marktownend

Yep, it came with the rails (well, 5 of them). Annoyingly 4 of them were attached to a lovely straight looking bit of timber, but we had to unscrew them as there was no way that was going to fit in my MX5 that I'd taken to collect it! I'll attach them to the straightest thing I can find. I like the candle wax tip!

Just to stop everyone pestering the OP in the future, I picked this up from him today to have a play with.

Think you're meant to remove the protective plastic covering from the camera lens before taking the photos. That's a large quantity to start shifting to individuals via Facebook or whatever, I'd guess you might need to be looking to sell them wholesale to a timber company who can then retail them, but they've generally got their own sources and quality control. Someone like English Woodlands Timber in Sussex, but probably closer to you.

Mick, not sure 40 mins x 5 make 2 hours. Bombadil, thanks for the reminder about Bovril, I love a hot Bovril on a cold day. Agree about Earl Grey and similar, always a dreadful surprise. I do lighting for events rather than arb work and work at some quite nice private places for some quite well to do folk. Generally we're looked after really well (had a couple of bottles of very nice champagne left on the seat of the van whilst setting up a job this summer, not even afterwards!) and had the best steak of my life provided by the caterers running from a temporary kitchen in a marquee in someone's garden, but I did one very nice party (working right through the night) and the lady told us she'd cooked us some food and to go and help ourselves in the kitchen. Well I'm really not fussy but even I found it totally inedible. Never had food like it. Some uber-cheap supermarket lasagne that she'd somehow killed. Our problem then bacame what to do with it, we couldn't leave it, couldn't put it in her bin where she'd find it, couldn't feed 2 portions to the small dog as it would have ended up as dead as the lasagne, I ended up finding a carrier bag in the van and having to take it home for disposal. And the main event caterer would happily have fed us if she'd been asked in advance. I'm scarred from the experience. The builders currently putting up an extension for us at home seemed very surprised to find they get decent coffee here. And proper builders tea.

I do some conservation volunteering in woods near home which includes coppicing hazel that was put back into a 7 year rotation 9 years ago, so we're on the second cut. A local chap who also coppices himself takes some of the product to use for spars and seems to get decent commercial orders for them, I believe he's got one thatcher who travels from Norfolk to Wiltshire to collect them but no idea on pricing. They need to be processed relatively soon after cutting and I think the thatchers also want them fairly fresh to maintain their pliability.

Well it's suspiciously similar to these which I noticed in our garden earlier, about 2 feet from our sorry looking apple tree that had a growth right at the base a couple of years ago that I thought was honey fungus.

Indeed, we've had our woodland for just over 2 years and have had my mum and an aunt, both in their early 80s visit and both were spotting all sorts of things I knew nothing about, just because people in general knew more about nature and the countyside even as recently as their childhoods in the 1940s. I thought from the first photo it looked very like a spot near Castle Drogo so was chuffed when I saw the finger post in the 2nd pic pointing towards Castle Drogo. Think I had the wrong spot though. Am I right in saying that an assart hedge is a hedge specifically formed by leaving a thin strip on the edge of a woodland when it was cleared? Think I've read about that in one of my woodland books. Presumably if you're needing a field boundary for stock enclosure or whatever then it would have made sense to leave some existing trees (presumably supplemented with some traditional hedge laying) rather than grubbing the whole lot out and starting from scratch as you'd have a functioning hedge sooner.

It's a chain of recently launched satellites, they all get 'ejected' from a single launch vehicle and gradually spread apart. Don't know much about it but saw them when on holiday in Devon a few weeks ago. New launches every few days/weeks? www.findstarlink.com is a basic tracker (edit - ignore the 'tracker' link, it's something to do with Arbtalk being sponsored by a tracker company or something, every time you type tracker it automatically puts a link to an equipment tracker and I can't find how to type tracker without it putting a link in) for them, enter your location and it'll tell you potential upcoming sightings,time, direction, brightness etc.

Quite breezy here in Wiltshire today. The cat doesn't like it but no structural damage to the house yet. I was very grateful for the appearance of one of the original Panda 4x4s sometime back in the 90s when I was temping in a dull office and went out to play in the snow at lunchtime with a colleague, great fun drifting etc until the car broke down as we ploughed through a drift as the timing belt cover or something was missing so filling the engine bay with snow wasn't the best idea. This Panda appeared and the guy happily towed us a few miles to my mates house including slithering up a steep slippery hill so we could leave it there and we drove back to work in his landlady's car having taken about 4 hours for our lunch break. We were really impressed with the little thing.

Andy, get that 3rd pic (as it's displayed on my laptop anyway, the one with the big sky) turned into a jigsaw puzzle. You'll thank me when you're old, grey and decrepit as it reminds you of the days when you could shift big oaks logs around on your own...

Might be worth contacting the management at Kingley Vale near Chichester just in case they've got any trees down.

OK Graham, since I posted this on page 63 just over 18 months ago things have changed somewhat as fairly shortly afterwards I, together with my 3 siblings, bought 4 acres of slightly neglected broadleaf woodland in Hampshire. We're not going to manage it commercially, more as a place for a mixture of conservation, play, relaxation, chainsaw fun, firewood processing for our woodburners etc. Absolutely loving it. I've been rereading quite a lot of this thread this week and realising how much I'd learnt from reading through the first time! Plus seeing how many of the issues you've got are so similar to us, just on a larger scale. So thanks again for putting so much effort into this thread, it's genuinely a really valuable resource. You don't know it yet, but I'm coming to visit you at some point in the future, I'd love to have a look around and bring Hobnobs. And some updates would be great! Mark

I'm only a 'homeowner' type of user (admittedly now with a small woodland) and keep my own asset list of power tools etc but I'd be interested in this, however I've just looked at the site and the fact that there's no details on the contact us page of an address or similar would immediately put me off (if I'd not found it through seeing this thread which explains it's Steve). Also Steve the links at the bottom of the site to the For Sale and Forum sections of Arbtalk are no longer valid. And the fact that there are 427 items listed as stolen out of 1917 registered is really scary, have over 20% of all items listed really subsequently been stolen?

Absolutely. And you're not the only one who's got it.

I'm not surprised! Let's hope they know what valuable timber they've got there. That's significantly bigger than the biggest slabs we got from our cherry.