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Calcutt appear to offer hands-on training, at least to some of their clients; I had a very easy trip through the top lock a couple of weeks ago thanks to a couple of hirers under instruction. Looking back, I'm not sure why they weren't being trained with their own boat in the lock, but I was happy to be of some use...
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Never thought of that before, it’s a great idea. Well it would be if you have a tank like yours. Our tank is under the engine with a long flexible and slightly curving filler pipe from gunnel to the tank. Which is why we have an electronic gauge!
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Chris Lowe started following Live aboards
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You should get an emergency supply of wee bags, I use them when camping and the crystals absorb a lot of fluid, it's then disposed of in the normal rubbish.
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I think we were moored at either Tewkesbury marina or Bredon in 76 so holidays would have probably been up and down the Avon.
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Leisure lithium, trolling motors and air pumps.
magnetman replied to T_i_m's topic in Boat Equipment
There were some eastern European suppliers doing quality PWM boards. One must remember that while the UK has been generally denuded of this kind of thing some of the European or ex/soon to be USSR lands have real manufacturing bases and industrial estates. To quote a n other "they actually still design and make shit in these.places' However this can of course result in QC issues ( not the legal helper taking the money) Obviously China will take over and the former Tesla show room at Canary wharf is now a BYD show room. The cheap and nasty Chinese pwm boards do burn to easily but there may be some good ones. Brushless is a little bit of noise and the vessel I am currently lounging upon does have a Mk motor which has.brushes. Main thing is avoid the fishing line and tilt it out after use like it was a religion. -
billS started following South Oxford closing soon
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Calcut pump was running yesterday morning when I went past.
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Thanks again to everyone for the guidance. Turned out to be a fairly straightforward job; I'm not sure what was sealing the gap between collar and flue, it could have been fire cement, but I managed to chip/scrape it out with a small chisel that I keep for those jobs where you know you shouldn't use a chisel but it still seems like the best tool. Underneath that was some fire rope, and once I'd dug that out the whole flue came away with most of the smoke box still attached. The flue itself was in good nick, and I've just finished putting it all back together with the new fire box, using fire rope and high temperature silicone between the collar and flue, and just high temperature silicone on the joints between stove, smoke box and flue. It's worth noting how I think the smoke box failed; it had vertical cracks starting from the base, at the widest part of the box. Looking at the corrosion in the cracks, they'd clearly started some time ago and been growing slowly. The box itself was attached/sealed rigidly to the top of the stove with something that looked a lot like fire cement. What I think had been happening was that the lip on top of the stove that the fire box fits onto had been heating up more quickly than the fire box, and therefore expanding more. With no "give" in the fire cement filling the gap between the lip and the fire box, that put stress (hoop stress to be specific) on the fire box, concentrated at the widest part, eventually causing it to crack (and then causing the crack to expand). Hopefully the high temperature silicone, which does feel very rubbery when cured, will accommodate the differential expansion and prevent a recurrence. It was 29 degrees on the boat this afternoon, so I did not fire up the stove to test it...
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Cill damage at lock 59 Kennet & Avon Canal
beerbeerbeerbeerbeer replied to Steve Manc's topic in General Boating
they still do 😃 my favourite bit from that film is when he chucks his cheese sandwich in the cut asking what’s for later only to be told another cheese sandwich and he rolls his eyes. and of course Eric Sykes going down with the boat -
Vactan fisheyes - is it something I’ve done?
cuthound replied to Kathymel's topic in Boat Building & Maintenance
How old is the Vactan? IIRC it has a shelf life of only 12 months. That said it is good of them to replace it without question. -
Try it. When the stick touches the surface a wave is sent out across the diesel surface that is easy to see when looking down the roughly 2" filler pipe on my boat. There is a minimum BSS size for fillers, so yours won't be much smaller.
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Cill damage at lock 59 Kennet & Avon Canal
Steve Manc replied to Steve Manc's topic in General Boating
My better half says learning how to deal with the locks is half the fun. Recently watched a film from 1964 called The Bargee. Ok it's doesn't comfort to today's society ! Also in the film they used the working boats to open the locks 🫣 -
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How do you tell when it is just touching the surface?
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I had been living in London for several years by 1976 and was 20 years old and newly married (yes, we are still together!). My main memory of the long hot summer, in relation to the inland waterways, was that we had booked our first hire 2 or 3 months before the heatwave arrived. I then spent much of the summer worrying about whether or not there would be enough water for our late August hire boat to go anywhere. For some reason It hadn't dawned on me, despite having left my home town of Great Yarmouth only 3 or 4 years earlier, that the Norfolk Broads were tidal. Our holiday went ahead with no problem until (if my memory serves me correctly) our final night (a Friday) when the heavens opened and the long hot summer was at an end. That was our first step towards owning a boat. It did take another 39 years though.
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I remember trying to get down the arm to Aylesbury before the locks shut for the day to be greeted at the last lock by the lock keeper laughing as he put the padlock on stopping me above the lock, there was no love lost between the lock keeper his son and ACS. This meant I had to leave my little marine ply cruiser tied to the towpath whilst I went away to work for a couple of weeks, I took the outboard and boat contents home with me. Sometime in that period my mother had a call from the police asking my whereabouts as the boat was sunk and they were concerned I might be inside. She assured them I was OK and the boat remained where it was for the time being. A while later duly returned with the boat trailer ( I said it was small at 14ft) put the trailer half in the canal, there was no hard edging, tied the trailer to a tree, winched the boat onto the trailer, then winched the trailer out of the canal and assed the damage. There was a spark plug sized hole neatly drilled in the bottom of the boat so I screwed a spark plug in there and relaunched the boat and took it down to the basin. Over the following weeks I discovered through the grapevine that it was the lock keepers son who had drilled the hole and I worked out a way if getting my own back. He had a motorcycle that he used to leave on the road and one night I filled his fuel tank, there were no locks on tanks in those days, with cement. Took him ages to work out why it wouldn't go and to correct it. I was 24 at the time and a bit of a rebel🤔
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NB Saturn started following Memories of the 76 drought
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We were around Napton in ‘76 as well - I would have been 7, and we had a new 30’ Hancock and Lane sailaway we were camping on having taken delivery the previous December so it was our first trip on that boat (don’t think the term sailaway had been invented then!). I’ll have to dig our old log books out and have a look - my memory is of bow hauling the boat for quite some distance due to low water then.
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T&M Closing between Middlewich and Hardingswood from 25 July
Alway Swilby replied to David Mack's topic in Stoppages
There is also a feed into the summit pound from the Caldon Canal. The locks on the Caldon down to Froghall are closed so that more water is sent from Leek down to the main line T&M. -
Nearly half a century now. Go back 49 years before 1976 and few of the working boats that are lovingly preserved today had even been built. The Woolwiches, Northwiches, Rickies, etc laid down in the 30s.
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I don’t know, but ballast spread over the base must be there to offer stability? so possibly removing ballast with an extra base plate might be ok, but removing ballast when the sides have been over plated might lead to instability?? I just know mine is noticeably more tender, since I had the sides plated and removed ballast
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magpie patrick started following Memories of the 76 drought
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Certainly history if not heritage - it's easy enough to look up what the restrictions were in 1976 if you have an old set of Waterways World or similar, and also to debate how the whole set up was different then compared to now, but I though I'd offer some memories of our family holiday at Whit 76 and perhaps encourage others to do the same. I was ten that summer, so I'd be nine at Whit and @1st ade was thirteen. Mum and dad had booked a week from Fenny Compton in a 30 foot 4 berth called Curlew (remember when four berth hire boats were 30 foot long?). IIRC correctly dad's original plan had been to head south but as restrictions tightened he changed the plan to head for Snarestone and Coventry. Napton locks were open 12noon til 3pm, meaning be clear of the flight by 3pm. We got as far as Napton on the first (Saturday) night and joined the queue. I recall a boat going past us at about 10am the next day and various people pointing out that this was the queue - I think they were genuinely surprised. Anyway, our turn came and we shared with a GRP boat, the picture in my memory says it was a Dawncraft - they were ahead of us but the lock keeper put us in first as is best practice, and we made our way down the locks. We then got to Hillmorton that day, and waited for the rather more generous opening hours to go down on the Monday - after that, Hawkesbury didn't have restrictions, and we didn't need to share it! It also became the first lock I worked without assistance... Then proceeded a lock-free couple of days as we went to Snarestone, where we'd been when hiring from Alan Tingay at Shackerstone, and Coventry, where we'd never been. I don't remember much about these previous cruises, I was too young. Memories of this one are the Ashby being so quiet that one day we didn't tie up for lunch, we just drifted, and we must have been at the start of the decline of the village shop as mum couldn't get milk. Then the plan was up Hillmorton Thursday afternoon to be ready to go up Napton Friday lunchtime - but (And this is where the memories come in rather than just the historical record) we got to Hillmorton to find them already closed for the day, the hours had been reduced. Nowadays internet and mobile phones would have told us this. Dad arranged for use to get to the head of the queue, finding a Natwest boat we could fit in with, and we did our best to do Hillmorton and Napton in one day, but it was too much - we got to Napton just about 3 from memory. and were due back at Fenny Compton the next morning. Dad recalled how the hire company had complained, as we picked Curlew up, about another hirer getting stuck at Nell Bridge and the boat being late back - I think he was imagining the scene as we would arrive late... What happened next is what sticks in the mind and won't otherwise be documented. Dad spoke to the lock keeper, who said something like he didn't know the hours had changed at Hillmorton, and "they shouldn't do that, they're supposed to give notice" (or words to that effect) - however he couldn't just let us through. With a colleague he went to the lock house next to the bottom lock, reached through the window for a phone and made a big show of ringing "head office" - sometime later they rang back, he took the padlocks off and we had our own chaperoned ascent. That really does stick in my mind, on a holiday where locks had been hustle and bustle, boats sharing and following through, Dad and Adrian steered whilst me, mum and the lock keeper worked the deserted lock flight in the early evening sun - such peace.... We were, of course, back at the yard bang on time thanks to this. I've told this tale because, 9 years old then, I've just celebrated my 59th birthday - 49 years on, the grown ups involved, probably including the BW staff and the other adult boaters, are probably all dead, and you won't find tales like this in the history books. Comments and other stories from 1976 restrictions most welcome!
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A million questions narrowed down to a few, for now :)
Gybe Ho replied to Boater floater's topic in New to Boating?
Why would a kg for kg switch from ballast to overplate steel make a boat more tender? Archimedes does not know what material is in your bilges. If anything an overplate would marginally lower the centre of gravity and increase the moment of inertia.