Billhook

Just bought one on impulse from the local Lidl in Skeggy reduced I think to £109 I was expecting it to be made in China but was pleasantly surprised to see German manufacture, Oregon chain, reasonable quality bar and trimmer and triblade plus strimmer but I already have a decent strimmer, so may not be using that bit. The whole thing seems strong enough but the penalty may be the weight. 43 cc engine. I think that the human being also needs to be strong enough hence the price reduction. Have you found the machine easy to use? The motor may well counter balance the tools on the boom but I am apprehensive about tackling higher branches especially so they do not end up on my head!

I bought the petrol version from Welmec Welmac UK Ltd: Urban SM70 Branch Logger and I thought that the build quality was excellent as well as the after sales backup. We have put quite a lot through it and have experimented with different sizes of brash as well as different bags. It has been very reliable and often taken in larger diameter branches than we would have expected it to cope with. For us it works as we run woodburning stoves in the house and down in the farm office where I may only be there for an hour and need quick heat. I have tried to sell the idea to the village but there is a mixed response. The pub loved to have a bag to start their open fire and to quickly bring the fire up again if it had been a quiet evening and suddenly half a dozen customers came in Since they are a tight fisted bunch around here I started by asking what they thought was reasonable to charge after they had used it. It started at £5 a bag but soon reduced to £2.50. However it was not cold at the time, people were charging less for logs and oil price is down. Other folk complained about the netting in the bags being too wide allowing debris to fall out, the bags being too heavy at about 30 lbs for women, and the size of the product being too variable A bit of grading of brash is necessary to make the size more uniform. Smaller close knit bags are available but the summer came along and I need some cold weather to gain people's interest again The two main advantages for me are that firstly my wife loves to operate the machine (keeps her fit and saves on gym membership!)and now the garden as well as the farm is becoming tidy Secondly we use the product all the time and put it in the stove using a cylindrical type of coal scuttle rather than the tapering type so it means that we are no longer using the quality firewood which is more saleable. So if you have a bit of woodland and are normally burning the brash in the wood or chipping it, and using the good wood yourselves that you would otherwise sell then buying one of these is a no brainer

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Better go on strike for more pay like the junior doctors!

Spot on there. Until the invention of the rough terrain forklift/telehandler all the jobs on the farm were not only back breaking but dust laden in confined spaces. Loading and unloading 1 cwt sacks (used to be 16 0or 18 stone before my time!)of potatoes, meal, fertiliser, seed corn. Trays of seed potatoes had to be filled from the cwt sack three at a time then stacked then loaded into the planter. Shovelling corn into augers out of bins, unblocking combines, stubble burning. Forking sugar beet, hand hoeing sugar beet Working as a student on a dairy farm had a lot of the above but also the physical part of dealing with large animals. Some of the early tractors were unbelievable for noise and dust and heat. A day in a Track Marshall 90 after a stubble burn with the hydraulics so hot by your right elbow that they would burn you, the noise deafening, lungs and eyes full of crap and the levers so hard to pull that I have yet to meet anyone who can beat me at arm wrestling. And yet I am still in awe of all you tree climbers and am much happier doing the ground work!

I thought that they were storing electricity in the form of hydrogen by electrolysis in certain places like Orkney. The excess electricity could then be used in the form of a hydrogen fuel cell at a later date. I like Elon Musk as he has a vision. He is a very rich man from selling off his PayPal business and is not interested in making money so much now. He obviously does not want to make a loss but his vision is to wean us all off hydrocarbons and power the world with batteries. He thinks that he could power the whole of the US from a relatively small area of solar cells. The excess generated could be stored in car batteries or in domestic battery units He also wants to form a colony on Mars to start an emigration off the planet, hence the formation of Space X He seems to be acting in a philanthropic manner and I would love to support him one day when I find the £100,000 odd pounds to buy a Tesla Model S!

Now you have no excuse to bottle out of those scarier arb jobs!

All the more reason to take good care of the crown!

Having a powerful engine is one thing, but you have to show that you can handle it as well! [ame] [/ame]

[ame] [/ame] Bit clearer

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Try the Tommy Cooper test If some days you think you are a Wigwam and other days you think you are a Teepee..........you could be too tense

Yes the age thing creeps up on you doesn't it! I suppose there cannot be a crime in thinking about what you might like to do even though the actual physical side may not be threatening! There would be a lot of people in prison if thinking about it was a crime

[ame] [/ame] "Learning to fly, but I ain't got wings" Tom Petty another Earworm!

How would you fancy your chances against a dozen ladettes on the street corner shouting "Whooaarr, show us yer twelve inch bar" or " 'AV you gotta woody mate" I used to try and deal with gangs of women from Boston Docks who were potato picking and if they thought you needed a lesson they were quick to go into action. Luckily I could run a bit faster in those days, but boy were they rough../

Just wondered how much of this has been identified. Perhaps not so much racist or insulting Leave/Remain voters It could be due to this new initiative in Nottingham https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/jul/13/nottinghamshire-police-count-wolf-whistling-hate-crime I do not know any women who are upset by a wolf whistle. Usual response when asked is that they quite enjoy the complement, especially as they age! The thought of one of you young bronzed lads, muscles rippling, confidently striding past a group of girls and comments such as "I'd like to see what that guy has in his lunch box" leading to reporting it to the police as a hate crime is a bit oxymoronic. In the report it says any unwanted verbal communication could be construed as a hate crime. What next? "Can we have the next dance?" "Can I buy you a drink?" "Fancy going to the movies?" If the woman just does not fancy the guy, is it now a hate crime?

Looks as though you have a fair amount of trees there to keep you busy!

Just wondered what the great minds of Arbtalk thought about air travel in general. We seem to have a troubled World where the choice of destination is becoming more and more limited, vindicated by the amount of people choosing to take their holidays in the UK. Northern Africa is mostly out, Middle East not good, Russia, Paris, Southern France and now any Church. This is a project fear that really works however brave a face politicians want to put on it. With all this in mind and the fears of global warming, pollution and energy conservation will we be looking at any expansion of any airport as a complete folly in the future?

I tried to move four oaks about four inched diameter at chest height. They were growing well around the edge of a lake, I had planted them in 1996 but they were too close and needed thinning. I picked the best looking ones and put them into some parkland as specimen trees. I used a Vermeer TS44 treespade which seemed to be boss of the job. They seem to move well but they did not survive as they all had developed a big tap root when they were by the lake which was severed by the Vermeer. I moved other trees successfully but oaks are prone to this tap root problem. If I was going to try and move another similar oak I would put the spade in and out a year before I moved it but it must be better to find one with a proper root ball. In your case a bit of investigation with an air spade might be the answer

Ibuprofen can trigger heart failure, experts warn

Do you think that it has been the subject of some topiary in the past as it doesn't seem to have any long branches giving it a well balanced shape which may have helped it survive.

Have you tried this? Hells Gate Geothermal Park and Mud Bath Spa | Activities and Tours in Rotorua, New Zealand

I am over sixty now and I used to have a lot of back pain in my twenties and thirties which I do not have so much of now. Lessons learned over sixty years 1. I always start the day with a 4 mile bike ride which includes two steep hills so that most muscles are warm before starting physical work and the body system has been given a chance to work properly 2 With chainsaws most of the work I can do with the smallest Stihl 170s so I am not carrying something around that is too heavy/noisy/powerful/ vibration prone. Try and buy the best antivibration saw, wear ear defenders and good gloves 3 Really consider what I am doing before I try to lift something and if the forklift/hydraulic grab is there use it. If the peavey is there use it. 4 I try to miniimise the handling when cutting up a tree so that once the branches are stacked on the muck grab I do not have to lift them again until I take them out of the ton box and put them on the fire. The muck grab presents them to the Palax Combi in much the same way as a log deck. 5 Do not soldier on after a minor injury just to prove what a man you are in front of your workmates. 6 I do not use ibruprofen as I need to know what is hurting 7. Once you have a bad back or neck I have found that massage and chiro only relieve while they are being administered and often I am back to square one by the time I have driven home. With backs and necks the solution for me is to strengthen the muscles around those areas with exercises which will hopefully hold the vertebrae apart so the nerves are not trapped so easily. Once the damage has been done it will never be quite the same but you can help a lot by strengthening exercises My recovery time now is much shorter when I have the warning "twinge"

'Weapon of mass deception': Tony Blair and the Chilcot inquiry - how newspapers in Britain and around the world reacted I wrote the only letter I have ever written to the press after it was announced that the Americans had put up a $20 million reward for Saddam Hussein dead or alive, just as though it was some Western movie. My letter went something like "if I found Saddam lurking in my shrubbery and shot him dead because I assumed he had weapons of my destruction on him, would I be able to claim the $20 million reward or would I end up like Tony Martin" My point being that if we were legally at war I would be legally able to shoot him but if as I suspect we were not legally at war I would be in prison. They never printed the letter

Can you put up a youtube video of how it works and results please?