gdh

Yeah, heated cabs and touchscreens are great but you've got to appreciate the simplicity of older tractors. Our 35 just crossed 10,000 hours and has never had any major issues.

Brilliant seeing the range of sizes and equipment here. Our two tractors for firewood. Bit of a difference over 50 years;

Does it need to be a tractor or would an old telehandler do? They'll be more maneuverable. If you're going for a rotator you'll want something fairly big as they put the load further forward and can be unstable if you're tipping at height. Our kramer lifts 2 tons and that's about right (although ours is a very heavy rotator with 1.8cube boxes). Our small loader which will lift 1200kg will use a rotator but it's interesting to say the least.

We started in local magazines then word of mouth took over. We get a few customers through our website and alot of people use it to check sizes and prices but that costs a bit to run. The last year I've been doing a Facebook page and that gets a suprising amount of messages although it's taken time to build up and it's quite a bit of work to find interesting stuff to post. Signwritting the pickup also gets us a few calls.

We do but we've got limited storage space and we sold way more than we expected so the backup stack went to.

I mean blasting a massive amount of hot air through it so it dries in a couple of days instead of weeks. It's less efficient but as you say, sometimes it's better to take a small loss to keep customers happy long term. We use our woodchip drying trailer to do it.

I think you might be missing a few points, modern fires and accreditation schemes are requiring dryer logs and in most areas you can't get it that dry without a kiln of some sort, definitely not in the winter. We dry so it's all below 17%, I don't see the point of going dryer as that's what it rises back up to when stored so I'm with you there. From a business point of view we make no money from the subsidies, it costs just over what we claim in RHI to dry wood. For us we wanted to sell more wood a few years ago and instead of building masses of storage to cut in the summer it made more sense to build one drying shed and be able to cut all year and react to orders. We could put up the prices in mid winter when people who air dry start to run out but I prefer to be fair to customers as the drying is close to being free anyway. In terms of wasting wood it takes 150 tons of softwood to dry 1000 of hardwood firewood. That 150tons extra makes the logs about 10% dryer than air dried so they produce more heat (they don't have to burn their own moisture), are lighter and need the chimney swept a lot less often. It also means we can compete with imported kiln-dried firewood. I've nothing against air dried wood by the way, most of the time it burns just as well and with a lot of suppliers it's a cheaper option but for our business we couldn't get it dry enough and our customers, especially the ones with boilers for their homes need a very dry efficient log. Edit: apologies for the length, I was trying to answer the question not bore you

Rumble in the bronx Legend of the drunken master Mad max (the new one) Hot shots

I've actually just been working that out because we go over the rhi limit. Assuming you put it in from a covered stack and it's not soaking it takes £3-4 a cube of chip (chipping ourselves) and another £3 of electric. The bigger cost is the shed, boiler, boxes and fans. Even on a twenty year pay off you're looking at another £2.50 a cube without interest on loans and that's doing 2000cube a year and assuming nothing breaks. It's taken us a lot of time to get our system efficient and it will be different for everyone but I would say £10-15 a cube if we started again from scratch.

Are they the ones you were giving out with bars at the apf? I keep meaning to find out what they were, they lasted ages and were nice to use.

Haha, it's pretty stressful this month, just came in to 18 answer phone messages. I do the cutting with someone else a few days a week and my dad does the deliveries. That's between farm work. We'll do around 2000cube this year so it has been double what we usually sell and we can't keep it up but it's not as much as it sounds - about a third is wholesale and the rest ranges from 1.8 to 5 cubic meter loads which are just tipped loose.

All I see is the processor, I've had enough :). It's been the busiest month we've had and everyone I speak to is the same. Must have sold 3/400 cube this month. We're getting more orders than we can dry and just used up the last of our stockpile. I'm deciding between force drying at a loss to keep people happy or turning them down...

From what I understand most wood is similar in terms of kW to kg. That's why dense woods like hornbeam look good in terms of cubic metres but wouldn't necessarily be better in traditional tonnage.

Sounds like a reasonable price to me, we're not making masses but we're on £9 an hour and delivering it for £70 a cube. Out of curiosity how are you all selling bags? Is it in bulk for garden centres and garages or do you do a few to individuals if that's viable?

Chipping softwood today, the weather was appalling with a constant stream of dust and bark blowing at me so I'm glad I could do it from the cab for the most part.

Yes, he really shouldn't be standing under where the professional's about to drop branches...

Looks like I had it backwards when I tried doing 10+ for £4 last year. On the plus side it looks like I should increasing our 1.8 cube load from £125 to £1250... Wish me luck

There's a few buzzards about here in mid Wales and loads of red kites. Saw 12 in one go as we baled hay.

Have you looked at kramers? We've been using them for years and they're great for yard work and reliable. I use a 280 for firewood production, stacking boxes etc. It will only just handle a box rotator as we use potato boxes which are bigger so we tend to use our 750 for loading to be on the safe side but it's the equivalent of the jcb 406 anyway. If your looking for any second hand machine agriaffaires is worth a look, probably more there than eBay.

Tajfun 480+ (or 400 if you want to spend less) for me, I haven't seen faster processors for normal logs yet. They're good value for money, well built - put 3000tons through the 400 and 1500 so far through the 480 so far with no issues and they have a good selection of log decks. They have self tensioning conveyors that fold away quickly, all hydraulic controls for the coveyor and every other control is on one joystick. 480+ has auto height adjust on the splitter which makes a big difference and will measure cube cut (although I haven't used that).

Thinking of not enough fuel, have you tried running it with the filter off in case that's blocked? Only mention it because I had that with a strimmer recently.

Yeah, we're quite lucky that we've got a woodchip customer who pays by the kW so it pays to chip hardwood unlike most contracts.

Yes, we find it's more efficient to chip it and it improves the quality of the firewood if we take stuff less than 4/5 inch out. To be honest I was chipping bigger stuff than usual though because I've had enough this week of chainsawing bent pieces to get them through the processor...

Finally worked out how to post Facebook videos. :-)

Been chipping the smaller bits that aren't worth processing this week and coppicing a hedge with the tree shear we've just got.