Totally off topic, but that’s okay for this thread right?
Today I finally took the plunge and ordered new tools for one of my jobs; I am very excited, the coppicing season is starting again and we’ll be spending some weeks over the winter living wild out in the woods and restoring some very old overgrown hazel coppice. It’s very hard but wonderful work, it looks brutal, and in a sense it is because we are felling trees; but in the years after we chop everything down there is this incredible bloom of life - it’s a wonder to behold. It’s like all the life that has been laid there waiting, unable to grow because of lack of light or whatever can suddenly burst forth - it’s amazing! A wide variety of woodland flowers, butterflies, insects and of course the new hazel poles.
Anyway, here are my new tools, I haven’t named them yet, but they are hand made using traditional methods in a small forge - so I think they might need names.
Awesome… yeah - there’s nothing like it! The whole time we spend away is like slipping back in time 100 years - there isn’t even any mobile phone signal - I kinda need it!!
There’s quite a bit of woodland left here and there, but yes you are right, a lot of it was completely destroyed to make way for crops, pasture and meat production. Where I live the land owner couldn’t bring himself to chop all the trees down so he left a small selection in every corner of the fields with their own little enclosing wall - it’s quite unusual!
The billhook blade length 22cm (9in) full length 39cm (15 1/2in) - you can get bigger ones at about 50cm, but they would be a little unwieldy I would have thought. I can cut through about 1 1/2 inch thick hazel poles with one swipe something like this.
It’s the same all over, although in fairness whilst the pace is exponentially accelerated with industrial farming techniques I recently read an article about the difficulty in Iceland in redirecting everything the Vikings cut down!
The size of the hook bigger than it looks. Because of the density of scrub I’d be accustomed to using the larger size you mention. The irony is that the “weeds” which made the bush unpleasantly impenetrable actually produce good soil, and act as a kind of pioneer species to regenerate rainforest cleared for agriculture!
I’m currently in the upper amazon where the machete is an every day carry item for much of the population!
@anon83620728 must be in the woods chopping a path through the reality known as nature, while I return to the forum of digital dreams where voltages and samples require a different kind of billhook to negotiate their overgrowth.
One day a week ago, Brian, our beloved guide and person of distinguished inspiration to the many who have a kind of residence in the place of Orthogonal Devices made an appearance and for the better part of some hours showered us with knowledge we didn’t know we needed or maybe satisfied those who’d requested it.
But today I long here in the silence awaiting the promulgation of what will be when the version known as 0.3 will be known and lauded across the land and a new canonical hour will be ordained around the shrine of the holy object known as ER-301.
So, while you have all been enjoying the new firmware I’ve been out in the woods again, here’s a few photos to show what we’ve been up to, it was a fun week, but I hurt a lot
One highlight was releasing a hung tree using nothing more than a rope an extremely powerful knot called Versatackle and a bit of effort - it worked a treat and there’s no way we could have done this without the rope technology:
This is Blue (and handler Chris), she’s a workhorse that we use to take all the products we managed to get from the coppice restoration process to the end of the woodland track - she is amazing:
And this is the coup after we have finished our work, all the products nicely stacked, looking pretty damn tidy even though I say so myself. You can see about 400 hedge stakes, 500 short stakes, 200 fascines (not all of these are in the photo), 300 beanpoles and quite a lot of firewood! Look to the rear of the photo to see how dense the woodland is compared to the area we cleared.