Most of the heroic failures in biomass heating/energy generation involve the word Gassification…………., related to a desire to make the simple (torching a log) complicated

Done.

Where did the postcode/lat long lookup come from?

Now that will help Scottish tourism – I might venture down to Inners to catch a glimpse of the swedish womens team training.

I won’t however be venturing down to London. How could that be feasible when you live up here – you could have ended up tikets for events 2 weeks apart (although none at all would have been more likley.

Don’t do nothing.
We had our suspicions about an employee and was waiting for the right moment (whatever that might have been) to say something. He is now recovering (slowly) after a serious car crash. It was very close to being disasterous for him. Thankfully no-one else was involved.
We are all going to be paying for this for a while……

Thanks for that. I am not sure I can rely on myself to be that organised! Looks like she will have to settle for a cheaper phone!

Mighty expensive just rocking up – was gonna be £200 single for a car & 4 folk!

GEM has proved cheap & reliable, but is a pay & reclaim which can be a pain.

I had heard that the owner doesn’t like mountain bikers as they don’t think that they make any money out of them, and this was part of the of the reason for ending Bothy Bikes lease.

This is despite that fact that they have a cafe opposite the old BB shop.

AS an aside I thought the brash was left so as it rotted down the nutrients went back into the soil?

The brash is left until most of the needles have fallen off as they contain most of the nutrients. Also the income from the brash is greater than the cost of applying fertliser.

The timber income acheived by FC for it’s clients (us) is far less than the private sector acheives for it’s clients

[My only gripe with harvesting is when all the brushwood isn’t removed on clear fell, leaves hell of a mess.]

Difficult to remove it – a lot of it is needed to keep the machines up (on wet sites) and until recently there wasn’t a market. There is now a developing market for it as biomass – heat & power plants, so an increasing number of sites have the brash removed, which loks a lot better.

The timber should currently have a high value to us taxpayers, but when has a state owned organisation been best placed to realise financial value……

was thinking a similar thing – the doc was not easy to use.Happy to help out if you make it easy for me!

Some good comparisons on here:

http://www.torchythebatteryboy.com/p/bike-light-database.html

When this happened to me with alloy in alloy frame we:
Tapped out tread on inside of seat post.
Welded on approprate dia bolt onto slide hammer.
Knocked post out with slide hammer
Came out fine.
See no reason it wouldn’t work with a carbon frame – famous last words!

Daughter has a supermarket she wants to sell – to fund biking kit!
I have no idea what it is worth though – would need to check

Thanks for all those suggestions – the guys may not need bikes after all!

That’s probably true, but I don’t fancy telling our tree planters that they have a rather long walk every day!
I can’t see there being a big uptake on Cycle to Work by them…..

Not had that problem – but the previous vrsion did NOT like geting wet – one trip on a et night and the battery was ****. The battery now goes in my back pack.

Forestry in Scotland is booming.
Timber harvesting has never been busier – prices of timber are buoyed by the weak pound reducing timber imports.
Removing vast swathes of productie commercial forestry to make way for windfarms.
Planting enormous native woodland shruberies that will never be productive.
All with the attendant red tape, meaning we are constantly short of good staff……..

use senditnow.com that is parcelforces on line service. abt £12 for a bike. I have had no problems with the stated max size.

A few thoughts:
woodlands.co.uk is aimed at the leisure market – people are buying a large garden, the underlying timber value comes no where near the asking prices.
(at last) Timber prices have risen considerably over the past 2 years, due to the weak pound reducing imports and rising demand for biomass material. We actually export large volumes of pulpwood to Scandinavia – coals to Newcastle……
Plantation values have also risen – the returns have been very good.
There are very definite taxation benefits to owning woodland the timber is free of income tax, capital gains and IHT.
Public liability insurance is relatively cheap.

It starts from an early age, 12 yr old daughter is in the minority by doing any sport, so it is esy to see why peer pressure discourages them. She complains that in PE at school the girls just stand about talking. In the local schools mtb xc series she is only one of 4 girls in her age group competing, but there are heaps of boys. It is also noticible that with each step in age group the numbers fall off with both girls & boys. I don’t know if there is a correlation that she is also in the local athletic club with a core of similar age girls, and the club is run by 2 very commited women who obviously inspire the girls.

Thanks for the suggestions – I also had it in mind that there was somewhere in town hiring kit – but couldn’t find it on Google. Managed to do some bike sharing as the kids were in different races so that solved it.

The guys at windwave are so helpful – I emailed them about which bottom bracket I needed, got a phone call 5 mins later, & lots of subsequent help

He could go with the hotrock for longer, but the cost of refurbishment got to £160 without looking too closely, and without addressing the issue of the suspension bushes/bearings being sorted. He’s done an impressive job of wearing it out!

He’s moving up from 24’s because he’s grown, and his spesh hotrock is totally shagged.

Boobs – I might be interested in the 8500 for our son – hae e-mailed you.

+1 for avoiding Paris – 4 hours stuck in a jam there!

ittaika – the grass is always greener………right now I am wondering where you get the application forms for “Banker with significant annual bonus options” from!!

It would be a long commute……..

The forestry bit is fundamantal I am afraid!

Thank you – I will introduce that as an interview question – name the 5 trees in the Lumberjack Song………

Thanks – will give those a go!

Thanks, Gumtree readership seems to have shifted – a few years ago it was mostly Ausies/Kiwis, then Eastern Europe, now not sure where the main readership is.

“As most of the trees are worthless”

errr not really. The timber market is more bouyant than for many years, with UK sawmills taking an increased market share – good news in these doom laden times, and the industry supports jobs in the fragile rural economy.
Most of the riding I do is in private forests – not much sign of being chased.
Probably not much interest to the urban masses…….

thanks – minus 12 here last night – looks like that is here for a while.
Like you said the alternatives to leaving it on as normal do not bear thinking about!

The boiler has frost protection on, but will that warm the house enough to stop the other water pipes freezing?

Well said Cheeky Monkey!

Privatisation? Operating in a similar way to a commercial business would be a step in the right direction. We do not have the luxury of being able to tell our clients that they get less per tonne of timber but it’s OK because they provide public benefit. You can have both.

Loyalty – probably not in reality – but with short term tendering it is difficult for a business to justify investment for the long term.

Understand the hassle? They should have an understanding when they want another rabbit pulled out of the hat, at no additional cost.

Subsidise overheads? – Yes they should pay for them- the rate for the job needs to include the overheads. FC seem to think that overheads = profit, when in reality the margin is very tight. Low/no margin – thats why we don’t do much work with them now!

1) Use their forests to produce wood.
2) Use their forests as an environmental resource.
3) Use their forests to improve public health. This is the one that MTBing gets in under.

As (1) has become less profitable, (2) and (3) have become more important.

The reality is that FC are very inefficient at 1. They get approximately 50% less than the private sector achieves. They have been very chameleon like in pinning their hat to whatever political peg is available at the time to justify their existance. It is very easy to show the cost to the taxpayer of every tonne of timber that leaves the forest, but contributing to the wider public health agenda is something more open to smoke & mirrors accounting.

Going back to the original thread:
For a private company dealing with FC tendering is a very unsatisfactory process. There is no loyalty and they have no understanding of either the costs or hassle of running a business. They put out framework tenders, time consuming to complete, for which no work materialises for the majority of “successful” tenderers. Importantly for the Hub, it is much harder for a new organisation to win the tender than the encumbent one, as they can promise the earth in the tender.
We are very selective about what FC work we would consider now – we have the scars to show for it!

WD 40 is a good penetrant but not lubricant I’ve ben told.
Similar problem solved by:
Cut top of seat post off.
Tap a thread onto inside of seat post.
Weld a bolt onto the end of a slide hammer to match thread.
Screw bolt/slide hammer into seat post
Couple of whallops with the slide hammer & out pops the seat post