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I had some pitch pine that had been used as staves in tanks in a tannery, the top 1/4" was dry & dusty & stained with the dye from the vats. Cut past that & it was good as new. It had such a resin content that cutting it was difficult & the saw blade had to be brushed ocassionally with parafin...

Anyone would think wood grows on trees! But seriously 40 years in the boat trade & then education i saw a lot of good timber get thrown away, i managed to save some of it! Subbing a one of repair in a local yard I was just finishing off on the last day when a guy walks in & says "Anyone want to...

I remember when PU glue first came on the scene back in the 90's, Balcotan was the first one, later it was rebranded as Semparoc. Then some bright spark had the idea "Lets put it in tiny bottles with a picture of a hairy arsed ape on it & call it gorrilla glue then we can sell it for ten times...

Mix it with compost & grow potatoes in tubs, put in compost heap. If its oak chippings smoke fish or find someone who has a smoker.

Looks nice to start with but in my experience it offers little real protection & will go dirty grey & attract mould. Apply too much & it never dries. I learnt the lesson years ago, now i just give a quick sand down, slap a coat of woodstain on the gunwales once a year!

On our club there is a large piece of wasteland that has quite a few self sown apple trees, all grown from seed so will be crosses of some kind. Several of them are really good eating apples. The best tree has apples that look similar to a Golden delicious but with a red blush, really crisp &...

Teak, 100% If you want to bleach it scrub it with salt water & leave in the sun, it will go a lovely silver grey colour.

20 odd years ago we built a large extension on our house that effectively doubled its size. I was a house husband with small child. A builder mate gave us a price for the extension up to roof on, windows in stage & i did the rest. I didnt get paid & the whole thing was done in two years. If we...

That sounds like an Arboga, lord knows how you ever get at the gears in one of those if you strip the tufnol ones! I have a manual & it looks difficult to say the least. As for the chinese ones they are nylon because they are cheap!

The school i worked at a few years ago had an Optimum lathe & bench drills as fitted by our service provider. All had the legend "Made in Germany" on them, in fact they were made in China & were a mix of good & shockingly bad quality, the lathe was supplied new with roll pins missing from its...

I have a late Harrison 140 (metric) came out of the college where i worked for a while. Unlike most it still has its original manual & factory test chart plus a large amount of tooling. Lovely lathe to use & still as accurate as the day it was made. Re toolposts my Harrison has one of the...

I had a similar problem with my garage. A cheapish fix that works to seal the Precast slabs & floor joins. Rake out any mud, roots, dirt from all gaps, wire brush them out too, blow out with compressed air if you can, vacumn cleaner if you cant. The joint has to be clean. Hot air gun to dry it...

Im a boatbuilder & have had to repair many wooden boats built from mahogany, Even the best of them were classed as only moderately durable & if used in contact with the ground will rot in short order, It was used in boats because it was a stable good looking timber & available in large sizes. So...

The colour & grain looks similar to Kapur, it smells unmistakably of camphor when you plane it, used to be used for heavy duty deck timbers etc, (Southend pier was decked with it) if it doesnt It might be jarrah but the jarrah sleepers i have seen are far more interlocked grain & darker.

That Tree surgeon was probably laughing that day, I would bet he doesnt get paid for what he cuts normally. Our local guy mentioned earlier dumps all his timber at a local nursery, free tip for him, the nursery processes the timber into firewood they sell by the hippo sack.

A guy down the road to us is a good tree surgeon, he did a job in mother in laws garden last year & left two big Ash trunks about 18" in diameter in ten foot lengths for me. Then you realise how heavy they are! He cuts down & clears what could be considered to be tons of usable timber every...

I would also say Greenheart, it was used a lot for piles in wharves & other marine construction, It has been used in boatbuilding for keels & such like as it is extremely rot resistant. There was a big lot of it came out of Barrow docks a few years ago. It blunts tools very quickly!

Car companies build cars to make money, they are in the business of shifting products, lots of them, the customers convenience in fixing it when it goes wrong is barely a consideration, any way to make the product faster & cheaper to build will be used. The white goods analogy is perfect, they...

I had a later 352 which had the steel block guides & thrust rod, though adequate i found them noisy & screechy & didnt like them. I made a set of decent guide holders which had a ball race thrust wheel & Coolblocks on the sides, not sure if these are still available but they are a plastic fibre...

Birch plywood.