Another green laner build

I just had a look on Toolstation and their £100 chainsaw looks pretty small and under powered. It has a single 18V battery and 12" bar. The Hychika uses two 18V batteries giving 36V and has a 14" bar.

One advantage of being self employed and semi retired is that I can take time off at short  notice. A group of us got together for a run to the east of Newton Abbott. There was an interesting mix ranging from wide and smooth to steep, rocky and washed out. This one slowed us down a bit.

   

wrote:

You find the chainsaw on eBay . It looks like they have now dropped the price to £117. Don't use normal thick chainsaw oil. It needs thinner oil and the thick stuff won't feed. When the supplied oil runs out I'll probably use engine oil.

And 20mpg would be nice! I get about 150 miles to a tank

Ouch. At least you get a fair chunk more power for your money.

Thanks Les, I bought one today from them for £104.58 thanks to their black friday sale voucher code   Early xmas prezzie for me.

Your latest lanes look interesting too 

That's a really good price.

South Devon has some cracking lanes. It definitely helps to have a small 4x4. That's why I got the Jimny. Next we're probably moving on to the Tones/Torbay area. I'm more familiar with that area though I haven't been down there for at least 5 years.

This weekend I got the winch wired in and mounted. I now have an Anderson connector front and back so the winch can be used on either end. The winch mount will fit in any of the four receivers. As you seldom get a straight pull I made a swivel so the winch can be rotated about +/- 30 degrees then locked in place.

The winch is only rated at 3500lbs but this isn't a winch challenge vehicle. The winch is hopefully only going to be used to pull myself back out of trouble. I carry a couple of snatch blocks so I can double or even triple the line if I really need more power. If it proves to be too small I'll fit a bigger one. The cabling is good for a bigger winch but I doubt if the little PP3 sized battery fitted in a Jimny would like it.

 

It's been a while so it's time for an update. I've been doing quite a bit of green laning so I have had an opportunity to figure out what works and what does not.
First of all, I keep hitting the suspension arm mounts, which is a common problem with Jimnys.
 
It's very tempting to make new arms that mount higher up, on the side of the chassis rails. The other alternative is to lift the car a couple of inches but I'm not keen on lifting. In the short term I'll probably just weld on some protection plates and ignore the grinding noises.

The next vulerable points underneath are the diffs. Not much I can do about that without going for much bigger wheels.
 

The transfer case protection frame seems to be doing it's job.
 

The winch works pretty well. The only issue I have with it is that the pivot mechanism tends to slip under load allowing the winch to twist around. I need to redesign that. The receiver setup works great and has survived some pretty heavy snatch recoveries without any detectable wear.

The chainsaw was well worth getting. The batteries last for ages. For instance we went out on Sunday in the storm and had to clear 7 trees, some of which were pretty big. The batteries are down one bar out of three. If have found a couple of issues with the saw. First of all it's fairly easy to knock the chain off the bar if it gets stuck. I think it's something to do with the very narrow chain this saw uses. Another rather more concerning issue I have had is that the trigger sometimes sticks on, which is potentially dangerous. I sqirted some PTFE dry lube in the switch mechanism which seems to have mostly solve the problem.

The car now has a PNI Escort HP6500 CB, which mounts neatly on the front of the ash tray.
 

I purchased a 'superflexi' antenna through UK 4x4 Norfolk CB Centre on eBay, which didn't even last one day before snapping off at the base. Not impressed at all. I mounted it on the back door, low down to protect it from tree branches so it should have survived.
In their favour they didn't quibble about returning it.