On Thu, 25 Aug 2016 08:16:24 +0100, Chris Hogg wrote:



My experience of weed burning was in 1962 when my father used a
paraffin-fuelled device which wouldn't look amiss on roadworks.

Oh, happy memories! Those big orange flame-guns were great fun, and
spectacular if you pressurised them too early, before the coil had got
hot enough. Great jets of flaming paraffin shooting out, setting fire
to all and sundry!

Had a regular school holiday and weekend job with a mate in a very
dilapidated walled garden that once belonged to a manor house that by
then had been sold off to become a prep school.
The lady owner of the garden who was trying vainly to grow produce as
a business asked us to remove a decade or so of growth of holly and
ivy from the walls ,we used the weed wand to great effect but a fair
number of people especially in the school got rather alarmed at the
subsequent wall of flame about 100 yards long and getting on for 20 to
30 ft high. Kept us nice and warm on a dry cold January day though.
Later she asked us to clear out a sunken greenhouse disused for 30
years a job we tackled on a Friday, We burnt down the accumulated
vegetation with the wand and then damped down and went home intending
to dig out the rubbish on Monday. We need not have bothered with the
damping down as on our return we now had a new water feature which was
a sunken green house with a 3ft deep pool inside.
After pumping out and removing the muck we found the cause , a long
forgotten tap on a lead pipe hidden amonst the brambles which we had
melted off with the wand.

G.Harman