Haironyourchest

Couple of service valves there.. does the bricked up arch pre date the SVs? Could be an old pumping station or something. Looks industrial/municipal. Or could be something like a tradesman's entrance for the attached dwelling/s, like a coal bunker.

Sounds rough... But if the gig includes a paid-up residence in the grounds, you got to consider what that's worth as well. How much would that cost in rent etc? What price the immediate environment? Does the gig include the use of yard space for your own projects, equipment, firewood, etc? How does the stress level of a secure income on a stately estate compare to chasing a hundred different clients? It all needs factoring in.

No problem. If it's just the Maintenance & Crosscutting ticket you're doing, then there won't be any felling, which I would consider sad, as that's the fun part. The legal stuff will be covered, workshop saw maintenance, saw safety stuff, then a couple of afternoons of "Crosscutting". This will be almost certainly in a conifer stand somewhere. The instructor will fell trees and you will process the trees to forestry log product standards. You will be taught about work positioning, compression/tension, how to free a stuck saw, etc and so forth. The felling ticket (C31)? is a continuation from this. You fell the trees and process them. Most of the course time will be processing, as that's the nature of production felling, and that's where most of the accidents happen.

The first day of the course is all the industrial legal stuff, PUWER, environmental, H&S reports, how to do risk assessments etc. You can download the current NTPC course material for your course (don't know where but should be easy enough to find). You can't really fail the theory part, it's like the Safe Pass test, they hold your hand through it. The felling part can be challenging though. Pie cut, danish cut, bore cut etc, cuts that most people don't know or use. You have to be able to remember them for the assessment and execute them well. I'd been messing around with saws for years before but never learned these cuts, it wasn't super hard but the muscle memory wasn't there. Moderately challenging. Situational awareness is taught. Always look around for co-workers standing too close, look up for widowmakers, snap the chain break when repositioning, etc. All good practice and worth taking on board. You won't have to strip a saw in the field (more likely a forestry plantation). Maybe change a chain. Those courses are damn expensive, and have the potential to be quite enjoyable. You should do the course, just for kicks, and write up a report here for our edification.

That is quite funny though...

Just for kicks, EL not a legal requirement in Ireland South anyway. The only compulsory insurance is medical malpractice for doctors. Public liability is supposed to protect you if you are found liable for damage or injury. Don't be liable. That is, don't be negligent. The shoestrings mentality I notice in (virtually all) small construction outfits working in public spaces. Talking two, three man crews with scaffolding, roofing on terraced streets kind of thing. No toe boards. No netting. No pipes around the poles. No tape. No signs. No ladders sometimes, just climb the scaffolding. Some passerby gets a slate dropped on them, that's negligence. Passerby ignores the warning signs and walks into a pipe covered and hazard taped pole and gets a bloody nose - that's on them. They might sue, but it would go nowhere (in theory). But even with insurance, if negligence is a factor, there's gonna be trouble.

The way it's panned out thus far is: most guys seem to get enough juice out of a battery for one small removal, more often two charged batteries or one battery and a charge off the client's socket at break time. They use the battery top handle for dropping the limbs then switch to a ground saw for chunking down the stem. Personally I've the Stihl 160 with the medium battery and the rapid charger. I can get about two hours of limbing out of it. Most of that time is climbing and positioning. One full charge would be roughly the same cutting time as one tank of petrol. Serious work requires multiple batteries and a charging point.

It's a startup, sounds like some smart-arse thought of a clever boondoggle: Waste wood, rubbish basically, pay me to dump it in the sea, New York mob style, and call it carbon sequestering. "It would have been burned otherwise" ??? Maybe. Maybe not. So what? It also would have rotted and released it's CO2 that way, as vegetation does, but it also could have provided habitat and food for the ecosystem while it decomposed. It it could have provided heat while it "decomposed really fast" (also known as burning). What they're trying to do is, taking plant matter out of the ecosystem cycle. A gimmick.

Ouch! 😳. Can't see the advantage of modifying a kinetic for one handed operation. Vertical hydraulic, one handed is obligatory as you need to be moving the log around on the deck. Any type of horizontal splitter I can't reposition one handed anyway. I'd never go for a horizontal anything after using vertical.

If you gonna bypass it, consider how to do it in such a way that the process is reversible, cos you might want to sell it someday.

Heard the rumour, who knows if there's any truth to it. But who'd be brave enough to try? It might fool Bullman but you'd never be sure. I don't want to be looking over my shoulder the rest of my life, thanks. Remember our motto and oath, Doug.

I agree the tattoo doesn't deserve the hate it gets (mostly from member's wives TBH) but having to fly to Sarajevo to get it done was *almost* a deal breaker for me at the time. I don't regret it though, the members only section is totally worth it.

Mandatory on all vehicles and ban seat belts. That'll slow the ****************ers down.

Bolam, the ledgend. Don't ever change 😆

Sounds like there's some ballast missing on the back end. I though diggers had built-in counterweight, but maybe yours doesn't?

Migrant camp? 😬 Prisoner day release program? 😬 Or invest in a small multitasker machine and configure it to drag more brash than two men and employ one good man on a good wage to run it. You might even get a cheap dole guy to run the machine for cheap if it cuts down on the physical effort. I moved a couple tonnes of logs yesterday with the track barrow, across a hundred yard lawn, in an hour. A lad with a wheelbarrow wouldn't have done it in half a day.

What a harrowing read...Impactful and excellently told, glad you pulled through. The unexpectedness and speed of the event was something I can relate with, in a very diluted way. I had an accident involving a comparatively benign mini dumper a few years ago (magnitudes less serious than dangb93's accident). The abrupt change of reality from happily working to "Oh-****************-****************-****************-whats happening???" - such a terrible feeling. Can I be very morbid and ask what you eventually did with the stump grinder, in terms of cleaning, repair, storage, sale or whatever? (Sorry if the question is cringe 😬)

And a massadam rope puller or similar to use with the big block. Can't use a tirfor with those rigging blocks, shive diameter too small. It'll come in handy.

I blame the catalogs...happy, attractive people, sculpting their little box hedges... Power tool version of recruitment propaganda.

Carbide drills are more for ploughing through rough stuff like timber with metal in or masonry+ timber. I thought. Not sure a carbide is capable of precision cutting?

Also check inside the muffler for a "catalytic converter". I remember reading something about makitas and cats. My McCullough blower came with one, looks like a wad of fairly thick wires kind of (not the same as the spark arrestor screen, this thing is big, and inside the muffler), not designed to be removed ever). I noticed the cat would glow red hot after a short time... Had to force the flange oof the muffler with a hammer and chisel to open the thing and extract the cat. Putting the two halves if the muffler back together was an awful bodge, but it works.

If the bolt goes all the way through, I'd start the drilling on the other side, against the factory bolt end. Drill it right through.

The sheared surface is probably slightly angled, so that bit it just gonna skate around on it. Are you drilling by hand? I'd make sure that head was clamped tightly to the table of a piller drill and get that cobalt drill precisely centered, and go real slow and easy. Cobalt should cut anything, but maybe it's taken damage to the bit and needs a new one?