Yesterday I took the tractor and trailer round to gather some piles of firewood I’d felled and cut up in January and February. Some of these were right next to the rides and easy to get to, but a couple were way off any of the rides behind tangles of brambles and fallen branches. Despite this, I was able to get the tractor in by finding a roundabout route since it’s narrow enough to get through gaps and has enough power to get over smaller logs and stumps.
In this video I cut down hazel, wych elm and ash trees for firewood, as I clear the edge of a woodland ride at Century… Read More »Felling winter firewood
Last month I had a problem with the tractor not starting and I ended up replacing the carburettor and the fuel lines. I also improved the ground clearance with a “pulley cut”, and this post also shows some modifications I made to the car trailer I use to bring firewood home from Century Wood.
One of the attractive features of coppice selection is that you can do it at any time of the year. It’s even less seasonal than… Read More »Summer firewood at Century Wood
Last year I posted about buying a second-hand lawn tractor to use in Century Wood. I modified it during the winter to make it work better in the woods: for getting around and pulling the garden trolley that I’ve been dragging along the rides myself since 2008. Now I’ve tried it out and in this post I talk about the modifications I’ve made.
In the slider above you can see the before and after pictures. The tractor was in good working order, but had some patches of surface rust and flat tyres at the front. There was no grass cutting deck with it: when I went to collect it during a gap in the lockdowns, its eBay seller gave me the rusted lump that had been the deck for free, and I managed to salvage two pulleys from it before taking the body of the deck to recycling.
This video shows the mods I’ve made and driving the tractor around to look for fallen branches on the rides. The rest of the blog talks about the modifications in more detail.
Read More »Wood tractor 2 – trying out my mods
I’ve bought this second hand lawn tractor to convert into a sort of “wood tractor” to use at Century Wood. At the weekend, I took the tractor to the wood to try it out in its stock configuration, before making any mods to it, and made the YouTube video at the end of this post.