coppicer

Huh, so it's not just me then! Thanks.

Back in the winter I was felled a number of trees one after the other, mostly hazel with some willow. This is an old paddock that was apparently abandoned 20 years or so ago, before I bought the property, and which I am trying go clear and restore to non-woodland use. Having returned to work in it over the past week, I find some of what I cut has dark reddish bark, almost like a prunus of some kind, but the shoots seem to be mostly the grey-green that I associate with hazel (and the bark of the other trees is as one would expect from a hazel). Is it hazel or something completely different?

Agreed. Mass planting, even of native trees, something of a gamble due to the law of unintended consequences. The Japanese did it after the second world war, because they had been short of resources during the conflict and were determined not to have that happen again. Also they thought they might not be able to import. So they planted sugi (cedar) plantations on an unprecedented scale, in the regions around Tokyo. Of course, trade came roaring back within a decade or so, and they found that harvesting their own cedar - nice though it was - couldn't compete in economic terms with imports from developing countries. They also found that these vast cedar plantations generated clouds of pollen that basically triggered hay fever in a large percentage of the population who had hitherto been untroubled by it, because pollen levels had never been that high, historically speaking. It was explained to me once that the allergic reaction to pollen is cumulative, like filling a cup with water. The person receives the stimulus (water is poured into the cup), but they don't react until it hits a certain critical level, which varies by individual. Once it hits that level, the cup can't take any more water and it overflows - and that's when you start getting hay fever. I lived in Japan for a long time, and after about 10 years, having been unaffected previously, I too started to get hay fever in the pollen season (Feb/Mar) like many Japanese. I read an interesting academic paper on it but can't find it now. So yes, let's be careful with large-scale plantings. It's not as if the conifers here in the UK did our ecology much good after WWII...

I bought a Forest Master 7 ton electric splitter with the duocut knife on it in 2016. It has worked well, though I haven't really abused it. One of the nuts sheared off shortly after I got it. I emailed them a photo and they sent me a replacement free of charge. It will take fair-sized rounds, up to 40cm as they say, but will fail on really gnarly stuff. On the whole I'm pleased with it. On the downside, it's not a light thing, and isn't super stable because the legs are so close together. Keep thinking I should make a kind of cradle for it. I generally use it with it sat on the back of the pickup. I run it off a 3.4kW Clarke/Honda generator when I'm in the woods, and that works fine, though as soon as you engage the ram the genny gives an almighty snort like a bull lining up a target. EDIT: the wheels on the one in the picture look a bit more widely set than mine, so maybe they've realised the need for greater stability.

Thanks to everybody for the comments. I have: - Visited the Danarm website and found parts diagrams - Sourced some primer bulbs from eBay - Realised that what I thought was the screw attaching the head to the shaft is actually a lubrication port ? so will open in and pack will high-temperature grease later Onwards and upwards!

I have been running a Handy Pro THPK35CH strimmer, which uses a Kawasaki TJ35e two-stroke petrol engine, for 6-7 years. The engine's been reliable, I've never had any real problems starting it, and it's powerful enough to take a heavy cord or even a mulching head. The primer bulb has just developed a pinhole, so I'm non-urgently looking for a replacement. It's part number 49043-2067 and a few places seem to stock it in the UK. This has (rather belatedly) got me thinking about maintenance, such as lubrication. I looked at it when I first bought it and if I remember correctly there weren't any obvious grease nipples, and the strimmer head seemed to be sealed. Should I be giving it some TLC, and if so what, or will it just soldier on until it dies? Dan

I would guess so, but at the cost of stability?

This is what I wonder. There must be an optimal ratio of (external) surface area to volume for a pile of wood like this.

That's a great price. Maybe I'm not looking in the right places...

Sounds like the Tigchel one. There's a distributor not far from me.

Presumably a kind of masonry heater? Was it something you made yourself, of from a commercial supplier?

That's pretty good for the price, isn't it. Do you have any particular favorite vendor/brand, or do you just use anything you can get hold of?

And how do you do it now? (Sorry if the answer is in the thread I referenced earlier - haven't read the whole thing.)

Thanks for the comments. Bit cash-constrained at the moment, so perhaps that's something for the future. Eyeballing it, the fencing looks like standard 1m height? Do you not attach the wire to the pallet at all? I guess if you were transporting the pallet over rough ground (like my bumpy fields) you could just put a pair of ratchet straps under the pallet and over the top of the logs to form a cross, and use those to keep the netting stable and in place.

That's actually a great idea, because they fold flat, unlike IBCs, so delivery isn't going to be as much of a hit. About £38 exc. VAT, says Google. Still can't afford them at the moment - derisive cries of "Pov!!" from the back rows - but something to keep in mind.

How does it work? I mean, do you build the stack of wood first and then wrap?

True, and good thinking, but isn't the problem that base material is more or less twice as expensive as standard livestock netting at 50m for a similar price, if you buy new? (I have some sheep netting here I can recycle, not sure how much, maybe 100-200m, but hard to tell how much is usable.) You probably get a lot more strength from chain link though. Conversely it's probably not as workable, so bending it into shape might be hard work.

Probably, but it's expensive isn't it? So perhaps only worth it if you have some lying around.

Well Cardiff is two and a half hours, so Bristol probably three or so one way. Might still be cheaper than delivery though.

Thanks - I have thought about that, but the truth is that these days I'm seldom more than a dozen miles from home, which is where I work. Occasionally I get as far east as Carmarthen. I'd struggle to get more than two cages in my trailer anyway.

I'm in southwest (very west) Wales. If I look on eBay for anything within 30-40 miles, and that's what I see, sometimes more. And then there's getting them delivered, or fetching them. EDIT Just to be clear, that's for tank and cage. I haven't see any local ads for the cage alone.

Are you - are you sure you got enough in those? They look a bit underfilled to me ?

This is a wire cage that I assembled yesterday. There was some old netting that I was able to reuse from a defunct fence; this needed a length of about 4 m. Pallets are not that easy to get hold of, as I have found that builders merchants round here tend to be pretty tight and careful about giving them way, especially the more solidly built ones that you actually want. Still, the cost of the materials is close to zero. My concern is that this lightweight pallet will just decay over the course of a couple of years if left out in the open. I made this cage by fixing the lower edge of one end of the netting to the middle of one side of the pallet using 2 mm galvanised wire and a wire twister attachment on my drill. Then I wrapped the netting around and fixed it at the next corner in the same way, and so on until I had attached it the pallet all the way round. Where the netting overlapped, I fixed it with some hog rings initially, just to keep it in place, then bent the wires back and twisted them round to fix the netting at the join. The whole process took me maybe 40 minutes of faffing about. It should be a lot quicker, of course, as I get used to it. Perhaps 10 minutes? Fixing at the corners and at the sides takes time, because you're fighting the netting and trying to keep it taut. In this case it didn't come out particularly tight. I might be able to get a fair number of logs in this, but it looks to me as if the netting might become detached from the pallet. It probably needs a wire in each direction across the top to keep the netting from bowing out too much. A more general concern is that smaller logs might just fall through the holes. I have some old chicken wire lying around, and I could clip that inside netting as a kind of "liner" to keep small diameter logs inside. Next time I think I will try making a rough cylinder out of the netting beforehand, then plonking the cylinder on top of the pallet and fixing it in place. That seems to be how the village idiot does it in his operation.

Here's how I have stored firewood up till now. As you can see, I need for pallets for the base, sides and back, and a piece of plywood on top. In this case I was experimenting with a very thin piece of plywood, and it hasn't worked. You can see that it's gone all wavy. For other boxes I used marine plywood, I think 18 mm, which was expensive, and you only get two "roofs" per sheet. I actually gave this a coat of Cuprinol Ducksback, and it has held up well to the rough weather of the past couple of years. For the most recent couple of boxes I have simply tied the pallets together using wire rope and crimps. That seems to work reasonably well, better than using long screws to fix it together, which is what I was doing when I first started. I only have about half a dozen of these boxes on the go at any one time. In future I will need a few more - maybe as many as a couple of dozen. Overall, costly and time-consuming to make.

I'm having difficulties deciding on how to store the higher volume of firewood I expect to extract from my property over the next few years. At first I thought I would extend the existing approach, which has been to store the wood in an open-fronted "box" made out of pallets. However, this needs a lot of pallets, and it only works if you stack the wood neatly, and if the wood itself is of reasonable and reasonably consistent size. You can't just throw logs in there and hope they will stay put. Going forward the wood will be more variable in size, and there's going to be more of it, so stacking carefully by hand is no longer practical. What I need is a container into which I can drop the cut wood and forget it, and that I can move around as required using a pallet fork or loader. It seems to me that these my options. (1) Cages from an IBC tank. These are sturdy and a good size; this would still be my preferred option if it were not for cost and availability. £40 a tank seems to be the going rate, so a couple of dozen tanks would cost me the best part of a grand. Also, I live in the back-end of nowhere, and I very seldom see IBC tanks coming up for sale within a reasonable driving distance. Because of their bulk, delivery costs seem pretty high, probably adding 50% to the purchase price. (2) Vented bags. Initially this seems like a really good idea, and I may still use them, but after trawling through dozens of threads here on arbtalk, I see a lot of comments about them not holding up well to sunlight, and about not drying as well as IBC cages, leading to mould in the middle of the bag. The cost is not too bad, however. (3) Wire netting cages. I came across this in a fascinating and quite inspiring post made by @the village idiot at the end of last year. He describes the use of wire netting to process about a gazillion bags of firewood per year, and provided some useful pictures. From what I can make out, he dumps rounds into wire netting enclosures, then transfers them after splitting down to a more reasonable size into cylindrical wire netting enclosures standing on pallets. This seemed interesting and inexpensive, though I have my concerns about how well a wooden pallet would stand up to being left in woodlands for a couple of years. So I decided to experiment with a combination of (2) and (3) above, documenting it in a short thread (partly because I feel guilty about semi-hijacking an interesting thread by @difflock). Final point: this is a hobby, not a commercial venture. I do it because I enjoy it, because it gets me out of the house and keeps me active, and because I use the wood burner for space heating, so it does actually save on the gas bill. Dan