SbTVF

Not a bad price considering it’s £40 roadside fresh felled when we’ve been buying it!

Just don’t start a conversation about Brexit with him!! Oh right well he may be different this year, he said he was short on what he wanted to have when I last spoke to him so he may be more generous. Depends on the specs. If it was just arb-lumps then fair enough, as it’s not worth the hassle but anything 6-16” and in good lengths is worth £50-60 roadside all day long.

Give the log shed near York a ring and ask to speak to David Sowray. He’ll buy it off you I’d think. £50 a ton roadside for fresh ash up here in Teesside at the moment though. Probably get closer to £60 as it’s processor friendly.

It was bought to do the groundworks on our static holiday caravan park about 5 years ago. Looking at second hand prices it’s barely lost a penny in value. We’ve repinned the whole arm, replaced the main knuckle at the base of the boom and top hitch and it’s as good as new mechanically speaking which is good as we’ve still got another 5 years of work for it to finish the site.

Almost every single young ash round here has it (north east). If you go into the neighbouring F.C. woodland there are big patches of self seeded ash and you have a job to find any without it. The mature ash trees seem to be ok but a few are showing signs of dieback, but can’t be sure it’s chalara related. Most mature ash in our hedges have looked have dead for as long as can recall but they’re still standing! I am seeing considerable evidence of decay and rot in the ash im processing for firewood. That’s coming from along the a66 near Barnard castle. Luckily they’ve been harvested before they are useless.

That’s a thought but it’s bloody awkward using the grab that close in I’ve found anyway and the deck will take a good few grab fulls. Any old crappy timber trailer with bolsters on would be best I think or even a grain trailer chassis and make the bolsters. Though you can get an 8t brand new kellfri forwarding trailer for £3200 or £3800 if you want it braked.

It’s not too bad as the digger can track quite quickly but no point wasting time if I don’t have to. Yeah it’s the perfect size for pretty much anything we ever do. Wouldn’t say no to the 15 tonner Takeuchi do and then a 3.5t for everything else. One day!! It’s taken a lot of hard work and long days working to get to this stage so it’s nice to know it’s noticed and worth it! Have just over 100 IBC’s, they are useful but I hate them. They’re slow to fill and move about. The intention is to concrete an alley between some buildings and tip the logs loose there to dry and cover them with breathable sheet so they don’t get soaking wet. Using custom built cages to utilise the kiln area better and processing 3-5 months ahead of drying we can almost double our drying capacity without building a second kiln. That’s the plan anyway.

Yeah that’s the idea. Need a little trailer to tow behind the digger so I don’t have to track back and forth 5 times to load the deck when I’m getting timber but otherwise it’s great! No space to roof the deck, the timber wagon has to get through there to the stacks. The conveyor will hopefully get roofed at some point though. It’s a 7.5 tonner. The grab was about £1200 new? Rotator and associated hitch and hose added another £2000

Only 4m high at the front. It’ll get 500mm concrete panels round the back 3 sides and then sheeted down to it with the same as the roof. Will want a gale breaker curtain on the front where the processor is too at some point before the weather turns. Need to shift some logs first before we buy one of those! Wouldn’t want it any lower I’d not be able to load the table very well. The grab and rotator hang down over a metre then there’s the hitch and linkage too!

Finally got the good old tb175 piped up for rotate. Ended up teeing off the crowd lines with a manual diverter for cheapness and simplicity. Now just needs a flow reducer in the rotate line (it’s a bit rapid currently), the new line attaching up permanently and some cab guarding and she’s good to go.

It's taken quite a few years to get it to where I wanted but it is so much easier like that. At least all the little trial set ups have meant I knew exactly what I wanted. Of all of it the 3 phase motor set up is bloody great, makes it a much quieter job not having a tractor blaring away all day and can just turn it on/off with the button while you load the deck or whatever.

Cheers, it came with one when we bought it second hand. Its only a £400 extra anyway so if i'd have bought one without i'd of definitely fitted one. It makes it so handy to move around the yard if I want to set up anywhere else. The 500cc quad tows it brilliantly! I have done some contracting but not since I got the deck, would certainly make things easy. Would just need a tow hitch attaching to the processor so I could pull it along behind me on the tractor.

Finally set up how I want it. Just need a sawdust extractor and I’m happy. Oh and the side of the shed sheeted of course [emoji106]

Farm assurance requires empty chemical containers to be recycled but silage wrap, net wrap and be twine is very hard to get anyone to take it away because it’s hopeless to process. I bet most goes to landfill or is burnt on farm. I suppose you’d end up with micro beads of plastic in the watercourse eventually from the incinerator ash but the ash in it that was from everything but plastic would probably do more good than harm for a long time first. There’s a company up north turning plastic into a granule that is mixed in tarmac for roads now, that’s an excellent use for it. We should recycle more as a nation. And properly. Not just shot it all in one tub and expect w council worker to do it at a facility. We should be provided with more specific recycling bins to separate the useful stuff!

Hedgerow clearings, pallets, silage wrap you name it [emoji23]

Ah that’s a shame. Every farm I’ve been on that’s had a burn pile on stubble always gets a huge flush of yield in the patch for years after!

Can’t ash be spread on fields as soil conditioner for farmers? Why the hell are they land filling it?

About 8 years back we bought land with 10 acres of SRC willow original planted for Semco at Wilton (middlesbrough so about 10 miles away) but they weren’t taking it any longer so ended up managing to send it to iggesund opposite end of the a66 at Workington. The fee we were paid after transport only just covered the harvesting done by metcalfe farms modified forager and left a bit to pay for it to be mulched out so we could grass it for the sheep. Metcalfes have that machine running 6 months of the year just doing willow for iggesund as far as I’m aware and it spends a good portion of that time in the borders and Scotland. Our field was done so badly it would’ve had to be replanted anyway so it wasn’t such a ballache for the harvester. Was entirely a grant chasing exercise by the previous owners. If managed correctly it does create a good yield and can be grown on marginal land which otherwise might only be otherwise useful for grass. The whole biomass thing for power stations is pretty ridiculous. Especially If they’re going to use decent wood to chip just because that’s all they can get hold of! Fair enough use SRC willow, miscanthus, arb arisings, brash, forest residue, knackered pallets and wood packing material but saw logs? Insane. Why aren’t we incinerating all our household waste to create energy instead of landfilling it? Quite frankly why aren’t we building more than one new nuclear power station??? I’d rather they subsidising that and getting rid of the waste than totally raping our forests of decent wood when there is barely enough of it anyway!

Try ringing Bennett’s directly rather than email. Always been happy with their service for sharpening chipper irons. They’re literally 2 miles from our yard too!

Only paying £60 up here for hardwood so nowhere near that cost per cube. I’m working off something like that figure by the time it’s delivered to the customer! We’re lucky in that the timber handling gears main cost is covered by other parts of the business so that is greatly reduced. Good to know my maths was spot on with the cost per cube for imported though. Stil £30 a cube in it for us at that. Which supplier do you use by the way?

Profit margin on imported is about half as much as doing it ourselves currently I reckon. Might have to get some though as we are already stowed under with orders!

Yep come across plenty of kiln dried logs like that round here. Customers soon suss it out though in my experience and look for somewhere better.

I feel like there should be a separate classification for air dried logs if there HAS to be certification. The fact is, if I log is properly seasoned for enough time and not re-wetted in anyway other than due to humidity in the air. There should be no reason for it not to burn cleanly . KD wise. If your logs aren’t well under 20%, you are not fully drying them in the correct manner. Ie stoping part way through a drying cycle one the outside is dry or case hardening them due to poor humidity control in your kiln. Our kiln isn’t some engineering marvel by any means but I know all of our logs are sub 20% if not sub 15%. I don’t need and neither do my very happy customers, some expensive, pointless, paper chase of a certification scheme to tell me they are ready to burn. More over I’m not a crook like some in this business and I’m not happy to sell logs that I wouldn’t use myself!

Do you hand wind the roller or use a drill/impact wrench?

The consultation does ask ‘should retailers be made to store wood so that it can’t be re-wet’ at least.