Woodsman1967

I've split hundreds of tonnes of rings with one of these splitters , slightly older model but basically the same . For the awkward,slanty, knotty bits I just have a short length of knotted bungee tied to the left handle . I use that to pull the handle down whilst holding the log . Sounds fiddly but in practice works fine and requires no ,modifications to the machine . Generally though I use it 2 handed as I quite like my hands and fingers attached to my body.

I've had an AMR road tow 12 petrol splitter for about 5 years now , split 200-300 cube a year through it, I've had no problems with it . I've been splitting metre long billets from 60cm diameter Ash trunks this year. Great bit of kit

£125 for a cube of 2 year old air dried mainly Ash . Pretty much sold out already (around 300 cube) and now turning people away . I put it up £25 from last year and haven't lost a single customer . Others around me (East Anglia) are now at £140-£170 per cube . Demand has been crazy , just wish I had more . I'll be putting it up similary again next year if the current economic climate stays the same .

2 minutes ago, the village idiot said:

Lots of build up on the chain actually. Do you think this could be a factor?

Same , cutting lots of ash does this . Haven't noticed any problems from it though . I do clean it off the bar regularly

33 minutes ago, the village idiot said:

Arborol generally gets a pretty favourable write up in terms of chain and bar wear but I am up for trying something different. 

 

Do any of you get good results with any other plant based oils?

I do a lot of ringing up medium/large trunks , have always used Stihl and recently tried Husqvarna bio oil (don't like the idea of getting covered in  and breathing in mineral chain oil all day ) and have never had any unusual bar/chain wear problems

3  hectares in a winter , sounds like you've been keeping busy ! Those big ash do take a while to tidy up . Do you have much dieback there ?

We've been felling some 80-90ft ash this winter thats suffering some dieback and the crowns shatter when they hit the floor

4 minutes ago, Woodworks said:

Snag is if you really are delivering fresh cut logs in loads in excess of 2 cube most pickups will be overloaded. Could argue you have to do 2 trips to stay within weight limits.

Agreed . The more you look into it the more the whole scheme seems unworkable . The chances of being pulled over on the road and checked are minimal anyway . Most of my customers who can only store 1 metre at a time are happy enough to pay for 2 at a time and have them delivered seperately , the rest would just pay cash .

I'm probably at an advantage as I live in a drier part of the UK , sell mainly ash and season for 2 years so may well be able to meet the 20% moisture content anyway but with the added confusion of wet/dry basis moisture readings thrown in its just so confusing .

I've never been busier , phones been constant . My regular customers have used around 50% more than normal this winter and its not been particularly cold here ( East Anglia ) . Stopped taking new customers before Xmas .

Sold around 350 cube so far , got about 50 left .

Thats great thanks

Thanks . Wasn't planning on doing a lot of road towing to be fair , just a bit locally . Seems strange that they would make it over the allowed weight ? . I'll have a good look for any bent bits .

Hi . Going to look at a secondhand wp36 in the next couple of days , looks fairly tidy from the pics , anything in particular I should be looking out out for , Common faults etc ? Thanks

There's just 2 of us and sometimes just me . It's a labour of love , as is the whole job in truth . Definately not in it for the money .

Great post ! It's an ongoing battle of wits to keep the deer under control , I've tried most ways over the years .

Brash piling didn't work particularly well , brash spreading turned out to be a real pain if your not using machines , ended up knee deep in brash trying to fell and drag wood to piles (never again !) . Plastic fencing was very quickly chewed through by rabbit and badger and electric solar powered fence was not much good and was then stolen within a few months .

We dead hedge our plots , its time consuming and hard graft but leaves the ground free of  trip hazards and also allows you to survey the plot the following year for any unusual wild flower etc that may appear before the brambles and nettles take over . Also dead hedges create great habitat and look good to !

If a bit of care is taken to get the bottom of the hedge tightly packed its a pretty effective barrier and will generally keep out Fallow for a couple of years before it starts to collapse . The sneaky Muntjac are more problematic but aside from a bit of browsing this summer we have mostly kept them out .

Back in the day the Wildlife Trust would surround our dead hedge with 6ft chestnut fence ( which also supported that industry in Kent/Sussex) and then more recently with Heras fencing . This combined fence meant nothing got through and there was zero browsing .

One thing to note is that a lot of new Heras fence has bigger gaps in the wire which proves useless to keep Muntjac out as I have witnessed first hand , worth noting if your buying hundreds of metres of it as the Wildlife trust did without checking !?.

Culling is pretty essential to keep numbers down and as you say also provides great quality free range healthy meat . I'm vegetarian and not a supporter of shooting animals for sport but accept and understand that wild animal numbers do ,in many cases , need to be controlled . I wish more animal rights supporting Vege/vegans could work this out . Walt Disney has much to answer for !

7 minutes ago, the village idiot said:

I don't think you'd get any comeback if you adopted this approach. It sounds sensible, hopefully keeps you viable and is close enough to the best practice guidelines.

 

After a couple more years we should have a clearer picture on what trees are going to make it and which aren't.

 

What they are probably trying to prevent is a knee jerk mass felling of Ash.

 

The speaker seemed much more concerned about Deer management than anything else.

Yes of course it's vital to try and keep any resistant ash and there will be some .

Maybe I'm a bit jaded from 20 years of being a contractor in SSSI woods and having to listen to well read and  well meaning , usually lovely people turning up on site with totally impratical  ideas of how I should do my 'job' only to find that a year or 2 later they have moved on to pastures new and been replaced by someone else with totally different ideas !

And yes , deer management should be right at the top of the agenda . It's a huge issue

6 hours ago, the village idiot said:

I went to a Woodland Communication event yesterday. One of the speakers was from Natural England and was detailing the latest guidance on managing woodland with Ash dieback.

 

Encouragingly there is some evidence from follow up studies in Europe that resistance rates in woodland Ash populations could be as high as 40%. This is an average of course so there is no guarantee that all individual sites will see this level of survival. 

 

From what I could gather current advice on woodland management practices are as follows and depends somewhat on the frequency and age of Ash within the Woodland:

 

High Forest: Moderate  thinning operations targeting the worst affected trees can help improve the survival rates of more tolerant trees in the stand and allow light in to encourage the growth of potentially resistant saplings. Care must be taken though not to 'over thin' as this can have a negative effect on the trees left standing.

 

Coppice: 'In rotation' coppice Ash should continue to be felled. The biodiversity losses from ceasing coppicing would be too detrimental. For out of rotation Ash coppice the advice is to retain large stools if not subject to imminent collapse, especially if they are seed producing (female). It is also suggested that converting the coppice system to an alternative silvicultural system could be considered.

 

Deer management is paramount to give the best chance of natural regeneration of Chalara resistant saplings.

 

There is more detail in the table below. It relates specifically to SSSI woodlands but is probably fairly applicable to any woodland containing significant quantities of Ash.

 

 

The full guidance document is linked to below, including a copy of the table above that the over 40's among us won't need a telescope to read.

 

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/811166/NE_FC_Ash_dieback_SSSI_management_advice_V2_April_19.pdf

 

 

All sounds like a bit of a nightmare to me . It may look viable on paper, but in a wood similar to the one I'm currently working in ( full of large overstood ash stools and huge ash standards ) it wouldn't be economically worth doing . It's hard enough to scrape a living from working in the woods now without being left with only some 'thinnings' to survive on !

Coppicing only the understory and smaller stools would leave far to much canopy and shade for any regrowth to thrive , and potentially (probably ) leave a wood full of dangerous dead ash trees in the very near future . I'm already leaving any decent size tree that's not ash so as there will be something left in a few years , how can I also leave all the big ash as well ?

From what I've seen of woods in East Anglia there is no chance of a 40% survival rate , maybe 10-20% at best and probably less than that  . Surely it would be better to do a visual survey of the plot in late summer , select the best trees that are as yet uninfected and fell/coppice  the rest ?

So much of our beautiful ancient woodland is already virtually derelict and desperately in need of working and bringing back into cycle that standing back and watching all the ash die and collapse onto the understory is not a very good strategy

Looks like a cupboard spider , a type of false widow . Usually found in houses , sheds and (not suprisingly) cupboards ! They can bite though not usually aggressive and bite is not particularly painful unless your unlucky enough to have an allergic reaction . Never seen one in the woods before though .

1 hour ago, the village idiot said:

FIREWOOD. (Long post alert!)

 

There is a view among some that Woodland resource ending it's days as firewood is a shame and somehow a bit wasteful. We do not subscribe to this view at all.

 

In recent years it has been the demand for firewood that has driven the increase in management of many more broadleaf woodland sites, including ancient woodland. It is not just wildlife and the rural economy that benefit from this, it also helps the planet. Any displacement of fossil fuel use by wood helps massively to stabilise and ultimately reduce atmospheric carbon levels. Firewood, especially if combusted in efficiently burning stoves and boilers is a very good thing.

 

Right from the start of my woodland management activities firewood has been my mainstay in terms of revenue generation. Almost 100% of my income comes from firewood sales. Without this market being available and thriving the management of the wood would not even come close to being financially viable. Sustainable woodland management would likely only occur in sites owned by wildlife trusts and exceedingly green minded private owners.

 

As the firewood threads on this fine forum show, there are a hundred different ways to set up an effective firewood operation. We produce around 600 cubic mtrs of split product a year with no firewood processor. Are we crazy? Almost certainly, but there is method to our madness. I'll attempt to detail our thinking and our process below.

 

The path you choose to take with your firewood operation will be largely dependant on the size and variety of kit that you can afford to purchase/hire. There are people out there who make do with a chainsaw, an axe and a battered old pick up. If you are going large scale though it makes sense to equip yourself with some extra machinery to take the strain off your body.

 

When I first started out all I had available were my trusty Husqvarna 346, Antonio the work shy tractor, a small craneless timber trailer and a small horizontal 8ton electric log splitter.

 

The Process:

 

After you have felled an area of woodland you are left with a scene somewhat like this:

 

 

I had no means of extracting logs of this size so resorted to ringing up the lengths 'at stump' (where they fall). The 10 inch long rings were then roughly split with a maul and placed into cages made of stock fencing to begin the seasoning process:

 

 

During a dry spell in the spring I would hand ball the logs into my little trailer and extract them over the small bridge to my processing area. From the trailer the wood was then split down further and thrown into double height stock fencing cages to continue seasoning.

 

 

This methodology produced wonderful logs but the amount of handling was unsustainable in the long term. Firewood production was increasing year on year and I had to get a bit more mechanised.

 

The first change was to switch over to fully vented cubic mtr bags. This made handling much easier, including with loading the logs onto lorries (all my firewood is wholesaled). Below you can see an early picture of Steve on the horizontal splitter loading a vented bag held open with a frame made of pallets. We of course never bypass the two handed safe operating system on the splitters. What you think you can make out in the picture is simply an optical illusion.

 

 

We have since ditched the pallet frame and gone over to builder's trestles. These are brilliant for holding bags in place and slot neatly into the long sides of a standard pallet.

 

Our next improvement was to have our cordwood extracted by contractors with proper forwarding trailers. This saved a huge amount of time and unnecessary handling. We started with Chris Howard's compact set up but now use John Shipp with his bigger kit. This costs money of course but free's up your time for splitting more logs.

 

 

The cordwood was all stacked at our processing area where we ringed it all up out of the stack. This was probably my least favourite job in the woods. Cutting out of a stack is a real ball ache.

 

 

 

So, we had streamlined the extraction process, but ringing up out of the stack was not a practice we were keen to continue. Two seasons ago we asked John to stack all the cord wood one log deep on bearers. This took up a huge amount of ride edge space but did make the ringing up a lot easier, especially with a cant hook on standby.

A cant hook is a long bar with a pivoted hook on the end, it grips a long log and uses leverage to roll it over.

 

Last season we had a bit of a breakthrough. We were thinking about how easy it would be to ring up the cordwood if each log could be lifted up to waist height. The perfect machine for this is an excavator with a log grab attachment. We hired in James Gadd (a local contractor) with his bobcat and timber grab for a few days to test the principal. I don't have a picture with the grab, but below is an image of James with a flail attachment that we also had a play with.

 

 

 Ringing up with the help of the excavator was a revelation. In no time at all you are left with a sizeable heap of rings ready for splitting.

 

 

James was too expensive to use for all our ringing up, but I was so enamoured with the process that I went straight out and bought a grab of our own. We then hired in an excavator to finish off the rest of our stacks.

 

Filled bags are moved around with Sally and a forklift mast attachment (one of my better purchases!) You can see the trestles holing a bag open in the background (behind the bbq, which no woodland operation should be without.)

 

 

After a few months of splitting we accumulate quite a healthy collection of finished product.

 

 

Fingers crossed the video works.

 

 

 

So why in the name of all that's holy have we not gone down the firewood processor route? There are a few reasons.

 

We have been to many machinery demos and have not yet encountered a machine that can produce logs of the consistent quality that we want. We have very high standards! 

 

A firewood processor is somewhat limited in the size and shape of the log it will accept. With our method all logs can be dealt with in the same way.

 

To use a firewood processor to it's maximum efficiency you ideally need several other pieces of additional kit (log deck, loader, elevator, second tractor etc.) We do not have the funds available for all this ancillary equipment.

 

These are all reasons why we have shied away from a processor, but the main one is simply down to job enjoyment. When making purchasing or operational decisions we almost always prioritise job enjoyment over maximum productivity. Steve and I both love spending the summer on the quiet electric splitters listening to audiobooks and podcasts. The splitters are powered by a diesel generator sited a long way from the work area. This creates a very pleasant environment in which to work, and an opportunity to broaden our minds. A scenario that would be much more difficult with a noisy tractor and processor right next to us.

 

A processor set up works very well for most large scale firewood producers, and they would probably consider our methods bonkers. Each to their own I say.

 

We have tried vertical splitters but actually find our compact horizontal splitters considerably more user friendly. The 'compact' is key here. Most horizontal splitters are a bit too long, the ergonomics slowing down the splitting operation significantly. Our little splitters only have a maximum of 8ton splitting force, we have always found this perfectly adequate.

 

I chose early on to wholesale all of our firewood. We sell to two local firewood merchants who do all the deliveries. We obviously take a significant hit on revenue per bag with this arrangement, but Steve and I are both keen to spend as much time in the Wood as possible over the winter, rather than be trucking around the lanes of Suffolk dishing out logs. One of our wholesale customers collects the bags himself, the other gets the logs delivered to his base via lorries loaded with the alpine/forklift combo.

 

Every woody person I have spoken to sets up their firewood operation in a different way (from us and from each other). A good general rule is too try to limit log handling as much as possible. I personally would add to this that it is important to ensure that you are enjoying the process too. It is difficult to sustain and be successful with a process that you dread the thought of doing.

 

 

Edit: Forgot to mention that small diameter logs, generally those that don't need to be split are processed on a circular saw bench. This is easily powered from Sally's PTO.

 

 

Very impressive stuff . Ive been doing logs for many years and am not as organised  as you . Never considered using a small excavator with grab as a mechanized saw horse .

Having a wood with a prelaid network of concrete tracks and hardstands is a massive bonus ( I've just got in from a morning of paddling about in a muddy wood yard )

On 09/12/2019 at 18:27, the village idiot said:

MULCHER CULTURE.

 

So, after a site assessment from Daniel, the operations manager at Kingwell Holdings, this monster of a machine turned up at the Wood.

 

 

It is quite a few tons of German engineering with a 400hp engine powering a 2.5mtr mulching head.

 

 

The beauty of this machine for us was that it only penetrates the ground to the depth of the rotor teeth. Only the top couple of inches of soil are disturbed, but anything above ground level is eaten for breakfast. Perfect for grinding away large stumps.

 

The plan was for the machine to remove the stumps from zones 1 and 2 of our 3 zone ride edges so that we could then mow the regeneration on a rotation with our tractor and chain swipe. We had calculated that we could  just about cover all the rides in the Northern portion of the wood (50 acres) in the 5 days we had the mulcher for.

Our 'back of a fag packet' calculation proved to be way out. The mulcher was so effective that the North Wood was completed in one and a half days, leaving us with three and a half days to do all of the other rides we had opened up. This was most excellent!

 

Steve and I had spent two days with a hired in large saw taking the biggest stumps down a bit as we thought this would speed up the subsequent mulching process.

 

 

This turned out in hindsight to be a complete waste of time. The Mulcher hardly even noticed passing through stumps like the one above. Even the colossal multi-stemmed Ash stools several feet in diameter only kept the mulcher head busy for a minute or two.

 

After 5 days of carefully supervised mulching we had covered several miles of ride, 5-7 meters down each side, and several miles of access track, with not a stump left in sight. The outermost zone (zone 3) was left un-mulched down each ride edge. We wanted this to develop into shrubby coppice growth to be cut every 10 years or so with chainsaws. Zone 3's were not going to be mown so stumps weren't a problem.

 

Below are some pictures of the mulcher in action. In the last picture you can clearly make out the brambly zone 3's left to carry on growing.

 

 

 

 

 

 

This looks like a seriously heavy intervention, and it is. We are very confident however that these ride edges will green back up in no time and develop the lush, vibrant and varied habitat that we are after. Only time will tell if we have seriously over-reached with this one, but we did our homework and are anticipating spectacular results over the next two to three years.

 

A special shout out has to go to Justin Kingwell. He is the owner of the company and was our driver for the week.

There is no terrain where he is not prepared to take his very expensive machines. The concrete roadways didn't phase him a bit, nor did the potential prospect of the odd unexploded bomb! He mulches on regardless with a happy smile on his face. It was a joy having him around.

 

The regeneration of the vegetation on these ride edges is going to be monitored by our conservation guru Juliet. I'll keep you all posted on how they develop.

 

Next up, firewood. The revenue generator.

 

Wow that's a pretty serious bit of kit , those rides should look fantastic ☺️. I'm guessing there wasn't much in the way of wildflower on the old ride edges ?

How long ago was this done ?

The AMR splitter has an IVA and towable up to 60mph.

I looked at various other splitters and found a lot of them haven't which makes the "road towable " bit of them irrelevant . One maker I spoke to (unfortunately can't remember which one ) said something along the lines of  " most people don;t worry about the IVA , you'll be fine as long as you don't have an accident whilst towing it " !  Needless to say I crossed that one off the list  !

5 hours ago, Lucan said:

 

If you want some bedtime reading on the biodiversity value of sycamore in UK woodlands: The ecology and biodiversity value of sycamore (acer pseudoplatanus L) with particular reference to Great Britain

 

This is a really interesting read , there's a area of the wood I'm working in that I believe was once mainly elm (all long since gone ) which has now been taken over by mostly sycamore which is slowly spreading into more of the wood . Given that most of the wood is predominantly ash , which is now about to suffer a similar fate to the elm , I'm happy to let it spread further and hopefully increase the biodiversity in the wood .

5 hours ago, the village idiot said:

I reckon it would be capable of a certain amount of 'winching in' especially if you orientated the arch to the log.

 

It might need a few design tweaks if you were planning to do a lot of this.

 

I'll see if I can get Tim involved in the thread to give his thoughts.

 

Without wanting to do him out of a potential sale, you would be more than welcome to borrow the arch to see if it fits in with your operations. It just about fits on the back of a pick up, (and easily onto a trailer) if the wheels are taken off. It's been out in one of the Suffolk Wildlife Trust woods to extract some truly mighty Oak stems.

That's very generous of you  , I may well take you up on your offer sometime ☺️

12 hours ago, the village idiot said:

THRILLING MILLING.

 

Much more through luck than any hint of sensible planning we have been fortunate enough to have had experience of three of the main types of mobile milling machines at the Wood. These were the Alaskan Chainsaw Mill, The Lucas type mill and a bandsaw mill. 

 

I'll give an overview of each type, but in most cases in order to mill a big tree stem you first need to transport it to a suitable milling area where there is enough space all around for a sawyer to do their thing. Quite often in Woodland a suitable stem will have fallen into a crowded environment not suitable for setting up kit.

 

Traditionally, sizeable stems would have been extracted from the Woodland using organic horse power, these days for better or worse, (an opinion generally dependant on whether you wear a flat cap or not) we have turned to mechanical horse power ie. tractors. Even a fairly big tractor might struggle to drag a 2 ton Oak log across a stumpy forest floor, you would soon be ploughing instead of extracting. It is a big help to employ a lifting device and an extra set of wheels. This is where the log arch comes in.

 

 

My log arch was designed and built by Tim at TCF Engineering, the same chap responsible for my little timber trailer from earlier posts. It is a fair bit larger than his standard model. My Arch needed to be strong enough to cope with Oak logs weighing several tons but narrow enough to fit over the slim bridge joining the two main regions of the Wood.

 

The arch is fitted with an 8ton 12volt winch and a pulley. To use the arch you simply have to back it over the butt end of your log, feed the winch cable underneath and back onto itself, activate the winch to lift up the front end of the log and secure it in position using strops or ratchet straps. You are then good to go. This particular arch can lift a 5 mtr long log completely off the ground. Any longer than this and the log has to be skidded. The winch is powered from the tractor battery.

 

With a log suspended in this fashion, the friction is so low that you could probably extract the timber with a grippy ride on lawnmower. Probably best not to try though.

 

We have extracted many large Oak and Ash logs using the Arch. It is a great piece of kit:

 

 

 

 

 

By far the best bit about having this extraction method available is that you can play Log Arch Rodeo with your woodland co-worker. This involves one person driving the tractor as fast as they dare whist the other sits atop the log clinging on for dear life as it fishtailes around all the tight corners.

 

I have some entertaining video footage of this but unfortunately I'm too stupid to work out how to upload it. I will leave it up to your fun loving imaginations.

 

Next up more detail on the variety of timber milling techniques.

 

 

That's a sturdy looking piece of kit ,  been thinking about getting one for a while now , can the winch be used to drag a stem into reach of the log arch or is it only for lifting ?

Yes its got a 9hp honda engine

I've had an AMR 12 ton towable petrol splitter for about 6 months now and can't fault it .

Costs considerably more than the ones your looking at but is fast , fuel efficient , tows lovely and even though only rated at 12 ton splits most things ?

That certainly is some serious wide ridening you've been doing there , should create some wonderful micro climates and habitats . ☺️

Not sure how I feel about large scale out of season (summer) felling though , what about nesting birds ?