Billhook

In the words of the great Tom Lehrer, remainers must be " feeling a bit like a Christian Scientist with appendicitis"

I thought that it might only work on a small leak in a car radiator, sort of dribble leak, but not on an industrial machine with a big old radiator. Hope it may prove useful to some of you one day if you just need a quick temporary fix. I see on youtube that people put the whole egg in but I would have thought that it is the white that does the sealing.

"We in the XXXXX party have pledged in our manifesto that we will pass a law to stop politicians lying to the public" Yes, mmmm, I cannot see much future in that one!

Just resurrected the old JCB swing shovel 806C. About 15 tons with a Perkins 6 cylinder engine. Not been used for over ten years and had a ten year old ash tree growing out of the hydraulic compartment! Filled it up with diesel, checked oil, found a battery and then put a hose in the rad to fill it up. There my problem started as the water came out of the radiator faster than it comes out of me after a night on the beer. The old radiator firm has packed up and the nearest place is 30 miles away Set about rad removal only to find that the bolts with the rubber mounts were turning inside the rubber. This would mean cutting them off and finding replacements. On top of that the bottom hose was nearly impossible to access. So I have read about it and seen a few videos on youtube and I thought that I would try it as I only had one job to do with the JCB which was an afternoon's work. I bought a dozen eggs from Sainsbury at £1.80 and cracked them all into a bowl then fished out the yolks with a spoon. So I now had about half a pint of white. Started the digger which proceeded to lose all its water in about ten minutes. Made sure the engine was hot so kept topping it up. After the last top up, when the water had just disappeared down the matrix I poured the egg white in and the leak nearly stopped straight away. I did ten minutes work and the radiator was still full. So did three hours work and although some water was gone it was still half way up the header tank. I now will have a very rich omelette for my breakfast every morning next week!

Make all schools take the kids out every now and again to pick litter up from the side of the road. They will not like doing it so they may just tell their parents "Hey if you chuck that effing Starbucks cup out of the window I. gotta pick it up!"

We used to have a Kidd sawbench and cone splitter about thirty years ago which seemed a big improvement on the old prewar sawbench! Both relatively lethal for loss of fingers and risk of splinters flying at you. A lot of heavy work but it did keep you warm in the Winter. Bought a Palax Combi off Jas Wilson second hand in 1996 for about £2500. PTO and linkage but it had the mounting point and pulley for a motor so I bought a 3 phase and I now have the option of electric or tractor pto. Electric is quiet and fume free and I operate it in a lean to shed with lighting. I collect the lengths of timber with a Matbro teleporter which has an ols muck grab on the front. This will take a couple of tons of 10 foot logs from the wood to the processor and by tilting the grab and gently releasing the logs with the hydraulic grab this works for me both as a forwarder in the woods and a log deck at the Palax. A lot of the wood is not straight, mainly Ash and Sycamore but some oak. There are some horrible shapes that would not go through the automatic feed processors and because of this they do not always fall true iunto the splitter and can fall sideways especially on shorter lengths. For this reason I disconnected the automatic trip for the splitter and use a foot operated pedal. This video shows all the lovely straight lengths that you see on every processor video! But it does show the 10 inch diameter log (I think it will handle a bit more than this) [ame] [/ame] I like the circular saw blade which with tungsten tips seems to stay sharp for ever and waltzes through most timber but the main thing is I have control of the feed speed. When processing smaller diameter lengths that are bent sometime a nearly 90 degrees I can feed it though in a series of quick cuts without cycling the splitter which is a big time saver over the machines which need to cycle every piece. In this case I would remove the static axe if I had a lot of similar stuff to process. I like the relatively small amount of manual labour involved so I keep warm in the Winter. I cannot imagine sitting/standing by a totally automatic processor would be much fun on a cold day. There is no lifting and it is not hard just pushing the log sideways on the rollers and pushing the log into the saw. The conveyor takes the split timber to one ton wooden potato boxes. A lot of this is about the cost of a processor and spending £10,000 on a fancy machine may take a long time to recover with the price of firewood and global warming. Palax processors can be picked up for reasonable money, probably less than a saw bench/ splitter /conveyor bought separately PALAX 600 COMBI FIRE WOOD PROCESSOR | eBay My old machine is still going strong after 20 years with no breakdowns and not many blade sharpenings (Thank you Jas Wilsons!). I am not sure how often the chainsaw systems would need fettling by comparison. I like the fact that the blade is about as protected from the operator as possible, certainly a massive improvement on the traditional saw bench where the operator is in line with the blade and whose fingers are inches from the blade on either side with each pass. So without a processor there is potential injury not only from the blade but also from lifting and the damage to your back. I am an old git of pension age and try not to do any manual lifting (been there, done that with Cwt, or 50kg bags of potatoes/fertiliser/seed, I have the T-shirt and the bad back) and if I do it right the teleporter should not only bring the logs from the woods to the Palax but also the boxes to our house and plonk them right outside the door next to the wood burner. I am afraid the sad thing about logs around here is that the hassle of selling them to the general public with all their different requirements is too much for me and the only way I can sensibly make any money is to burn them myself and save the vast utility bills that we used to have. But there again I do not have to rely on logs as my only source of income.

The purpose built bags seem a little dear at around £50 so has anyone found a used bulk bag of some kind to easily adapt for the trolley?

Nah! He would not be interested in a swallow, much more likely to want a swift (one)

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None at the house yet but I love them when they first come. They seem so pleased to have made it back that they fly in and out of the car port sometimes only a few feet over our heads accompanied by a lot of twittering. (Not the Trump kind!) They seem to like the wind vane with the two Airedales and treat it like it was their fairground waltzer! Not a very good example here as they seem to enjoy sitting on it when it is spinning much more violently [ame] [/ame]

We are always a bit later here in Lincs but a pair were flying around the lake this evening rather wishing they were back in South Africa I should think with the cold strong wind!

There seem to be many different cone shapes as well as different thread coarseness. The Atomsplitter which is shown here Welcome to The 300 Ton Atom Splitter - Certainly has a different design and deals with the larger timber The logs in the Black video would easily go through the Palax Exac-One Ltd - Timber Splitter and if you click on the video, I see he has the same problem as my cone in that in some knotty pieces it just bores a hole rather than splits My cone certainly is narrower and is not as flared at the top but I would have thought that it would penetrate the log better being narrow but perhaps not so good on the final split. Which Black model did you order? Please let us know how it works for you

Yes I think that you are spot on there. Bit of a learning curve here and a bit of patience would help. The last video he bores into one end of the big log by the knot and nothing happens apart from boring a hole,( a bit like my first attempt) until he tries the other end, starting right at the end. I have another digger track motor which may not be quite so worn and may try that one if no more progress is made.

Or better still this [ame] [/ame]

Encouraged by the success of my post hole digger adaptation on the from of the Matbro Teleporter, http://arbtalk.co.uk/forum/video-forum/105418-teleporter-hydraulic-auger.html I bought a cone screw splitter from Poland to fit in place of the auger. It has a negative thread so anticlockwise rotation but became stuck in a relatively small bit of ash. I had to lift the log to spin it to release the cone by "hammering" it against another log. It may be that I just need to have a bit more power as the hydraulic motor is worn, or it may be that the cone is not a good design. [ame] [/ame] This is what I was trying to achieve [ame] [/ame]

My father planted several acres of poplar in 1960 when Bryant and May were encouraging the idea. The graph of match use was about forty five degrees upwards, everyone smoking like no tomorrow. Father always said that I would make a fortune in the year 2000 out of them The year 2000 came and most people had packed up smoking and those that still did used butane lighters.................. A chance remark from someone who had been living in Oregon gave me the idea to build a log cabin out of some of the straightest. He told me that poplar was used for house building there and that there was a 120 year old Church that had been built from it. I went on a log cabin course in Devon with Dan Franklin at Woodenways.com He came up in 2000 with a team and we built the cabin seen on his site in the first and third photos (with the swans) Log Cabins | Woodenways We used forty trees and built with the full scribe method. The base was laid a couple of feet up on half a dozen large stones to have plenty of air around and keep it well away from moisture. It has no rot at all seventeen years later. We have used quite a bit of the poplar on the fires and I would agree with the comments from Stubby, Skyhuck and Big J As for growth rates a lot depends on the soil type, moisture content and which direction the slope is facing. If all is well they grow fast.

Buy three of these FUEL / PETROL & CHAIN OIL CHAINSAW COMBI CAN 5.5L + 3L IDEAL FOR STIHL USERS | eBay and one of these Permanent marker pens waterproof bullet tip - RED, BLUE, BLACK *High Quality* | eBay Not trying to be too clever but at these prices not too bad an option

Found several 12 bore cartridges in a cupboard that must be over 70 years old, tried one in the gun and it went "Bang" as opposed to "Pop".

Go and have a word with Bunnings in Norfolk, they make strong machines! [ame] [/ame] Failing that, when things break just keep singing this song by the Sanctified Grumblers.......it will make you feel better! [ame] [/ame]

P-51 Packard Merlin, turn up the volume! [ame] [/ame]

A couple more thoughts on subsidies. When I started farming in 1970 there were hardly any rules. I could grow what I liked, trim trees, cut down trees, pull up hedges, put up buildings and do what I liked with the old farmhouse.(now listed) We never did rip up the countryside as we had to live with it or mess about too much with the house. My ancestors planted most of the oaks and I and my father have planted many more because we love trees and nature The money from the EU seemed ok to start with but the supermarkets soon learned how much farmers were being paid and adjusted their payment accordingly to a point where most farmers are being screwed into the ground and surviving on previous profits or diversification, selling land for building or maybe having a large farmer contract farm their land. With the payments came all the rules, and there are so many rules that a farmer may as well not own his land. Sort of nationalisation by the back door. If the rules are broken there is a fine imposed by a little bureaucrat somewhere that is disproportionate to the offence and there is no judge and jury. For instance a tractor driver may be distracted for a second ploughing the headlands and cut into the field margin only by a few inches and the fine is imposed across the whole farm and may be several thousands of pounds. Certainly more than I would be fined for mugging an old lady or shoplifting. The politicians have achieved exactly what they wanted, and that was to control the farmers who are all runnng around like blue arsed flies trying to adhere to these rules. The supermarkets make more rules and fines. The value of the wheat in a £1.00 loaf is only about 5p so you can see where the profit goes. I am the average age of a British farmer at 63 and if it was all a bed of roses where are all the young farmers?

During World War 2 there was a desperate food shortage in the UK. Before the war we were reliant on shipping bringing in food from all over the world but German U boats put a stranglehold on the country. "Dig for Britain" campaign meant that every bit of land, park, garden was dug up to grow food. The great cry after the war was to make our farming efficient enough to feed ourselves so that we would never have to endure such hardship again. Grants were given to rip up hedges to make fields more manageable for larger machinery. A lot of money was put into plant breeding, chemical control, fertiliser development and education. Apart from those subsidies there was a deficiency payment if the price of wheat for instance fell below a certain level the government would step in and prop up the price to prevent bankruptcy and introduce a bit of stability. This system seemed to work well without anyone complaining about farmers receiving this help The EEC changed things. By the time I started farming in 1970 we had increased the yield of wheat from about 1.5 tons/acre to 3 tons/acre and by 1984 it was nearer 4 tons and the EU had to buy the surplus wheat and store it in intervention stores. At the time there were "Grain Mountains" and "Wine Lakes" all costing a lot of money to store Something had to be done so "Set Aside" was invented whereby we had to set aside 10% of all our land to fallow. We were paid for this but not nearly as much as if we grew a crop. This was eventually changed in a political move to a "Single Farm Payment" which was designed to make farmers unpopular in the eye of the public by being deemed to be paid for doing nothing. The main aim of this was to make subsidies for farmers so unpopular that they could withdraw it altogether. Back to square one then, import cheap food from abroad. Farming does not pay, land reverts to scrub and a whole generation of farmers sons head for the bright lights of the city. The fact is we were at our healthiest as a country in WW2 as we did not eat too much and become too fat. The drive for ever cheaper food just for the sake of it does no one any favours except the supermarkets.

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I think her name is Chalara and if you were to venture into a serious stump grinding session with her you may find yourself with an uncomfortable case of Hymenoscyphus fraxineus leading to stump dieback!

"We all travel along the same railway line , but where we get off is a different matter..." Except for Southern Rail on strike where we do not travel!