ESS

Thanks. I know what you mean. I cope fairly well with pain , but there doesn't seem any escape from this, pain relief seems to be very temporary, even sitting down theres that constant nagging hey ? its bad company. Even things like walking round a show or the shops I am looking for somewhere to sit a lot of the time.Its easy for them to say arthritis is in its early stages, but they don't feel the pain.I have it in lower back, and I think we tend to try and find different ways of doing things to try and avoid some of the pain , and that puts pressure on other parts. Makes sense about one at a time. Good news about the felling, that's encouraged me , and glad youre on the mend. Thanks again for your input.

Yep, I can relate to the mood thing. Did you have to put a lot of pressure on to get the op done ? Can they only do one side at a time, mine are equally painful ?

Thanks for that.Its good to get feedback from those that have gone through it. Speaking from my own experience I have found the specialists tell us things for a reason. I knackered a shoulder up years ago, and had almost 2 years out with it.I ended up having it done privately, and it would be fair to say it was the first time I had done any form of recovery by the book, but am glad I did. My hips do make me miserable most days now,and even sitting for 12 hours in machines gets them angry some days. What I am finding is I am avoiding recreational walking because of pain,and that a bit of a vicious circle thing, because it would be easy to put weight on so increasing the problem. I am going to give injections a shot, it was suggested last week at a docs appointment. I have nothing to lose from it , and have had some relief from them in shoulders in the past . I would quite happily live with a few weeks off to eventually get rid of the pain, but didn't want to cut short a part of my life I still enjoy. Its an awkward age to start looking at change. Thanks for replying.

Really ? that was one of my concerns . I still enjoy picking a saw up on the right jobs, I did wonder how a replacement would stand up to that.Although I spend a lot of my time on machines now ,felling is part of my life I don't want to let go of yet. Its the doctors that are holding back, early stages they say, if that's the case it must get bloody painful eventually, I have to stop up hills to let the pain subside because it gets too angry to keep walking. Did any of you guys that have had replacements have any success with injections pre op ?

What kind of age are you guys getting these replacements at ? Mine have been pretty angry for a few years now, and burn like hell some days, particularly climbing up slopes, and to the point of disrupting sleep with the pressure on them. Xrays have shown arthritis, but they seem reluctant to do anything beyond pain relief. I am 62 btw.

Very little arb chip goes direct to burners because of the inconsistency in chip size / moisture content. A lot of it gets taken back to depots , tipped , screened and blended , then hauled again to an end user. A lot of lower grade chip that doesn't make g30/50 spec is only realising £40-60 /t with sub 30% moisture. You don't get much haulage done for £15t nowadays , and in some cases there can be double that to get it to an end user.

Certainly a lot of those I have seen are, with a high proportion of sapwood.

My money says they are full of shake.

They have certainly bought forwarders,, and a couple more shredders. I was on a brash lift for them when someone brought it into conversation, however things do change every time a conversation changes hands.

Oh ok,.the story was a couple of months ago they had just purchased three new ones, but I will stand corrected on that .

You could try Jenkinsons, . Mike Gillette, or Elliot Henderson both run balers.

With hoppus you just convert at full measure,.and convert per species.

I have always found hoppus foot converted to be as accurate as you can get.

It will be heading for the power station at Sandwich, Jenkinson /Euroforest have the supply contract there.

Year of the miners strike, 82? We did the field testing for them, I only ever came across one other that was being used by some Irish boys working on the blow. They were a belting winch and ran rings round the Igland for pull.

I have used a 360 high lead setup that used igland 8000 with oversize drums with an hydraulic motor driving the winch shaft. The clutches are hydraulically operated on those as you probably know, and the brake engages instantly , once the clutch is disengaged. It was very poor on haul power though with the oversize drums. I have had a couple of 8000 mounted winches that would pull houses down, the high lead was very poor in comparison.Igland used to use an accumulator to get charge for the clutch rams to avoid drag on free spool.

Certainly the ones I have been involved with have free spool on the haul back line.

Nor me, tbh I would have thought wedges would be more efficient .

Perhaps fashionable is a word that gets used loosely in timber terms. Hardwood furniture in general has gone out of "fashion", more modern materials, houses etc. and a lot of this will be cost based. Surely traditionally timber was used for certain applications because of its properties and ability to do a job . Beech furniture was in a way poor mans oak,massed produced in comparison, but steamed and bent easily for chair backs etc. durable, grown in abundance on suitable ground around which the furniture industry in places like High Wycombe grew up around. Ercol, Goodearls Risboro , ,,,Berrys of Chipping, all large millers/manufacturers in their own right, I could carry on with the list, but all gone or almost. It wasn't as much about availability as suitability ,timber was still hauled or trained long distances to mills because of this.

I could see it just pushing straight back out of the cut. I may be an old fashioned bugger, but old fashioned steel wedges take a lot of beating for tipping big trees over, particularly hardwoods.

Yes, I did wonder that after I posted. The elm burr thing was like a fever that ran through the trade for a few years. Best one I heard of was an 8 foot log making £7,200.it was a full burr and went to Italy. The tree had gone white and the contractor was given the tree for firewood,..only need one of those a week.

Depending on species Scotts would be the nearest to you.

Hardwood ?

It was Nidd I bought for.mid 70s. The prices I quote were from that time.They used 8qg and up,and ran 2 saw lines, cut 5000 hoppus week in week out. It would be Ron that was buying in the 80s? The £3 was for planking butts, anything that would peel was a higher price, though generally they wanted a bigger qg log, planking logs were 14 qg up and would tolerate small defects whereas peeling logs had to be blemish free. I got £40/hoppus for a 24qg rippled log early eighties. There was never really a hardwood pulp market in the north, although some parcels from South Yorks found their way to Kemsley on backhaul, I only ever did one contract, we were more geared up for bigger timber, but obviously with the amount of working pits there was a strong demand for mining timber , a lot of chocking gangs cut on site then and could use down to 5inch top diameter to squeeze 4 inch chocks out of , and with 2 foot straights there was little waste. We also had an outlet in the north for refinery poles through BICC, it was a useful outlet for rough oversize softwood and shaky oak, they also took smaller diameter at one of their plants ,price was a couple of quid a ton more than mining,throw it on a trailer tree length and cut the overhang off. Oh how things have changed.