Tag Archives: broyer

Thursday 9th September 2010 – Here’s a pic …

… of our latest toy.

terry messenger ford transit ifor williams trailer tractor les guis virlet puy de dome franceI told you a little while ago that Terry and I had bought a trailer between us – and here’s a picture.

It isn’t half a mega-beast, an Ifor Williams Trailer with a carrying capacity of 2.5 tonnes. Terry’s tractor and broyer went onto this and the thing didn’t even bat an eyelid. It’s a 4-wheeler with 12″ wheels, detachable sides and back, and a pair of ramps that would be the envy of anyone.

I have the Minerva and the 2000E estate to collect to Brussels some time when I have the room , and this will do all of that without any effort at all. I’m impressed.

terry messenger ford transit ifor williams trailer tractor les guis virlet puy de dome franceSo this morning I went down to Liz and Terry’s where we put one of the old caravan chassis on top of the other one and then put them both on the trailer.

Guillaume and his mate and then Simon came round in mi-chemin and once they had been sorted out Terry brought the load around here. We took off the two old trailers and dumped them round the side of the barn and then Terry loaded up his tractor and set off for home.

I put a couple of buckets of mortar onto the wall and it’s starting to look much better.

Tomorrow I have to go to Bill’s to fix his computer and then I’m off to Clermont Ferrand for a meeting that starts tomorrow evening and finishes on Saturday late afternoon.

If I don’t blog tomorrow night it will because I won’t have been able to find a wi-fi point.

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Tuesday 15th June 2010 – Errrr ….

… well, yes!

The broyer arrived here comfortably on the back of the trailer. And the trailer looked extremely comfortable on its new tyres too.

So once we unloaded it, Terry set off back to pick up the tractor. And after a while, Terry turned up – riding the tractor, with the van and trailer nowhere in sight.

caravan chassis trailer folded up on A frame les guis virlet puy de dome franceIn fact, the trailer has folded up, as you can see.

There was clearly not enough ground clearance on the trailer and what it looks like is that as Terry has turned to go up a hill, the front end of the van has raised (as you would expect), the back end has gone down, and the jockey wheel on the trailer has grounded out.

And instead of the trailer riding up on the jockey wheel, the weight of the tractor on the trailer has kept the trailer flat and the A frame has given way instead. After all, there was probably well over a tonne of pressure on it at that precise moment.

Mind you, if there were to be a problem with the trailer, here would have been exactly where we expected it to be. It wasn’t as strong as it might have been and we did have to weld part of it as you may remember. And I have to say that our welding was fine and it probably held it together.

It was our intention to replace the A frame in early course and so it will just have to be in earlier course.

And of course there is nothing wrong with our theory about all of this. It’s the practical side that has let us down.

terry messenger mowing field tractor broyer virlet puy de dome franceAt least the tractor did actually arrive here and Terry did end up by mowing that field as planned so it wasn’t all in vain. We did what we set out to do, and that’s something.

The next question of course is “how does Terry get his tractor back home again?”. And that’s something that we can deal with without too many issues. Steps have already been taken in that respect as you will find out if you read on below.

caravan chassis trailer les guis virlet puy de dome franceInside my barn is another caravan. It’s the one I lived in between 1998 and 2003 and the interior was trashed by rats when I was ill. But never mind the interior – the chassis is in much better condition than the other trailer, having been stored inside a barn for the last 12 years.

So once Terry went off to mow this field, I set about taking the caravan body off this chassis. You can see that I’m well-advanced here and I reckon I’ll have it finished and the trailer outside by tomorrow afternoon.

Next step of course will be to put the flooring and the tyres off the other trailer onto this one (so we won’t be wasting what we’ve already spent) and we can use that to get the tractor back to Terry’s.

It’s all good stuff and all of this isn’t half solving a lot of my space and storage issues. It’s an ill-wind indeed that doesn’t blow anyone any good.

But talking of ill winds and blowing, we were blown another depressing November day with another 25.5mm of rain. This weather is totally absurd. I’ve never known anything like it.

And in other exciting news, there’s a CREFAD (the organisation that gives encouragement and assistance to businesses in the Auvergne) meeting about eco-building and renewable energy taking place shortly, and I’ve been approached this evening to see if I would like to sit on the Panel. Is the Pope a Catholic?

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Sunday 13th June 2010 – Sunday is a day of rest …

eco fair pontaumur puy de dome france… but not for me today – I had things to do.

One of the things was to go to Pontaumur for an Eco-building fair. But that was pretty much a waste of time. There were about 30 stands, of which about 25 were trying to get people to sign up for this “Become a Solar Energy Producer and Sell to the Electricity Board” scam.

If you’ve ever experienced this scam – with the cold canvassing phone calls and the harassment in every shopping centre, then you’ll know what I mean. It’s what double glazing was in the 1970s, cavity wall insulation was in the 1980s, financial planning was in the 1990s. Nothing more than a means of the disreputable sharks looking out for poor helpless minnows to swallow.

Think about it for a minute – on a good day (and I mean a good day) I can create 4KwH of electricity. Selling all of that to the EDF will get me 4x€0.55 – ie just over €2. Say that I can do that on 50 days per year, that’s €100 per year. The cost of my set-up here was about €6000 – so it will take me 60 years to get my money back. But I’m using for the most part cheap analogue equipment. Going over to new digital equipment you can add another €3000 easily to that.

And I installed my system myself. How much would the labour charges be for someone else to do it? And then what will be the return on the investment? And when the resale price falls from 0.55 to 0.45 later this year, then what?

Solar (or wind) energy is never ever going to be cost-effective at today’s rates and today’s prices. No-one is ever going to get rich from selling it back to the central supplier here in Europe. There are going to be thousands of disappointed customers in five years time, just like there were with Endowment mortgages, because greedy people who have seen nothing but the Pound signs  will have been suckered in by a bunch of sharks.

Renewable energy is a lifestyle choice and not much else – that is, until the retail price of energy is adjusted to reflect its true cost. And then, of course, it will be totally different.

However I did meet Christiane there – I met her 2 weeks ago at the Plant Fair too – and I also found someone to talk to about a system of lagoons for dealing with my waste water. So that’s back on the agenda.

Before that however I went to the Authors’ Fair at Pionsat to chat to Marianne. Bill was there too.

Later round at Terry’s we took the broyer off the tractor and with a winch and ramps we went to put it in the back of his van. But either the van has shrunk or the broyer has grown since we last measured it and now it won’t fit.

We’re having no luck at all with this blasted tractor-moving.

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Thursday 20th May 2010 – Well, the trailer is now finished…

caravan chassis trailer sauret besserve puy de dome france…as you can see, and we now have the tractor on it. All of the lights now work (with a little manipulation) and we are quite proud of what we have done – and rightly so.

But we’ve hit a major snag with it.

The trailer weighs in at 740kg which is fine. It needs to be less than 750kg for taxation purposes. Its carrying capacity is rated at 888kg and Terry’s tractor weighs in at about 1 tonne (1000kg) but that’s not much of an issue as it’s much stronger how we’ve done it and it’ll take much more weight.

But it’s the broyer that’s causing up the problem. It’s far too heavy – Terry reckons that it’s about 300kg and he could well be right, and I didn’t plan on all of this weight. It’s pretty difficult to take it off and more difficult to put it back on. And it’s much more difficult to put it inside the van too without a major and drastic rethink.

The length of the combined unit of tractor and broyer too is an issue. The weight can’t be distributed correctly on the trailer and even with reversing it on and pushing the broyer as close as we can to the back door of the van there’s still too much weight at the rear end of the trailer.

Then of course all of this is impacting on the trailer tyres. They are caravan tyres and so not up to all that much. One of them doesn’t have a maker’s plate but the other one does – and it’s rated at a maximum 1016lb (475kg) and a max of 36psi. The weight of the tractor is at the limit for the tyre never mind the weight of the broyer and the weight of the trailer itself and as soon as we put the tractor and broyer on the trailer the tyre sank right down under the weight. It has about 55psi in it right now and it still doesn’t look much better.

So we are going to have a major rethink about this trailer and maybe do some more engineering. But the tyres are going to be replaced for definite with some commercial van tyres. They’ll be so much better with the weight loading and that’s always a good start.

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