wrsni

In my experience charge somebody £120 for something and it'll be OK, tell them it's £100 plus VAT which is a total of £120 and you'll have an issue, and the issue isn't the twenty quid it's the fact that you're taking tax off them. So for your domestic customers deal gross, they don't need a VAT invoice so just don't mention it. It'll surprise you how few of them even mention VAT.

Really not defending ebay here but much of that applies to dealing with people in just about any arena nowadays, in fact, much of it just applies to modern "society" in general! Is it fair to expect ebay to be so much better that what's around us or engender decency in people?

It might be there for the right reasons but the system itself is complete pants. There is so much legislation in the planning system that they can find a paragraph somewhere to either condemn or approve just about anything that's put in front of them. So there's absolutely no consistency in judgements and more importantly if you've the money to pay for a "legal team" you'll scare the **** out of them and they'll approve just about anything rather than risk refusing it.

Hands still tingling after a day spent yesterday with a kango removing a back boiler and widening the fire breast to accommodate a nice new Burley Brampton. Hope to have the flames swirling in a week or so, can't wait!

That's not a "farmer" that's just a greedy person and they're all over the place.

Getting back to the original point, yes it is indeed a shame but things like this happen all the time and as you get a year or two under your belt you eventually figure out that there's no point in trying to be intelligent for other people.

Wash your mouth out, league IS NOT rugby! Never even mention them again in the same sentence.

I wouldn't be hard to persuade to part with mine and it would be considerably cheaper than that.

I wouldn't panic, yes there's a big trend for "log burners" at the minute but look into a bit deeper and it's maybe not all that it seems. Just bought one myself recently so have been doing to rounds of the showrooms/plumbers merchant and got the sales pitches and heard other people getting them. Nobody else that I've heard is actually going on to wood as a means of heating their home, it's just an "in" thing at the minute and lots of people want onboard. According to everyone from manufacturers to suppliers to fitters, the trend is very much for the cheaper multi-fuel fitted with a boiler, well that is classed as a "log burner" when actually it's anything but. Give it a year or two for the novelty to wear off and see then where the market is going. After all, as stated elsewhere, wood is still a long way off being a viable cost effective means of heat, and certainly not in a poorly constructed lump of cast iron fitted with a multi-fuel grate!

I actually bought one of these for the tree planting and the rabbiting spade was a back up if I found someone silly enough to give me a hand for a day or two but might have some use longer term as well once the job was done. As stated before the rabbiting spade done everything and the planting spear hasn't even the paint worn off it! Try one.

Might add that the Dolmar manual supplied with the saw (obviously the EU manual!) made no mention of different settings and it was just by chance that the manual which I downloaded yesterday was presumably the worldwide factory manual.

Have had my little Dolmar since new, didn't do much for a few years but it's been worked increasingly hard this last 3 or 4. It's run perfectly since new, didn't get much special attention but then didn't get any undue abuse either as I'm a use rather than abuse type of person with equipment. Always cut well, not a pile of low down power but then it's only forty whatever cc so what do you expect. As mentioned elsewhere, thought it was due a good check over. Stripped down, compression tested, good clean out, downloaded a manual to make sure the coil gap was the usual 0.3 but also noticed in the carb section, EU model or non-EU model. Had a look only to see that the EU model is restricted with little plastic stoppers on the carb adjusters. So hoked and poked enough to get them removed and then adjusted the carb to non-EU settings, warmed it up to make sure all was OK and gave it some work. Difference was incredible, previously it was a good little saw, now it's a fantastic little saw. So, what's the deal with the new saws being sold now as we speak. Are they hamstrung by regulations, or do supplying dealers know all the tricks and free them up before handing them over. Maybe the manufacturers themselves are on top of the regulations now and it's not an issue any more. Just curious as the transformation between the two set ups was colossal.

Dug just short of 6,000 holes last winter for tree planting with a Bulldog "rabbiting" spade and doubt very much if anything else would have done it as well and been as robust. Just be aware they've different grades of stuff, I've only ever bought their premier range.

That's what I've been doing for the past 6 or 7 years waiting and hoping for signs of improvement, no sign yet though. Probably the weirdest case I've had was a low capacity supermoto brought to me to try and sort out which had Taiwan stamped on the side cases but on investigation was actually produced in China!! But again, the product was being promoted as being British and the eejit that owned it did indeed think he'd bought a British bike, so there was more than one group of people responsible for that particular abomination, not least the owner himself for being so stupid. Doesn't say much when you have to go to those lengths to mislead people about where the wretched thing actually was produced though.

Well actually I was meaning this the other way, I don't think it's a true reflection on where China really is as it gives a false impression of improving quality. Leave out the factories either taken over or built by established non-Chinese companies and there's little sign of any improvement in the last 7 or 8 years. As for China traditionally minding their own business, you might want to do some reading up on the current Chinese aircraft carrier project and wonder if they might not be thinking about doing things a bit differently in future. Just to clarify as well, I'm not in the slightest anti-Chinese, in fact I think their system of government is vastly superior to ours in many ways.

This forum is one of the most well-mannered and generally sensible that I've used over many years. There you are, that's another generalisation but while there will always be exceptions to any statement that can be pointed at I'd trust that most will take it as a point based on the majority. That's very true, behind every piece of Chinese tat is a western "entrepreneur" busy lining his pockets. But the fact is that the Chinese are still prepared to lower their reputation by producing it and didn't they manage to poison several hundred thousand of their own children with no western involvement? Also, you can't really count factories owned and run in China, or any other country for that matter, by large established corporations in to the equation. They move in the machinery, materials, management, quality control systems, etc, etc, the factory could be anywhere in the world and it would function in a similar way.

That's true but the differences go much deeper than that even. Japanese goods were produced by Japanese companies who had so much pride and confidence in their goods that they followed them right through from factory to end user. They put systems in place to provide support, spares parts, etc for whatever they sold and those systems are still in place and working 40 or more years later. The Chinese companies however care little beyond horsing as much as possible into a forty foot container and getting it onto a boat meaning it's easier to get parts for most 30 year old Japanese bikes than a 30 week old Chinese one. The Chinese manufacturers are quite happy to leave that and even the branding of the product itself to whoever is actually buying the thing off them whereas the Japanese done all of that themselves. That's been the situation for quite a number of years now and it shows no sign whatsoever of changing.

People have been saying that for 7 or 8 years now and there's no sign of it. What makes you think the next 7 or 8 years will be any different. Oh, and I can't agree about the Japanese. If anything they took things up a level when their goods started appearing.

I'm no "doom and gloom" merchant, but I am frustrated by peoples inability or unwillingness to open their eyes, see what's wrong, and do something about it. Then again, to do that they'd have to take their collective heads out of their collective arses first. On the manufacturing thing, I have a lot of respect for this guy. Firstly he turned down the all powerful dragons, and now he's spending a lot of money moving production of it to the UK, Devon or Cornwall I think but may be wrong on that. But he's very much the exception sadly. Oh, and if you think the main motivation behind children in need is anything other than a well funded jolly for a lot of the countrys so-called great and good, then you're well deluded!

Because we're essentially a nation of greedy money grabbing cheap skates. We want as much as possible for ourselves, yet give as little of it as possible to anyone else. We want to earn £20 an hour yet want everyone who provides us with a service or product to earn £1 an hour. We want to go out and earn as much as possible for ourselves but expect someone else to look after our increasingly horrendous ill-mannered children for as little as possible. Shale gas will come as will nuclear power because we won't care about further rape and potential destruction of our environment if it gives us another few quid of disposable income in the week to then blow on crappy imported goods which we don't even need and will tip our balance of trade even further in to the red. Did Primark suffer the predicted massive consumer back lash once we found out the appalling working conditions, even resulting in huge loss of life, that was behind their cheap clothing? Did they bollocks, they recently posted results showing one of the largest increases in sales of any company in the UK. We allowed (almost) all our building societies to convert to banks between twenty and thirty years ago by allowing ourselves to be bought out with a few quid of a "share dividend", that's when the first seeds of the financial crisis were really sown. All this stuff going on and we're not even learning from it. You'd think what's happening at Fukushima would be enough to demonstrate to any sane even vaguely intelligent person that ALL nuclear facilities anywhere in the world need to be shut as soon as possible, but no we're going to build more because we think it'll save us some money!!!! We all like to pay lip service to caring about our children, and their children, yet our actions demonstrate that we actually don't give a toss!

For what it's worth, I couldn't agree more. If the country is in a shakey state now, it's building up even more trouble for itself by selling it's soul to all comers. The thought of nuclear power is horrific, the standard of chinese goods is horrendous, chinese built nuclear reactor anyone? Oh yeah that's right, we're getting four of them!

Baffles me how Golfs in particular and Volkswagens in general ever managed to get this reputation for bullet proof reliability. Known lots of people with them over the years and there's plenty of trouble, nothing like the total disaster of French stuff admittedly but nothing like the almost metronomic reliability of Japanese and now some of the Korean stuff either. Then again, if you want a true picture never talk to anyone who has a Golf, talk to someone who HAD a Golf, maybe that explains it!

Ordered up a new Oregon bar with Multicut chain to suit on Wednesday afternoon and while I was at it, included spare chains for both the ms440 and the 266 in the order. Got an e-mail at tea time to say that everything was on it's way and it arrived just after lunch time today. So excellent service all round and free delivery to Northern Ireland as it should be. Well pleased and would definitely have no hesitation in recommending to anyone else.

That's true, but most full synthetics aren't used or designed to be used in race bikes or at least ones that are pushed absolutely to the limit. Firstly, if you're pushing it that far the full synthetics burn too clean and you'll have difficulties with "readability" of the plug for jetting purposes. Secondly, if you get the oil company tech guys on a one to one basis they'll admit that they simply can't make a synthetic component to even match never mind exceed the anti-seize component of castor bean oil making it an essential component, so the most hard core racing two-stroke oils you can get, especially for an air-cooled engine, will be by default a semi-synthetic. So the full synthetic motor cycle oils are actually designed for very high protection, but matched to clean running and a very high degree of practicality. It could be argued that they're a bit of an overkill for a chainsaw engine but if you're prepared to use it you couldn't use anything better with pump petrol. To summarise, our friend is correct in saying that you wouldn't run the most extreme racing oils in a chainsaw, but the most extreme racing oils AREN'T full synthetics.

That's where it's going, was announced like May time or something.