dmr

Recycled plastic is a potentially good material, but as Tony says, is not nearly as strong as the equivalent sized wood. It also has quite a big thermal expansion which can be a problem unless your design allows for this. Then there is the micro-plastics issue too.

The Craftmaster Raddle changes colour significantly as it ages and goes from semi gloss to very matt so no chance of matching old and new. Ideally needs a new coat every 3 or 4 years, but I do like it.

We were chatting on WhatsApp just a few minutes ago, we can swear as much as we like without getting banned😀

Im not quite keeping up with things down that end, but is lock 8 closed for a while?

No don't do that, there are better ways to get a non shiney finish on the cabin sides, Ive had a hard day and a few beers but will try to write a better answer when I have a bit more time. 😀

To go a bit further than Tony, the surveyors job is to find faults to help you negotiate a price reduction, and to some extent to justify his own cost. He will also be advising what should be done in an ideal world rather than what is required to keep the boat floating for the next ten years. And to repeat what I said earlier, Shoeing is a localised repair/improvement to "strengthen" a high wear area and is not the same as full on overplating. Also welding to a bit of good but worn steel is a whole lot more satisfactory than welding over a pile of rust.

Can't really help, we had the Debdale gritblast and hot zinc thing done a couple of years ago. They suggested that a bit of the edge (near the back) should ideally be extended before the zinc etc. It sounded like a very small and routine job to them. Unfortunately there were various delays and so we never got to see the boat before it went back into the water so I have not yet seen exactly what they did.

Welding on shoes, especially at the back of the boat, is a quite common repair and really should not be regarded as over-plating with all the associated concerns. There could even (maybe) be an argument for welding them on from new to protect the high wear areas 😀 My only concern is that the inner edge should be chamfered (unless the weld itself does this) so that if you ever need to slide the boat down the bottom when the boat is grounded there is not a sharp edge to make things more difficult than they need to be.

Ed Shiers and Cox auto electrics can both help. Note that the generator needs new bearings from time to time, especially the older Bosch style one (I think you have the newer one), when the bearings fail its an expensive repair. Mr Cox will do a full overhaul. and if the brushes are Failing quickly are the slip rings ok ?

You can get a bit of trouble anywhere. A few years ago the new sports centre at Stone had all its windows smashed. We have had stuff stolen from the boat in some very posh places.

The poster asked for a place in London, while Im pretty sure your video is Rochdale 😀

When I woz at university I think I woz told that a 1 Farad capacitor would be as big as a typical room, things have moved on, but a 300 farad capacitor will still take up a bit of space 😀

Can you rewire it with thicker cables? Otherwise we need to know how much current the dosing pump is taking at the moment it runs and how long it runs for, not trivial to measure, maybe easier to just do it by trial and error. It might turn out that you need some pretty hefty capacitors.

Been thinking about this a lot lately. It's said the Victorian invention of sewers and the wc was a great thing, but its daft. We each make a fairly small turd which is some solid and a lot of water. We put this in water to flush it away so create a much larger volume of polluted water, we then add grey water and surface water to this to make a huge volume of polluted water. The compost loo is just so much more sensible.