Billhook

I have had a look around at some of the others but many are one handed and potentially dangerous. They all seem a little slower than the Portek The Little five ton Portek was just fine for the particular job we wanted it for, so I think I will go for another one and as an additional bonus they are now rated at 7 tons. Here are some of the others, Kinetic Log Splitters Oregon https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W5mmx6Rn3lo DR https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W66YcaJfqhI Supersplit https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hQf16bGKgo Rockwood https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4CbydMx9eQw

It suited us just fine for the small splits for the Aduro stove. Never had a jam but the occasional kickback if you did not hold it firmly. Not very good video . I have learnt to put the phone sideways for future filming rather than vertically! Is the 7 ton version from Jones any different?

Feel sympathy for all those who have had a workshop burglary as it is often several months later before you notice that something else was nicked. Even something as obvious as this splitter. Chainsaws and other everyday items are more apparent. The trouble being that it has been behind a wood box in our garage and has not been used there since I last had a big session filling several boxes. I went to look for it there and it had gone, then I remembered that I took it down to the workshop to build a cradle for it to sit in the teleporter bucket and had put it in the workshop store standing up behind a door. So it disappeared with the branch logger. The insurance will add it to the initial claim without excess. The police say that the Newark jumble sales is one of the places to look as well as Brigg. Here is a video of it. It does not look that powerful but it worked well to split smaller bits for our Aduro stove and my wife could work it easily so we miss it.

As a fellow farmer the same thing was drilled into me regarding PTOs. The guards must be fitted and in working order and fixed by a small chain to something static to stop them spinning. I was an eighteen year old student on a dairy farm in the early 1970s and it was in my first week that I was put on the tractor/slurry tanker combination. The pto had no guard and you had to lean over it to close a small rubber valve. It was a big farm of several thousand acres and had two or three managers. I complained to the dairy manager but he was a stroppy git and I could see that it was lump it or find another job elsewhere. I always wore tight fitting overalls and made sure that there was nothing dangling and managed to survive the year. The following year a cowman, not a student, was operating the same machine and it caught him and whipped him over the pto so quickly that it left both his boots behind and punctured his lung as well as nearly severing his arm with a tourniquet made from his jacket. I would not entertain a screw spiltter. I worked one for half a day and that was enough! Since the bad old days when I used to cut wood with an old tractor driven sawbench (hugely dangerous not only for cutting off hands and fingers, but also for splinters flying up at your face, or worse still the saw blade breaking up and bits flying at you) Using an axe for splitting, also dangerous over time. I am hugely grateful; that I managed to buy a Palax Combi off Jas Wilson in 1996 for £2500 second hand. The circular saw is about as protected from the user as possible and out of line, but the splitter is also in a trough covered by a hinged shield and all the split pieces are taken up an elevator to either a crate or a trailer. No picking up and bending This has to be not only the safest system (without being in a sealed cab and everything under remote control), but also one of the fastest.

I like Chalmers idea of consciousness as a fundamental. I watched Vespacian's "Mind over Masters" and the Sam Harris videos. I am not convinced that the experiment which appears to show that we have no free will is valid. The fact that your mind knows the answer before the fact becomes apparent to everyone else could be due to other factors, such as accessing the quantum in a way not understood at present. This does not mean that you have no free will. If consciousness is like a giant internet which soaks up every conscious thought that there ever has been, and you have found access to this "internet" by say meditation, then you could appear to see the future. Perhaps not actually seeing the actual future but seeing a series of events that would lead you to believe in a very likely result. Take this website as being a tiny example. You all have found access to this information by having a computer, an internet server, a code and an identity for this forum. A modern form of going into a meditative trance! In the primitive world, as a Bushman, an Aborigine or a Red Indian might induce a trance before they go off hunting for water or bison to gain similar information from the fundamental consciousness. They then go off on their search looking for signs to guide them. Signs that they may have seen in their "dream" I could post on here that "Billhook will be sitting under Nelson's Column at Midday on Sunday December 31st" There is a strong possibility that you would see me there on the day, and that is the most likely scenario, but I may have been involved in an accident on the way so it did not happen. In the same way in these experiments the mind of the volunteer has assessed the most likely outcome rather than actually seeing the future. I remain a POSSIBILARIAN at heart but I am heading towards free will which is guided by a greater consciousness which has grown up alongside the life force, both of which came into being by random activity rather than intelligent design.

Reminds me of the original Brit Girls thread. "Yer don't look at the mantlepiece when thar's stoking the fire!"

This is the part that I am unclear about. Firstly you state that sense of self is an illusion, and all thoughts are coming from elsewhere, and yet you clearly give us your (individual?) thoughtful opinion on Trump.

Everyone on this thread "seems" to me to be a different individual, with a series of insights and thoughts that I do not think that I could have conceived. So because you all "seem" to be different selves. why should I not be one too?

In that case it is a fine Christmas present!

I enjoyed the Vatican rag The Chemical elements and the New Math were two more favourites

I think that it is a Christmas present as I am sure I have given her ten times the value of the saw in free firewood over the years! It seems to be a heavy barsteward though and quite a lot of compression to start. I assume there is no decompression device but I am big and strong and she is small and weak so it is no wonder it has not been used! I see it has a 59cc engine but I do not know the hp.

Next door neighbour has offered me a Stihl 340. She bought it to deal with a large elm some years ago (over ten?) but found it too much of a handful so it has hardly been used. Still has the original chain unsharpened. 16 inch bar How is the 340 rated?

So what is your biggest fear Se7enthdevil?

May as well use an Oregon Suresharp as I have for the last 20 years. Nothing quicker or easier using the truck cigar lighter

I have vertigo just watching any of these videos Or a helicopter linesman, if the fall don't git ya the electricity will!

This is was surprising video when I put butts and kickbacks on the youtube search engine!

Wot, no safety two handed operation?

But you do have a big lever to raise or lower the blade manually? My Mk 1 you have to undo a bolt which locks the blade and then grab the blade and pull it up or down. I did weld a handle on the nut to at least make that part easier. A hydraulic device would be great but another thing to go wrong. I find that I am now splitting far less timber as the stove burns more evenly and lasts longer with lengths of round unsplit, so the blade spends most of its time off the machine.

Would a bit of copper grease help or increase the danger of working loose? Anti seize sounds good as does the double nut, but I was amazed how easily the bolt undid with not too heavy pressure on the socket bar and not too heavy on the hammer blow.

12 inches for putting through the circular saw and slightly larger if you have a length cut with the chainsaw that you just want to put through the splitter, you have to drop that one straight on the splitter bed. Totally agree with Timbernut concerning blades versus chainsaws. A good blade with sharp tungsten tips goes through 95% of timber like a knife through butter and does not need sharpening as often as a chain. Timbernut has your Mk2 an easy adjuster for the static axe, and if so is it just as easy to remove and replace the static axe?

I don' t know about Andy Cobb and Timbernut, but the reason I have never felt the need for an upgrade from the Mk 1is that I like to feel the force of the saw blade entering the wood, which can be very different on different timber and I do not like the idea of automatic feeds and automatic chainsaw/blade operation. The manual feed is quite easy and keeps me warm enough whereas sitting operating levers or switches does not on these cold frosty days. Also I can put through very bent lengths of timber and because I now operate the splitter ram on a foot pedal rather than the auto lever, I can cut half a dozen say 3 -6 inch diameter logs without the splitting knife and just use the ram to occasionally push them onto the conveyor. In this way the machine is much quicker than the auto ones which need to go through a cycle every time. The additional benefit is that when a log falls sideways into the splitting chamber, which it inevitably does on occasion, then it is easy to straighten. On auto it would be driven sideways into the splitter which stopped the machine and caused a lot of hassle.

It was interesting to watch that series on astronaut training and selection. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b092ng4q There was a very mixed bunch of candidates, ranging from two women pilots to athletes to a gangly looking geek who had a degree in physics I think. you looked at the candidates and you thought that he was the least likely to make it, but he hovered the heliicopter better than the pilots and docked the simulated shuttle perfectly., and he was in the final three and only not chosen because of his close relationship with his family and his young age. But the main thing that came out of it for me was that it was vital according to the man in charge Chris Hadfield, who had been on the space station himself, that the candidate must be able to interact with the other crew and be a positive, uplifting character that you wanted to be around. When they sent the first crew up to the space station they were inevitably alpha males, all brilliant at their tasks but they very nearly or probably actually had fist fights on board because of the intensity of working together as alpha males in such a dangerous environment. Not too dissimilar to arb work where there are a lot of alpha males working in a dangerous environment. My main point here is that if you can make a good impression on your potential new boss and workforce, that you are someone who people want to be around, then you are half way there. I always liked this comment on " I have a lot of experience" "Some people have 1000 different experiences, while others have the same experience a 1000 times!"