put it back right next to the rat run. Not caught one since. Part of the problem is that mice keep eating the peanut butter. Any tips for avoiding that? Having said all that I havent seen any sign of rats since catching that 1st one. But there must have been more than one?!

Hope you don't mind me tagging onto the end of this thread but does anyone know of a reasonably priced source for cedar or larch shiplap or halflap? Ideally British timber. I'm based in Gloucestershire.

I feel your pain. I've been suffering from a bad back this winter too, and i've got a hell of a lot of timber to shift. I'd used timber tongs in the past but never owned any and had kinda forgotten them, but I had some guys working in the woods with me and one had a set of the big husqys and it helped so much so i've grapped a pair. Great for dragging, lifting and stacking.

I have to say, I've never felt a pickaroon shaped hole in my life. I've recently started using some large husqy timber tongs and they are definitely doing my back a world of good. When would you use a pickaroon rather than tongs?

There's Martin Osborne at Longleat. I think he delivers to Bristol. Last time I used him I think it was £17.28 per cubic foot, which would be £600 per m3. (Sounds a lot when said like that! Never bought it by the m3...)

I have just finished enlarging a coppice coupe that is predominantly ash (originally cut for wildlife but has been decimated by deer due to lack of protection). I'm going to fence it and am considering singling out the stems so that it fits in with the rest of the management of the site where I am undertaking continuous cover practices and also due to worries about future lack of management of coppice on this site. Does this sound like a good idea? How do yields compare between ash coppice and high forest?

Yes Steve, it was my old bosses planer and going by the level of maintanance on all his other power tools I think it was probably blunt. My dad his a electric planer he doesn't use and he offered it to me last time I was there but I turned it down due to my previous experience. Maybe i'll pick it up and give it a go next time i'm there. You certainly got lovely results there Steve. I've got a tool called a turbo plane that fits on an angle grinder and can apparently be used to flatten surfaces. But wow. Its so aggressive, with curved blades sticking a few mil out of the disk. I don't know how I ever hoped to use it for planing. Very easy to get wrong. I imagine it'd be really useful for sculpting... but not on planks. Cheers Pete

Some good responses already. Customer was going sand by hand!? So I said "no you won't" and I'm sanding it for an hourly rate so no skin off my nose. se7enthdevil, my only experience of using an electric planer left a very rough surface, I imagine it'd be hard to get an even finish on a wide board? Seems like you must be able to get a good finish if you're moving straight to 100 grit. I don't have a bandsaw/table saw to rip logs so I'm thinking of cutting square edged boards with the alaskan/mini mill, then putting them through my mates thicknesser. I'm based in the woods with a 2kw generator so won't be investing in any big electric kit.

I'm just now starting to process some of the 1st boards I milled with my Alaskan. I've got myself a big 1000w belt sander and i've been using it today on some big Sycamore boards that someone is buying off me me for their kitchen. Its taken about 4 hours of sanding on these 2 boards and they aren't finished yet. This is partly due to being inexperienced with the mill and getting a rough finish in places, especially at the beginning and end of the cut. Need to get some 40 grit belts. Now i'm wondering about the sense in cutting big through and through boards like I often see posted (and like i've been cutting). I'm thinking that if I was to cut straight edged, narrower boards I could rent a mates planer thicknesser for a day and get loads of boards done in the time it takes me to do one with the sander. Also it would be flat and paralell, which is very hard to accomplish with a belt sander. So i'm wondering what techniques people on here use? Do some of you then rip up your through and through boards and put them through a thicknesser? Any other tips or tricks? Cheers Pete

The way that Will Malloff does it in his book is similar to Andrew's method. !st bit is the same, then he screws in "lag bolts" which i'm guessing are coach screws, in 2 paralell rows along the top of the log so that all their tops are level with the string line. He then uses a 12x2" reinforced with angle iron along the edges instead of a ladder, which he then slides along the top of the coach screws when he needs to.

Lovely stuff. I got my 051 off you Jon, picked it up from your brother. Its running nicely.