bilke_user

Pushed the price up by 20% and have now almost sold out. Mildest winter we've had here for many years but think because it's so wet people are staying in and enjoying the fire. Need to find a bigger shed!

After a day's work in the snow, it's always good to get home to a stove

Not sure if it was yourself who texted me asking to hire my machine for 50t of larch/sitka. Certainly wasn't me that quoted you the £240 though. For a machine and 2 men that's a steal. In sitka on an ideal set up and with 2 men 10t/day is pretty much what the wp36 will do. On larch it'll do a bit more but there's so many variables that it's always better to quote about 10t/day, especially if there's travelling and in the winter here days are short of daylight. If you're looking for a processor to travel with then the WP36 is really the only viable mobile option. Most processors in the sub £15k bracket will do around 10-15t/day and to get anything more than this you're looking at a significant investment of over £20k. Always remember that with the bigger machines you get a lot more waste product. My Farmi cuts fairly cleanly with the 4way splitter, but when using the 6 way the extra production it does is offset with the amount of waste wood it creates. You're more than welcome to come and see mine in action if it helps you make your mind up on what one to go for. I'm not a dealer so what you will see is what the machine does in the real world. I might add that instead of a bigger/faster machine my next investment will be a bigger shed to cope with the wood being produced

MAKE SURE the operating lever lock is fully in the OFF position. If it is slightly on the rubber part of it can grip the operating lever enough to stop it returning to the neutral position. Does it return to neutral when coming off the saw stroke? John

I'm paying £35/t delivered for 3m larch not wider than 35cm and not narrower than 12cm. It's coming from a clear fell site 15miles away. Another company are wanting £65/t delivered for year old sitka spruce in 5m length, no wider than 35cm and not narrower than 12cm. I've ordered many loads of the £35/t larch simply because timber prices are only going one way at the moment, especially with the insatiable appetite the bio-mass industry has for it J

Dear John, Please accept my sincere apologies’ for the difficulty you have experienced in obtaining answers about parts / technical matters with our products. It is of no help to you but around 8 weeks ago our parts person Calum and two other staff were headhunted by different companies. Despite endless interview’s we have been unable to find satisfactory replacements. Until such time as we find a replacement we are having to work out way through things as quick as we can. Kind regards, Stephen Cabrol Riko UK Ltd Tel: +44 (0)1420 487300 www.riko-uk.com Copy of a recent e-mail from Stephen. The issue I had with the machine was dealt with quickly and although it meant me guiding him to the part via photographs and a copy of the online parts diagram we got the part within a couple of days and for a price that was less than I was expecting. Easy man to deal with although not as knowledgable as Calum was

Think they are looking for a replacement for Calum, not an easy man to replace!

The bolt does unscrew. Alternatively unscrew the valve, but that is a bit of a faff Cheers John

No idea on what kind of wood you are splitting, but if it's big(over 2ft dia) maybe have a look at a petrol driven log splitter. If it's fairly straight stuff around 15" dia it might be worth hiring in a processor. I've a WP36 that runs off either it's own engine or a PTO and when I hire it out I expect it to process around 25-30 bulk bags of soft wood/ day or 20-25 bulk bags of hardwood, slightly less than the softwood because misshapen bits take a little longer. £300 is normal for a day's hire + operator. £8k buys you a used mobile WP36. Maintenance costs are very low and running costs are roughly £25/day for petrol Not sure what prices are like in your area, but most selling firewood now don't talk about price per ton. It's either by a measured trailer load (m3) or bulk bag. If you can find a market for around 200 bulk bags/year you would be well advised to invest in a processor.

Tricky to get pics from underneath mine as it's on a trailer and most of what your looking for is hidden or very much in the dark. Here's a link to a manual for an older WP36, essentially the build is the same as the newer ones. If your worried about longevity of the splitting blades and surrounding supports there's really no need to be; they are engineered to tolerances way and above what a 10t ram will exert on them. Weak things on the processor that could do with beefing up would be the base of the conveyor where the hydraulic motor joins the base roller, a bracket between the bearing on the right side and the mounting plate for the motor on the left side takes away any unwanted movement . Another potential trouble spot is the log lifter arm getting stuck under the splitting ram chamber if you don't get into the habit of dropping it manually before returning the ram. Damage in here can be pretty serious, i.e a bent in-feed plate ...... not common, but certainly common and easier to avoid than to fix. All in all it's a decent machine that does what it says it can do, but as with all machines it won't last forever if it is being asked to do more than it was designed for. Had mine for three years now and it's had close to 1000t through it with only minimal down time. I hire mine out, with or without an operator, so it gets a variety of skill levels from operators. It's survived them all with minimal damage. https://www.dropbox.com/s/aqoq1qc77x7yvvg/MastersplitWP36EN.pdf?dl=0

Instead of selling ready to burn logs just label them as ready to store. Instead of us lads worrying a lot about this, have a thought for the filling station owners who have nets stored in their forecourts open to all weather and unlikely to ever see 20% moisture content. Will they not be the easy target for the wood police

A couple taken back in 1990. Mobile processor converting the whole trees we skylined into short wood for the mills. Probably still got that shirt in a drawer somewhere

The ammounts of shrinkage is so small they can be ignored in real world situations, i.e throwing split logs into a box here's some hypothesis for you http://www.wood-database.com/wood-articles/dimensional-shrinkage/

if you have 100cube of logs it matters not a bit how much weight they lose you will still have 100cube of logs, albeit 6000kg lighter

my brother owns a pottery and he fires his pots in a wood burning kiln and all he uses are slabs from sawmills. It's getting harder to source these days because most mills now chip their slabs for biomass.

Wasn't that the one on S Island, New Zealand?

It's because of the millions that they are paying out in RHI that they will want to recoup some of it somehow, seems like a good idea to tax the sale of woodburners and also tax the sale of logs very highly. Hundreds of thousands of woodburning people might not agree, but if there's a bob or two to be made from the masses who won't complain too loudly then this government will be happy to make it.

I've a good few customers who have had wood gasification boilers installed and on the whole they are happy with their systems, but if they had the chance to do it again they would have installed an air source system instead. Wood is becoming scarcer and as such the price is going up. Keeping ahead of the seasoning is fine if you've got the shed space to store a lorry load at a time. The cost of softwood has almost doubled here in the past year, and is still rising, as many more places are now installing commercial biomass boilers. Our local sawmill is about to bring a biomass plant online and when this happens, much of the softwood marked for firewood will be consumed by that, leaving the small (one load a year) customers having to search further afield for wood. This whole biomass thing has been ill thought out from the start and we are now starting to see massive pressure to cut more wood than is sustainable, but that's a story for another day

That's them

I paid 5k for that one brand new in 2006 from A company in Wales, think they were called Davies machinery or something like that. In the time we've had it it gets used for everything including timber extraction, laying out fencing materials, carrying culvert piping and another thing we can't be bothered man handling. In all the time we've had it we've only ever changed a couple of loader pipes and replaced a bolt on the trailer headboard that sheared off. If only everything in life could be as reliable (and simple)

Probably the same thing's I'd do for a ten ton forwarder

Use my Landini Mistral and Farma 5 ton trailer for lifting most of the forestry stuff we do here.

6 cube an hour? I rate a good day with the processor at 27m3/8hrs Your two men will do almost twice that. I think you are dreaming if you are thinking of getting more production from any splitter, even a self return one

24K and paid back in 5 years? The castle I look after had an oil heating bill of around £12k. We changed to a ground source heat pump at a cost of £60K. This did away with the oil bill but added £4k/year to the electric bill after. Savings per year are around £8k and after 8 years it has paid off. 30t of softwood delivered at £40/ton is £1200 + the cost to process say £800; that's £2k/year running costs. Does this mean you were spending £7k/year on heating before you changed to this system?

If you've a lot of wood to do for yourself and also have a lot of other income avenues it can be a decent earner for your spare days (???) I use mine to process a few artic loads of softwood /year for sale as firewood, hire it out to farms, crofts and other firewood suppliers for a few weeks at a time and hire it out with myself to home owners on a daily rate. Hiring it for a few weeks at a time on it's own is where the money is to be made, but be VERY careful who you hire it to and get a good rental contract drawn up legally before even considering this route, otherwise you could end up with large bills and an angry exchange of words ! Hiring it with yourself as an operator is just another way of making a few quid, but it's hard work for not a lot of income (I can earn 3x as much just by clicking a camera shutter button) Mine has paid for itself in just under three years and now it owes me nothing and will still be worth 2/3 what I paid for it were I to sell it. If I did sell it I'd miss it greatly, not for the income, but for the little time it takes to split a years supply of firewood for the stove. I also like meeting people and going out with it on various hires gets me away from the same old same old for a while. Pretty certain that banks don't pay as much interest on the £12k initial investment, last time I looked (this morning) my ISA was paying 0.2%