Where's WYK been, and what trouble is he making?

[wyk]

Anyone know a dealer in southern England? I had the starter assembly off the Echo and managed to lose ALL the freakin bolts that held it on in the brush! Grrr! Also, the Sycamore did more damage to the handle than I had thought - it's much too close to the brake now. I may have to just find a parts saw, I guess. Will a 510 work, anyone know?

I raided the storage unit in the yard and found that Stihl starter assembly bolts work on my Echo. Only problem is now I have a mix of philips and torx bolts on the Echo. I also took the handlebar and bent the begezuz out of it so it would work OK and not crowd the brake. The carb acts up on occasion, but I cleaned her out, OK. The idle adjustment screw retainer is missing, tho. So I put some plumbers tape in there to keep it from wandering much. We'll see how she does tomorrow in a bucket truck. I do much rather enjoy using my lil Echo than the 341's.

 

[dave k]

Don't forget to visit his cottage and take in the tank museum while you are at it !

 

[wyk]

Yet more Arborist work. I don't mind it. I need to practice more with hardwoods and structures anyways. The outfit I am with has a lot of old contracts to tend to a lot of the older properties in southern England. This is near Sturminster, a barn that's a couple hundred years old had a Chestnut attack it. The garage area is a write off, tho. It looks like we'll be back to remove the Chestnut. We'll have to cut a path to it to get the equipment in to haul it out:

Here's one of the climbers with an ms660:

And here is the limb gone:

 

[wyk]

Here's the Echo helping free another saw, and the typical abuse she gets in work and keeps on ticking.

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[slowp]

Now, I am expecting a photo of you with Prince William.

 

[wyk]

Now, I am expecting a photo of you with Prince William.

One of the keepers of a wood we work in basically has that royalty sort of accent and talk. He isn't all ears and teeth, tho. William frightens me. Bear in mind that I am in Dorset - basically the farm country of England. While there is a lot of money here, I doubt I will be running in to royalty any time soon.

 

[dave k]

There is a suprising number of titled folk here in Ireland, Ive just a few mins ago picked up a cheque from a Lord and on Monday felled a yew tree for his father an Earl and work a great deal for the Earl's brother who comes in as a Right Honrable. Ive worked for another 3 Lord's / Earl's and find them to be some of the most honest easy to deal with people I work for.
Im not sure if it is still the case but Barttlet Tree Experts bought a company in UK in 96 called Southern Tree Surgeons who used to have the Royal crest on the trucks since they used to do the Royal estates tree work. Mind you there was also a agricultural contractor that had the same crest as they spread the Royal farm's manure !

 

[wyk]

Ah yes. I have already met several 'landed gentry' types. All very polite, very unpretentious. As an American, I have been groomed for a distaste of royalty. However, I have found that gentry, royalty, and working class are all unpretentious and rather good fooks here in England. It seems the middle class here(which is classified a bit differently than the US middle class is), anyways, I find the English middle class to be the pretentious snobs. As though they feel they have something to prove. What a difference a country makes.

I did meet a descendant of Earl Digby at Sherborne Castle the other day. As I would have - we do their work for them.
Or should I say we do their 'bidding'?

Cheers, Mates -

Wez

There is a suprising number of titled folk here in Ireland, Ive just a few mins ago picked up a cheque from a Lord and on Monday felled a yew tree for his father an Earl and work a great deal for the Earl's brother who comes in as a Right Honrable. Ive worked for another 3 Lord's / Earl's and find them to be some of the most honest easy to deal with people I work for.
Im not sure if it is still the case but Barttlet Tree Experts bought a company in UK in 96 called Southern Tree Surgeons who used to have the Royal crest on the trucks since they used to do the Royal estates tree work. Mind you there was also a agricultural contractor that had the same crest as they spread the Royal farm's manure !

 

[wyk]

Douglas Fir

Just realized I hadn't put up any of the Fir vids I had. Here I am having to thread a 20" Douglas through two oaks. We finally had enough clearing for me to start falling the Firs(they were usually much taller than the cedars). BUt it was still very tight, and remember we are not allowed to bring down any hardwoods. That gap is about 10' wide or so. I still nicked one of the oaks. Ah well. All the wood came out OK, so I was happy. The saw was the 'new guy' saw. An MS341 with a 15" bar, which is no fun to use on 2' worth of wood. As mentioned previously the rakers were ridiculously low, even for softwoods. So you will hear it engage the brake randomly, and maybe I may do a bit of swearing at it.

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[wyk]

Here's my current set up until the 346xp arrives:

Echo CS-520, 20" bar, 325 full chisel in a recently stumped sycamore stump:

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[huskynoob]

Anyone know a dealer in southern England? I had the starter assembly off the Echo and managed to lose ALL the freakin bolts that held it on in the brush! Grrr! Also, the Sycamore did more damage to the handle than I had thought - it's much too close to the brake now. I may have to just find a parts saw, I guess. Will a 510 work, anyone know?

Get yourself to a decent bike shop and pick up all the allen-headed metric bolts you need!

 

[wyk]

Not a whole lot to report on for the week, really..

We were sent down to Bexhill to clear an area for some more Ecologist work. This time it was to count how many reptiles were in the area. So they sent us in to freakin level the entire area of mebbe 200 acres. It was thickly overgrown in parts. At one point I had a backtrack following me as I cut a path through the trees. The canopies and brush were so thick the backtrack had to pull the trees off of me and from behind me as I progressed through the thicket.

Not much photos of the work. I was exhausted and busy trying to keep the backtrack busy. I do have a few photos from the Friday we took it easy and from fueling up both Land Rovers:

That is roughly $210 worth of diesel for two smallish trucks. £1.40 per liter works out to nearly $8.50 per gallon.

We took most of Friday off and had a break at the beach:

And the drive home took us past Arundel castle:

Yes, that sign does say "Dorking" on it

Here's a couple more English countryside pics just for the fun:

 

[porsche965]

Great photos and tour Wyk. From Chainsaws to Countryside this is a great thread. Thanks for all the time to continue your adventure and to share with all of us!:msp_biggrin:

 

[jmethodrose]

nice photos mate! how's your saw situation at the moment?

 

[wyk]

nice photos mate! how's your saw situation at the moment?

I have a 346 on the way courtesy of the NMurph/Mastermind combo. Randy seems to think it can pull a 24" bar in hardwoods...we'll see... I would like a good pair of dogs on it for falling and bucking, but there doesn't seem to be any other option besides 357 heavy dogs - and those look monstrous on a 346, let alone a 357.

You get that 365 running yet? I wanna try and see if we can fix it before you give up on it. Go ahead and PM me if ya like. My mobile is in a work van in the yard. I won't have it until Monday.

BTW, does anyone know a good on-line place in the UK for parts? I am playing around with Clark Forest at the moment...

 

[wyk]

Lawrence of Arabia

Don't forget to visit his cottage and take in the tank museum while you are at it !

It turns out one of the guys in work lives near the base and that cottage. So, I dropped him off after work and checked it out. No photos, but it was pretty cool. My cam is slowly dying. I am maybe gonna pick up another one tomorrow. I am taking the day off because this last week was absolutely brutal. We finished clearing an area in Hastings, all small trees and shrubs, then we had to chip ALL of it! All 100 or so acres we did of it. That was 2 days straight of feeding a chipper and moving brush and trees around and cutting them up to fit. The last day we were without any heavy machinery to move the stuff. It was absolutely brutal. We took turns, so now I am far more proficient with a chipper than I care to be.

Tomorrow I am back on the team that is doing the softwood thinning where we can't cut the hardwoods. We'll see how that goes. I hope the idiots didn't cut down the big douglas firs the landowners want saved. I'll try and get some pics of those. Ya saw the video where I felled one of the smaller ones through that lil opening. I am told it is much mroe open now that they had a different team there last week. We'll see...

Oh, almost forgot. I don't got me any photos, but I did get to check this thing out:

Bayeux Tapestry - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I should prolly add that the version they have at the Reading Museum is a hand made reproduction, which in itself is stunning. They hand-knitted a copy of a 230 foot long tapestry. I was amazed.

 

[wyk]

Good to see AS back

Hey, Buds. I was unable to get in to AS the last few days.

The lil Samsung camera I have is nearly dead. I am considering getting something like an Olympus 'Tough' or a Panasonic FT series. They are supposed to be waterproof and shockproof.

These are the last few images and video of from the Samsung:

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That's me destroying a felling lever. And shortly thereafter the walbro on the Echo gave up the ghost as well. I prolly should also mention in that vid that we only let the smaller cedars lay like that. You risk damaging the larger cedars if you fall them across each other. In any case, they are nearly worthless, and we are told not to spend much time on them. It's the oaks that are worth money in England. They do not build with wood here.

I am currently using a nearly new Stihl MS261 and it is a bit of a dog for the small stuff, but has good torque for the bigger stuff. Speaking of bigger stuff. I tried to drop a 2' cedar through a pair of oaks today. I thought for sure the thing would get enough momentum to power thru. Of course I was mistaken. So, it was left leaning enough for me to take an 8' chunk of the trunk(we are cutting ~6/8/13/16 foot sections for the mills). You want to do better on a trunk, but because it is so tight in there, we often have to settle for 8 if we can not get a forwarder near it or drag it ourselves. Anyhow, I take an 8 foot section off of the bottom and not only does it not fall down and come loose, but it swings towards the oaks, suspended by it's branches, hits one oak, and then falls to the ground and immediately decides to try and kill me. I see something new every day. I thought no way in hell could that happen with what had to be several tons of wood. But, there ya are.

I was up north of Bristol in the Forest of Dean last Sunday hanging with Jmethodrose. He introduced me to some buds of his whom chainsaw sculpt(along with his self):

The photos don't do it justice. There is some really cool stuff there. Including a bunny woman.

The area itself is quite nice:

This is the pub -

This is in front of a pub that is actually in the forest itself. It reminded me a lot of Oregon, actually. Really beautiful place. This also shows off Joe's very cool diesel Land Rover complete with snorkel and two pints of bitter:

And finally, Joe gave me a 365 that didn't work. All I had to test it the other day was my 32" lightweight bar and chain. I got her to idle after cleaning up the carb and making some adjustments. Eventually I got it to run OK. We'll see if she keeps working:

 

[wyk]

Get yourself to a decent bike shop and pick up all the allen-headed metric bolts you need!

I did even better. I got me one of those chainsaw multi tools:

Stihl, husky, torx, allens, it all works with this one lil tool. Wow, I just noticed that mine has 2 allen wrenches on it VS just the one it shows in the photo. Bonus. It also has a place on it to hold yer chainsaw files as well.

 

[wyk]

New camera on the way

I ordered a Panasonic FT-10 on sale(an older model). It is supposedly shock and water proof.

I also found some time to edit a vid from earlier with the old Samsung. This is a leaning cedar no one else seemed to want to mess with. You can see the canopy opening up a bit now. That's using an MS341 with an 18" bar if I recall:

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Here's a random car I found in a parking lot in a rest area(AKA, a 'car park' in a 'lay by'):

It does a good job of looking bigger than it is, but it's actually a tad smaller than my VW Polo.

I also don't recall putting these pics up:

This is Milton Abbey itself, near where we did the hardwood thinning last month:

And this is the standard Forestry warning sign the UK uses:

Here's the view down the road from the home I am in:

The circa 1700's church across the way that has a nearly 300 year old Yew tree in the yard:

And a photo of the old schoolhouse that I live in:

 

[madhatte]

Geeze, Wyk, you're having too much fun!