Conor Wright

1 hour ago, doobin said:

Front steer, reverse drive 💪🏻
 

with the hydro gearbox I really don’t think it can be beat for this work!

Safer. my brother has the pivot steer, very similar to yours. Some day it will crush someone's foot. It's an accident waiting to happen. Apart from that it's a great little tractor. He uses it mostly in polytunnels with a bedformer on the back, it lives well inside its comfort zone. Never seen a hill!

1 minute ago, Tony Mac said:

Thinking of changing my forum name to Waxy Residue 🤔

That may make you unpopular with the ladies.

5 hours ago, difflock said:

The heavy corrougated cardboard fruit boxes we bring the groceries home from Tescos in. Hard to tear up, but, man sur, quare firelighting stuff.

Same, always cardboard. only herself is forever ordering things and stuff on amazon so we have a constant supply of cardboard boxes delivered to our door! Haven't bought firelighters in years. If there is a day we have no cardboard I use the little bottle of map gas. Lights the logs in seconds and way handier than dragging the oxygen acetylene tanks into the kitchen!

12 hours ago, devon TWiG said:

If you are limited on start up funds then perhaps a long handled hedgetrimmer ...loads of work around for them , no great skill / qualification needed ...

It's the truth. I still earn good money on hedges. There's a niche between "proper" arb ie. Big fells and classy reductions, and what the average gardener can manage. I take on nasty hedge reductions and tall hedges fairly regularly and get decent money for it. 

It's far from glamorous but it's proven to be profitable and regular work.

I've managed to kit myself out fairly well for it over the years. It's still heavy work but if you're good at it and can get it neat looking and tidied up quickly there's no reason you couldn't live well off it.

I reckon there will be a glut of fairly new kit coming up soon as people tighten their belts and work slows down. Perfect time to invest in something to ease the labour, as said above mewp or grinder could be good starter machines.

It could be a shakey start as it's the early days of a recession but don't let that stop you, you'll be coming in fresh as a lot of people are looking to get out.

You only live once. Go for it. If it doesn't work out you can always get a job again, if you don't try you'll always ask yourself "what if?"

Just be honest with the family and tell them sometimes there will be long days, you'll come home poorer than you left in the morning, wet, aching, covered in sawchip and chipper dust, stinking of 2 stroke and too tired to communicate apart from a grunt to signal to the wife it's beer time.

There'll be bad days too but we don't talk about them.

1 hour ago, peds said:

What does it taste like?

Blend up a chunk of old oak branch, some wet turf and a dash of stagnant ditch water then add a teaspoon of chain oil and let us know!

Crouching tiger, hidden catshit

Batman

The Batman

Batman begins

Batman returns

Batman dark night

Batman forever

A 6 part series about conservation. coming to a small woodland near you soon.

Fear and loathing in conifer hedges.

Fifty false starts, the return of the faulty carb.

We were brash draggers. The first battle of the macrocarpa valley.

Jackarbs 2.0

Starring T.O and wee (in the chipbox) man.

Four weldings on a forwarder.

Saving private Stein

1 hour ago, Stere said:

The whole thing was/is a pyramid scheme or maybe thats too simple an idea?

 

NFTs included in that

The whole world is a pyramid scheme

just be glad you're nearer the top than the bottom.

How long is a piece of string? 

Figure out what you need to get to break even then add wages and a profit margin.

there's a few variables, your workrate, competency, ability to organise work, the work available locally, the wealth of your working radius, yard rental, machine reliability and suitability, employee holidays, employee abilities, employee inflicted machine damage, insurance, fuel, vehicle costs, local market conditions, repayments, servicing, maintenance and repair abilities and costs, compliance costs, then there's the less well known costs, wife or ho bills, needy kids, beer allowance, Colombian talc allowance, meth to get you going, weed to sleep, physio, counselling, spiralling pub tab, therapy sessions, rehab. Of course minus clawback when you eventually sell the van and chipper and get a job in tesco. You won't sell the saws, a knacker will have made off with them while yer in the pub. 

49 minutes ago, trigger_andy said:

One step closer to Nuke-o-clock. 

45 minutes ago, Mick Dempsey said:

 One step closer to complete Russian capitulation. 

I hope mick is right but while it might not quite be nuke o clock, I reckon they will level the city behind them. Out of spite and hatred more than for any tactical advantage. Probably gonna wait til the Ukrainian forces are within the city to maximise losses. 

If it is a Nuke we can just add it to the 2000+ atomic bombs already exploded worldwide. 

You should have received a seperate manual for the engine. Check page 41 of the 230 manual.

Handiest thing is probably to Google the engine model and look up a service video.

9 minutes ago, Steve Bullman said:

Think you’re getting your wires crossed between this thread and the cod wood thread. You’ll only con fuse matters 

You're right. Sorry, something must have tripped. It's time to phase this out. It hertz reading these puns anyway.

10 hours ago, eggsarascal said:

That is madness, I’d like to see a breakdown of such payments. £1,600 on rent/mortgage, child benefits, and their own £300-400/month. Where’s the rest made up? I’m in the wrong trade!

You think the payments are the real issue here? They will probably pale in comparison to the cost (social and monetary) of looking after the kids as they grow up dysfunctional and come to realise the extent of their abuse, then the rehoming/vet bills of the dogs and complete deep clean of the property, probably find them a new house, or two if they split up. good chance of special/extra education required for the kids, social worker etc etc. It will quickly add up to more than the already ridiculous free money.(certainly over a lifetime, spending your childhood sleeping in filth with dead animals isnt a good start)

Scum. They get everything and then look for more while decent people genuinely struggle. 

3 minutes ago, Bolt said:

I feel partially responsible.

 

We both should probably have been more aware of the potential for this to happen.

Don't lie,you can't cod us all, not in this plaice. you've been working in parallel to bring this series of puns here, you led us on and now you're trying to pull the plug. It's utterly unraisinable of you

(Yup, think I've got them all in there!)

I like the currant idea though. Gonna give that a go.

1 hour ago, Dan Maynard said:

I used to put traps before we had cats, now we're down to one cat and it's getting old I may have to start again.

 

My problem was usually the bait disappearing without tripping, had fairly ordinary wooden spring traps so I'd put a currant and tie it on with cotton. Usually get a few mice with the same currant.

Gonna give the currant a go. I've had the same problem with cheese disappearing. Usually melt the chocolate onto the trap. Fairly reliable way of catching the little feckers.

Thanks for the tips, I've tried both chocolate and peanut butter, partially for the above reasons. Both have caught mice in the past, as has rasher fat. I'll keep trying, maybe tonight's offering of gouda will give results, plain old cheddar hasn't been popular so far this year. 

Chief mouser out of action, loves being inside though!

Right, so it's that time of year, the mice are on the move. Nothing new it happens every year. Usually the cats do most of the work but our good hunter is currently out of action with a broken leg of unknown origin. The other cat prefers to watch the mice play and may or may not take a quick swipe at one if it came within range of her bed.

I've always set traps and usually catch anywhere from two up to, I think 11 was the record one year. Not exactly an infestation but this year feels different.

I can hear them, I've noticed poop, I've trapped three within the last week but there is one hanging around the warm air distribution system and he/she/it/non binary mouse identifying as a part of my home or whatever it is simply refuses to take the bait. Literally. Maybe it's gotten street smart, I've tried a few traps, old school, newer plastic ones, pre baited and no joy, although the cat set one off and came to the window at 2 am politely requesting I remove it from her paw. We have the ultrasonic mouser plug in things, they dont seem to do a lot but they're there plugged in doing their thing. 

I'm starting to think this mouse is a bit brighter than the others. I don't want to poison it in case it rots between the walls. Shooting it isn't really an option as there's too many wires and ducting around where I can hear him, also my better half has banned me from shooting from inside ever since the rat in the dry lining incident.

So, any ideas on alternative mouse catching devices, humane or not, just nothing too explosive. The rat took quite a bit of cleaning. Thankfully it was a rental.

1 hour ago, Johnsond said:

Couple paid £7k a month in benefits left children living in filth with 36 dogs

APPLE.NEWS

---

Officers, unable to breathe due to the stench, found a young girl asleep near a dead dog and...

7K a month on benefits  🤷‍♂️🤷‍♂️No wonder people won’t bother working. Pure insanity. 

Jesus. What the actual ****************. Say what you like about me for this but they should be shot dead and forgotten. To hell with jail or "punishment" get rid of them and move on, make the world a little better.

12 minutes ago, Mick Dempsey said:

Precisely, it could be the MySpace of the 2020s.

Never on it but I remember the name, what happened? Did a narcissistic megalomaniac take that over too?!

3 hours ago, Mick Dempsey said:

It’s starting to look like Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter could be one of the greatest acts of hubris, the biggest loss of money and bringer of some of the biggest laughs of all time.

It's like pulling numbers out of thin air, where is the actual value in twitter? Data? Ability to influence or manipulate? It's certainly not in anything tangible or in advertising. 

It would only be a good thing for humanity if it collapsed under the weight of its own hypocritical bullshit. So is it all the better if we can have a chuckle at the owner wasting a sum of money sufficient to literally end world poverty as a sideshow to an already rapidly declining society. Is this what counts for comedy now? Jaysus, just as well George Carlin died when he did.

1 minute ago, peds said:

 

I just can't help but wonder at what point people like you are going to get on board with the changes ahead.

 

Will it be when rice is no longer available in the supermarket? Not just a dozen different brands, or a choice between basmati or jasmine... any rice.

 

Or will it be when you can no longer visit Spain during the school summer holidays because there's too great a risk of quite literally poaching in temperatures and humidity that the human body - most life, in fact - is unable to deal with. 

 

I'm sure there's a word in German for the vague and intangible, sort-of bittersweet emotion that comes from observing people who have yet to come to terms with an horrific truth. They've got a word for everything, those Germans. 

Or maybe our climate will by then be suitable for growing rice etc and, being white Europeans we will keep most of it for our fat selves and sell the excess at huge profit to those remaining friendly tribes in return for keeping other marauding hordes from taking over and pillaging all before them and killing us all in a massive, brutal bloodbath from which only a few survive and go on to live a nomadic subsistence life until one day millenia later one of them discovers this magical dark liquid which burns thus changing humanity 2.0 forever

****************. Maybe we're stuck on infinite loop here.