Andrew McEwan

Or buy my alpine and skidding grapple, with winch mount!

I was happy with my TP130 pto for a couple of years, would be worth having a look at one if you have a dealer or used one near you. I upgraded to a TP175pto which is a much quicker beast (for sale at the moment) but would be too large for your tractor I think, needs min 40hp ish.

Hi Ian, Are you set on pear? if not have you looked at otiss? means you can run on any old tablet, has done everything I've needed for last few years, and has steadily had more features added. I came from trimble products and was expecting an ordinary tablet to fail, but still have my original sony x2 despite a lot of wet days, sometimes stick it in a weatherwriter but not often.

Doesn't what we do revolve around cutting? Surely HSE needed to see the implications of what they are insisting on, especially if they left the demo done on behalf of the whole industry thinking 'that isn't safe or effective'. Working demo no.2 perhaps?

Did the AA demo involve showing HSE what two roped pruning, dismantling and actual cutting actually looked liked and the problems it creates? Or was it some guys flying up and down on their rope wrenches srt rec climbing and asserting 'this is fine' to HSE? If so I can see why it might not have gone down well.

PUWER, and happily give them a quick file, just like you would with a saw in similar use, takes seconds, cost ~£11 if memory serves imagine if you ding a tft on site it needs changing?

Surely that is a more risky reinvention of a standard clearing saw blade? Standard ones have basic chainsaw type cutters that you sharpen as normal and are one piece construction, work well cutting scrub or re-spacing regen, I've used them on the husky 555, something for large machines only.

Maybe try and find a clean husky 350, and if not quick enough get Spud to port it, my ported one is ok on an 18 but obviously better on 15, and certainly lighter than my 550, with same nice handling/balance and flickability with better hot starting.

What was the difference in dbh between the two visits Steve? And how many reductions?

Forgot to say I have the side control kit for the crane if you want to get your FMOC with it, as well as lots of other random kit like forklift, towing T bar etc, and can until the trailer goes can help with delivery. I'm not a machinery trainer but also happy if someone is new to the kit to spend time showing them round it, moving some logs round the yard etc.

At the risk of turning this into a for sale thread I'm also very regrettably shutting up shop on the alpine tractor side of my business, first few implement adverts on arbtrader today but all the kit is going. Based around a low hours 2014 AGT850, it has been my ideal setup and excelled itself on rural arb and small forestry jobs. Fast across sites, and about as much tractor power (+ an implement) as you can move easily with a 3.5ton towing set up, the TP chipper on it is faster that a lot of 8inch road tows, and the winch and skidding grapples speed and power saves a lot of time on the right jobs, also has very recent AGT front 3pl kit and hydraulics. Lots of photos on mcewanforestry on FB, but the kit list is (all new to me) AGT850, TP175 pto chipper, Country 3.9m crane and trailer, RSL skidding grapple, Balfour 9 ton splitter, Uniforest 35m pto winch, Dragone140 flail and an ifor GP146 tri axle. I'm only selling to help get on the housing ladder and plan to focus on my consultancy work and smaller contracting jobs. A lot of thought and far too much research went into the set up, and it's all the best kit for the task that I could find. Ideally I'd keep it all to retirement, but can't justify it, and hopefully the set up or parts of it will be as much of an asset to another business as it has been to mine.

To fill your person spec and get someone decent I think you need to up the ££.

Still not a helpful original spec then, as you have to consider the risk of whiplash failure with those long static cable runs. I'd say with old high up steel cable it's even more important to consider installing upper synthetic cable, and same advice about aerial resistograph and winch testing first. Also don't need to tell you of the impact of repeated reductions on the trees ability to lay down new tissue to cope with the altered loading from static bracing. Minor extra point, have seen a fair few steel cable installs done with incorrect clamping, so would be dubious if they would hold under a big whiplash load anyway, worth checking for.

I would be taking my resistograph up there on that kind of aerial inspection, and also some rachet straps/small winch. Both to test the areas and unions around the rods. Have often recommended and installed sythentic bracing above old rods to reduce failure risk. From the your description rods weren't the right way to go to start with, best left for short span/lower down codominant issues if they are used at all.

Lets take a decay prone species and reduce it's crown so much that it knackers the ability to lay down new tissue around any basal defect, clever!