pycoed

I have a Homelite Super XL 12 with a 16" bar that I bought second hand from an ad in the Carmarthen Journal in 1978. Bloke was a tree surgeon. Has been used say one month a year for hedging & firewood ever since. Apart from the noise(which is RIDICULOUS) I prefer it to the Husky 136 & my mate's 20 year old Stihls.

Quite a Fine dealer according to the threads on the Farming Forum

Ah, but just how did you know he was wise? Did you observe him completing the The Times crossword in under 10 minutes? Or perhaps you just "thought" he was wise...

Source for the rosy situation described in Wales? Again, the approach used in England was not "badger slaughter in individual areas", in fact across much of the country it was the same as in Wales. In fact the cull trials were badly affected by costly disruptions & proved nothing. Many believe that they were in fact designed to fail from the start. Perhaps you'd like to comment on the Thornbury trial undertaken several years back which did show that removing badgers from the area led to almost complete eradication of TB in cattle? It is a sad comment on the competence of academics & politicians that we still do not know how many badger setts there actually are in the TB areas, let alone that no sett testing has been done. Killing of infected badgers & preservation of the healthy populations (to prevent infected badgers intruding) is the only sensible way forward. I still don't believe we should be spending money (especially money raised from MY taxes) on artificial badger homes. In wales we spent IIRC £250,000 on a dormouse pass near Pontyclun, which has yet to see a mouse & I know for a fact that £78,000 was spent on a bat house in a local hospital, following removal of it's boiler chimney that "might" have housed bats. So far only one owl has used the facility. My neighbour had to pay £1500 for a bat survey before disturbing his roof (the only local bats are pipistrelles & they all seem to live in our roof - I've never seen one in his). This is all part of a gravy train which is costing this country a fortune. Scientists , technicians, admin staff, PR & "the third sector" all with their snouts in the trough, & all paid for by a diminishing private sector. As I said early on: the country's bloody mad.

I have an Allen Mayfield Hydrostatic which is like an Allen scythe on steroids. I can vouch for the contrariness of the breed! And if you use the difflock as well.... put it this way - I'd like to see a video of it!! As has been said they will cut anything that can get between the fingers, BUT if the ground surface is rough i.e. lumpy or tussocky it will be seriously hard work. If the surface is flat (or plane to be accurate because it'll cut slopes you can ardly stand up on) then it's fine. However cutting 3ft plus rushes all with tussock roots, or white grass which also grows in tussocks, then expect to do some serious sweating.

Red deer & cattle don't live underground in close family groups, don't share the same dung pits, don't squabble & nip each other incessantly & don't urinate almost continuously. All these traits make (unfortunately for it) the badger an almost perfect carrier for a respiratory disease. Add that to the over population due to needless protection of an animal that was never in danger any way & we now have a problem with the disease endemic in the badger population over large parts of the country. Whether or not the first infected badger caught TB from a cow &/or reprehensible farming practices or vice versa is academic: the fact remains they've got it now, the vaccine doesn't work very well & in any case doesn't stop a carrier animal from spreading it. Testing & culling cattle is useless unless the same is done with the main wildlife vector, the badger. Instead of culling badgers on an area by area base, what should be done is that individual setts in TB areas are tested. I can't believe that this has still not been done despite all the whoohaa. If found to be infected the whole sett population should be culled. Clean setts should be left well alone. Only when the wildlife vector is included, can the soul destroying (& very expensive) culling of cattle herds bring any sort of permanent results. Now the argument about cavalier use of antibiotics is a separate one & despite your naive use of terminology ("pumped full of antibiotics for the sake of greed" really - is this Countryfile?) I agree that we should'nt have done that & should stop it immediately.

Not really, we've been through all this before, but my parents & grandparents were deadly serious about TB, since they remembered before penicillin. It's an extremely nasty disease, & if you had to design a perfect carrier animal, then you'd go a long way to (sadly) to beat the badger. Perhaps remember this when people start catching it again & this time antibiotics won't work...

This country is going bloody mad...

Don't take any bullshit from the dealer on this: the dipstick change is mandated because the sump is getting filled with surplus diesel from needless particulate filter regeneration cycles. i.e Isuzu think it's fine that the sump oil level is rising ( & being diluted with diesel)!! Unbefudginglievable!! There's loads on this on the Farming forum& other forums. Press the dealer to find what they are doing to remedy the excess diesel in the sump - 'cos just recalibrating a dipstick beggars belief! - This is not going to be a trivial issue 50,000 miles down the line...

Success! New coil fitted & away she went. Just cut for about an hour with it & all is OK. Let's hope this coil lasts better than the last one. Last one probably only worked for an hour of actual cutting, but y the time I had retrieved it from my son & got around to looking at it was probably 8 months, so no hope of a refund. The new coil (OEM but not genuine apparently)seems to be exactly the same as the defective one - the only markings I can make on on them are a faint "FL" embossed in the plastic jacket. Anyway - he's living up near Bicester now, so if it goes on him again he can fix it himself!

Well I've ordered another coil so I'll see what happens...

No play today on the FS200 - I had to do some emergency fencing & it was bloody hot to be digging in sections of telegraph poles! Brian the Highland bull had broken into hayfield, via a 6 ft ditch full of water & broken a "normal stockfence". Any road up - there's plenty of fuel smell in the cylinder after pulling over - this episode, the spark is too weak even to fire Easystart , so I think another coil is the only thing left. I've already tried setting the air gap as small as possible to no avail, it is currently set at about 15 thou - the thickness of a business card.

I've tried it with the kill wire disconnected from the terminal on the coil & it's just the same whether connected or not. Tonight ( first signs of madness) I even tried it with the original coil back on & guess what? Just the same!

Last year I posted about problems with a Stihl FS200 brushcutter my son had bought, well the problem is back! To recap: Compression is good & piston /bore are unmarked. Carb is new Plug is new & works in another strimmer. Fuel is new Air filter is new Fuel lines & filter are all clear. Kill switch & wire are fine for continuity. Last year there were problems with a weak spark, so I eventually fitted a new coil inc plug lead. Bl**dy thing still won't start, so I pulled the flywheel to make sure it hadn't slipped on the key: all was OK. Refitted flywheel & refitted the new coil with a gap of 15thou via the flywheel magnet & the coil stator. Flywheel magnet feels fairly strong. When pulled over with the plug out, the spark is pathetic - a weak white twinkle, compared to the shower of blue sparks I get from my aged strimmers (Echo & Danarm one of which is 34 years old! ). Spark is barely visible in direct sunshine whereas the older machines show perfectly clear blue sparks. I've tried plug gaps from 5 thou to 50 thou all with the same result. Short of trying another flywheel (suggestions for finding one are welcome) - what else can cause a very weak spark - is it worth trying another new coil 'cos I can't think of anything else. Suggestions welcome because I am very close to doing a Basil Fawlty with this:001_rolleyes:

Mostly nonsense: whilst the Wehrmacht was obviously severely depleted following it's Eastern campaign, the same could be said of the RN & RAF after 5 years of war. Pretty soon after Dday the German high command's principal strategy was just to try & hold in the East whilst trying to win a tactical victory in the West so as to enter into an armistice with the Western powers. They thought (erroneously) that they could agree terms with us to continue the struggle jointly with Germany against Russia. D day was a momentous event to plan & execute & could not have been done much earlier than May 1944 in any case, so to suggest it was put off opportunely is farcical. The planning alone had taken the best part of a year following the disastrous Dieppe "raid" from which at least lessons WERE learnt. Nothing before or since has approached the scale & complexity of D day as a military operation. Just thank our forefathers it all went so well albeit at horrendous cost by the standards of today. Absolute thanks to all involved.

I suppose if you survived WWII as a submariner, then you'd know nothing could kill you, short of natural causes!

You don't HAVE to do the nuts up all the way - just enough so the angles grip the fence well. I admit I don't strain with the tractor or loader, just a simple hand winch, or even levering with a long bar. I can usually break most things if I put my mind to it ( ex prop - say no more!), but I've never broken the wire...I can see scaffold tube inside the angle would be kinder on the wire, but I suppose it just depends what you have lying about when you need to make one?

Back to the OP: I use two 3 ft lengths of 6mmx50mm angle iron. Drill two holes through the apex of one angle and weld 2 10mm bolts so that the heads are inside the vee of the angle & the shank sticks out of the apex. Drill matching holes in the second length and nest the angles like this -<< Now weld a short length of rebar to to each 10mm nut and you have your clamp setup. Bend a couple of loops up from rebar and weld to one angle where you think will suit. The stockfence is securely clamped between the two angle irons with only moderately tightened nuts. Whole thing can be made from scrap in less than an hour - it's worth it's weight in gold!!

Well a lot quieter than than the Husky 136 I was using before! And don't mention my "man's saw" the Homelite Super XL 12 that I reckon has an amplifier not a silencer! But Our neighbours about 600 yds away. There's a bit of electric "whirr" with them but I suppose they are about the same as a Hoover overall. It's a 2Kw motor IIRC. I wouldn't have thought semi-detached neighbours could reasonably complain if used say between 09:00 to 20:00?

I've used a Titan 18" from Screwfix, available on offer at £49.99 - I paid £59.99 a couple of years back. I was very sceptical about an electric saw, but since I'd just put 4Kw of solar panels on my shed, I thought it would be nice to get free cutting back at the shed! I also bought a Machine Mart electro-hydraulic vertical splitter at the same time. The Titan saw has been tremendous, just two days ago I cut some rings off a 22" diameter Leylandii stump that had been lying in my neighbours field for 2 years. It was dead hard but the saw did it without too much problem! Again I was amazed. I must have cut up about 25 cu yards of firewood since I've had it , mostly in the 75 to 250mm range (hedge laying waste mainly) but some larger stuff. A real mix of birch, hazel, blackthorn, hawthorn, sycamore, lilac, oak, ash, elder, lots of willow, alder & a fair bit of Leylandii that my neighbour had felled (he won't burn softwood for some reason, so it all comes to me if I fetch it!)

Doubt if a 1.5 ton mini digger has enough reach to clean ditches & dykes has it? Mine need a minimum of a 5 tonner & most need an 8- 13 tonner. Had a good few days work done last summer with an 8 ton machine & a top notch operator @£250 per day inc diesel etc.

I've run a Wheelhorse ride-on with a 10hp Kohler engine (also another with an 8 hp engine - both K series) on propane. I made a vapouriser plate to fit between the existing carb & inlet manifold & fed the gas via a demand regulator to that plate. Seems to work OK.

AAArgh!! - wash your mouth out with soap & water young man!! Never heard of Castrol R? The most addictive perfume known to man. Not an additive - a "super oil" much used in performance bikes & cars up until the early 70's. Based IIRC on Castor Oil & once smelt never forgotten... oh! happy days <sigh> mutter mutter , nothing but bloody diesels in the place these days, mutter, mutter<sigh>...

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCcd5J-f1ZA]Zetor Super tuning - YouTube[/ame] Seems like this one could do with a bit of front wheel assist?

Just one little problem: how do you reduce the population to around 10,000,000 to enable its sustainability? If the answer to the question is George Monbiot, you are not asking the right question!