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Billhook

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Everything posted by Billhook

  1. I would like to nibble away at the top branches, then have a go at some of the limbs, all the while conserving my energy for attacking the main trunk.
  2. SATICHE - 0695 Here are a couple from this link which made me smile • get the new employee to "get a long stand"...send them to a friend who tells them, "You want a long stand? I'll get one. Wait here." ...and leave them. When my mother was a nursing student in England, they had a number of standard jokes. One that I remember went something like this: Nurse: "Go and ask the Ward Sister if I can borrow her fallopian tubes." (Sometimes, my mother relates, the answer would come back "Sorry, they're in use at the moment.")
  3. The old favourites like sending the lad round to the workshop for a tin of elbow grease still seem to work amazingly. On my first day as a student on a dairy farm, the manager introduced me to the cowman who held out his hand to shake. I jumped about ten feet in the air because I did not see that his other hand was gripping the electric fence firmly. (this you can do with a battery type fencer)
  4. Just to back my post. Met Office paid huge bonuses to forecasters who got weather right | UK | News | Daily Express
  5. Your guess is just as good as anyone's guess at the Met Office whose chief executive is on £220,000 a year for guessing. £80,000 more than the Prime Minister. My advice to all is to forget about slaving away in all weathers with your back breaking, dangerous and unrewarding woodwork, and join the met office where you will have a nice cozy indoor job on a comfy chair looking at computer screens, having cups of coffee and biscuits brought to you by some dolly in a short skirt, massive pay and huge pension and job for life. They probably never even look out of the window. You can make any prediction you like and if your prediction turns out to be wrong there is no penalty.
  6. Yeah yeah, I know, it's in my lunch box!
  7. Purely in the name of scientific investigation I just googled "Sexy Sarah Phone" and this was the result AdultWork.com - Sexy Sarah.. 23yo Bi-sexual Female ... AdultWork.com - Sexy Sarah.. 23yo Bi-sexual Female (Escort Webcam Phone Sex) Greenford Hanger Lan, Ealing SEXY PETITE PLAY MATE FUN AND NAUGHTY / Cum & dirty talk with me only £2 P/M BOOK YOUR PHONE CHAT NOW ! Sexy Petite Sarah i'm a very naughty . £2-00 per minute is a fifth of the cost of 118118!
  8. Ok I admit it, sexy Sarah only charges half as much to give a mental massage!
  9. Just received my phone bill from Talktalk, a long way over the average. My 90 year old mother is demented and has 24/7 care from an agency which employs women from Zimbabwe. Their command of English is ok but not the greatest. They are told to use their mobiles unless it is part of mother's care or an emergency. One of them rang 118118 (she remembered the advert with the two David Bedford idiots) to find the number for UPS whose medical package was a week overdue. "Would you like me to connect your call?" "What a nice lady" the carer thought. UPS were 14 minutes and 43 seconds looking for the package before the line went dead. The bill for that was £52.55! Three subsequent calls each again cut off 1 minute and 5 seconds £8.99 1 minute and 59 seconds £11.87 1 minute and 24 seconds £10.00 Total cost just to find what had happened to the package £83.41! Just below my wife made a call to Denmark which lasted 37 minutes and 42 seconds total cost £0.99p! The poor carer was in tears, as it was not clear to her that such charges could be applied. I had to take it on the chin and have now blocked the number. Spent over an hour on the phone talking to Ombudsman (not interested, utility mate) then Talktalk (it's what we charge mate) then 118118 who backed down and took off £28-00 They said that they had charged Talktalk £39-00 for the £52-00 call so Talktalk had taken £13-00 out of it. I am told by my garage mechanic that even a porn line does not charge this much! Surely there must be some law against this kind of obfuscation, or at least the word "reasonable" must enter the equation somewhere. What if they charged me £1000 for the call, would I be expected to pay? Anybody else been caught?
  10. Bloody good looking lass your missus!
  11. I thought that I put the right link in the correct box but obviously not. On very close inspection the girl is ever so slightly too big seeing that I am nearly six foot and fifteen stone and have size eleven boots. She must be six feet two size fourteen feet and thighs like a prop forward!
  12. OK The Kid, just to keep you all amused! Don't be too hard on me!
  13. Rumbled! I cannot put the pictures up as I would never be able to show my face (words) again on arb talk without being a target for all you wits out there! But to go back to Morten and your very technical answer which only puts my mind at rest a little, again if I just re photographed the image with my standard camera even using an old analogue film, would the experts still be able to see into the image that it had been doctored.
  14. Went off for a boys holiday to the Med in the summer leaving wives behind. Just gastronomic and alchoholic without frolic (we are all too old and ugly!) Just had a reunion and one of the guys gave me an envelope with half a dozen A4 photos. Opened in front of my wife whose expression should have been recorded. All pictures of me with scantily clad dolly birds, but the pictures were so well doctored that you really could not tell they were fake. In one a gorgeous lass is standing next to me on one leg the other leg wrapped around my middle, kissing my neck and her arm across my body and her hand on my shoulder. My hand is on her thigh and even the shadow of my fingers are there. On close examination there are no anomalies to be seen, it looks perfect. My friend who created this (still a friend!) said that experts could tell in a court of law that it had been doctored because of the type of file but he had no answer to my suggestion " what if you rephotographed the doctored photo?" Or are there other ways of telling it is fake? Joking apart the implications of this are horrendous. Much mischief could made if someone had a grudge and in our world of trees if someone had illegally taken some trees down and chipped them leaving the stumps, he could avoid prosecution by doctoring photos he took before felling to show dangerous limbs, rot or disease. If you wanted to prove you were out of the country at a certain time to avoid a crime you could doctor a photo of you reading a newspaper in Paris with the headlines giving away the date.
  15. Down to earth with a Bump today. My definition of reaction wood would be the time in seconds it takes to make a brand new saw chain blunt. I had a go at another piece of Ash today from a big tree which had become damaged at about a foot above ground so that only a third of the circumference was supporting the whole tree. My reaction was predictable after sharpening the new chain to see it blunt again in about twenty seconds! I don't know about lignin and cellulose content, more like a mixture of iron filings and flint!
  16. I am sixty one Stubby so you have a year's more wisdom! I used to use grandfather's old axe and found it hard work, especially extracting it from a recalcitrant log. So I bought the Palax Combi which has worked well for nearly twenty years without fault. Did not think you could teach an old log dog new tricks but having read the forum here I bought a Fiskar's X27 from the web at around £60 Irritatingly I see my local hardware store is now selling them for £49. Also have mounted a large car tyre on a block at knee level. (Courtesy of YouTube video) The explosive power of the X27 together with the ease of use of the tyre/block combo, and the ease of pulling an X27 out of a log has made the axe work both healthy and enjoyable. I had some four foot lengths of straight ash too wide at fifteen inches for the Palax and the lad who was helping bet me that I could not split these logs. I amazed even myself. It took about three blows but it did it and no way would grandfather's old axe have even looked at it!
  17. Billhook

    Ivy

    I think I will have to wait for the Spring when the sap is more active
  18. Billhook

    Ivy

    The mortar is definitely old and soft and lime and the bricks are sixteenth century and also porous. I will try the stem cut method as it sounds like an easy plan. However if it is drawing nutrient from tendrils in the brickwork it will probably bypass the roundup. The plant is huge now!
  19. It is a bit of a difficult one in these days of litigation and compensation. If you found a lovely tree in a quiet wood and you did not damage anything or peer into anyone's bedroom window, then I cannot see any person complaining if it was just a one off. (Even with ropes) If you start to use the same tree regularly with a group of friends that is probably different. It might seem sensible to ask the woodland owner for permission, but it opens up a whole new problem because now the owner has knowledge of the activity there are liability and insurance implications.
  20. Thanks for the replies. A clean cut is unnecessary for the firewood, and speed is preferable. I would understand multitooth blades being used on joinery quality crosscut timber. I just assumed that the Palax came out with the 100 plus tooth blade as a good compromise, but perhaps it is because it mainly deals with pine in the Scandinavian Forests. The fifty tooth blade is stunningly more effective on the ash and it does not grab at all I suppose that it a case of suck it and see but that experiment can be quite expensive!
  21. My trusty old Palax Combi came with a 700mm blade with about 110 teeth. Been using it for about fifteen years with hardly a problem cutting mainly ash up to a foot in diameter. The blade was due for a sharpen I thought, but an old friend who was a woodworker all his life thought that the blade was not in need of a sharpen, just a cleanup of residue. I took it off to clean it in the workshop and replaced it with another brand new blade I bought some time ago but this one only had fifty odd teeth. This blade went through the Ash like a knife through butter. Far quicker than the old blade even when freshly sharpened. How do you go about selecting the correct blade for the job in terms of number of teeth for mainly Ash and Beech, and what blade would you change to if you were cutting Poplar or Pine?
  22. Army Cadet suffers burns in blowtorch attack after selling poppies - Telegraph
  23. I came to the end of my energy contracts with Eon and British gas for the house. Suddenly because I had not renegotiated a new contract I found that the electric was over 20p/unit and the gas was 9p/therm. Spent the morning on the phone, takes ages and can be stressful but the result was Eon took on my electric and gas combined. Electric at 11p and gas 3.5p. Do I feel guilty about haggling? Not me.
  24. Perhaps lat a few concrete blocks under each end and then the polythene to give the water a chance to clear. I made a platform in 2000 and the lengths of whole tree poplar were laid on four massive stones. Before I set the poplar down we slipped some polythene roofing felt where it touched the stones. It shows no sign of rot but a length we did not use which has been sitting on the ground has now completely rotted away.
  25. Billhook

    Ivy

    Mmmmmm, two years later and it is looking better than ever! I feel that I need something to break down the waxy layer so that systemic herbicides can work. Wetters we use on the farm are more for sticking the chemical to the plant so I was wondering if I mix some washing up liquid with the roundup it may break through. Anyone tried it?

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