Leaderboard

I think you mean your veldt like figure - an area covering about a third of South Africa

Is that anything like Breadxit?

Or there's always the Kayan method.

I use mine loads A Panasonic they are brilliant. I use it to do the mixing and then prove and bake in the oven or I use it as is. The great thing is PROPER fresh bread still hot so you know its real. The huge plus points for me is I can make varied loaves which are simply unavailable in any shop even bespoke bakeries. Mixing differing flours with different gluten levels and yeast to get special loaves keeps it interesting. I use lots of spelt and Rye amongst others and make fabulous Olive loaf with olive oil. egg and oregano yum yum. Being able to adjust the amounts of preservatives such as sugar and salt and how much butter etc goes in makes all the difference. It also helps keep my svelt like figure

Don"t get a narrowboat then!

My advice is buy a used boat. Find a boat you like, use it and almost immediately you'll start finding things about it you want to change. Change them and as your experience grows you'll find more and more things wrong with it and you have the skills to make the alerations in between boating trips. In ten years, I predict you too will be on here advising the newbies who think they know precisely what they want in a boat that they actually don't, and to get some serious boating experience under their belts before designing a newbuild.

The BSS guidance on CO alarms says, "choose a unit showing it was tested to BS EN 50291-2 and suitable for boat use". Seems that little "and" is important; I had originally read that as meaning that EN 50291-2 indicated that an alarm was suitable for boats, but it seems that an alarm should be EN 50291-2 and specifically rated as suitable for boats. Not all are, this is from the manual for a EN 50291-2 alarm I have at home.

Why would you want a 12v toaster when you will have 230v Ac on board anyway ? Our 'mains' toaster, kettle and microwave (also had a deep fat fryer on board until Dr says 'no more') run quite happily on the inverter, we have 6x 230Ah batteries and the engines run for several (5 or 6 hours) most days so put it all back in again, Yes those appliances will draw 100-160a from the batteries but they are normally only on for 5 or 10 minutes - having an electric cooker and doing the 'Sunday roast' for 2 or 3 hours would be a totally different bucket-of-fish. We have a mains immersion heater but I would NEVER consider (on purpose) running that off the batteries (via the inverter). The BIG BIG difference between a house and a boat, is that you are not only an electrical user, but an electrical generator, what you use YOU have to replace, it just doesn't magically appear down the wires. Work out how much you will use (do a power audit) add 10%-20% and then work out how you are going to generate that on a daily basis. If you cannot manage to keep a lap-top battery charged what hope have you of ................... (Just so you know its 'in jest')

The £430 or the £000 ? I'm in either way! Will you split the difference and call it £215?

Ignore the heathens that still use wood preservative on steel boats - go for a decent two-pack - with cold zinc if you have money to burn! Take a serious look at (so called) composting toilets like the Separett range. The composting side of it is pointless on a boat, but the separation of solid & liquid is incredibly useful. We empty our loo every month whether we need to or not. The wet bits go down the elsan points without the "splashy fishes" of a cassette and without the hideous smell. Edit to add: Using a bow thruster when you are stuck in a mix of mud and plastic bags is a surefire way to burn out the thruster. Learn to use reverse and a spring line off the bank if necessary

WotEver wasn't joking in that linked post. A bit tongue in cheek in presentation maybe but the facts are bob on. We often get new boaters on here who kill £1000 worth of good batteries in a month. Some dedicated souls can do it in a week. Unless you care about battery life and understand how to care for them, and have a really good idea of your actual usage and charge cycles you will turn expensive batteries into doorstops in your first few months. Using cheapish batteries means you are only killing £300 worth instead. They will die too. That's assuming you don't go for the silent genset obviously - you only need a starter battery if you have your own power station onboard

I agree. One of our boats particularly needed a bespoke spec. (apologies to the experts out there if that is not the correct term..) . but I would definitely recommend to anyone to buy a second hand boat about 2 years old so that it's 'teething troubles' are fixed. In fact, our close friends are looking to buy a narrowboat and that is exactly what we have recommended to them.

Who is this? and what have you done with mrsmelly?

Ice breaking swan

Doh!

The Yeast of your worries Wussty....

He's just a bit Crossant.I expect he'll be baguette later

Yes ..... it is definitely genuine. A real photo taken by a visiting Nigerian Prince, who incidentally needs to remove several million dollars into a total stranger's bank account in exchange for 25% ...... if you're interested please pm me.

Why did you stop? Incorrectly fitted taps?

Oh and doing them up hand tight is a recipe for a leak. Nip them up good and hard with a spanner. As usual, DAMHIK!

So, by the time that lot was assembled the outlet was 6" below the water line.

Less than there used to be ...

A unit of speed and distance i believe implemented by napoleon. It allows an inflated figure of speed and speedometers that make lots of numbers. This excites the bogan element. ( chaves) Of course true speed is the imperial measure and the colonials only changed in order to pay another bunch of public servants to sit around discussing implentation. It made plutocrats out of the matesof the road minister who awarded them the contracts to buy the signs from china. The australians picked kms to make everything sound bigger. In reality the habitable part of the country is just over the size of the isle of white and is not near any conurbations. bwb at one point put speed in kms on the canal in some places.(6.2 kms) this caused a surge in sales of grey lorry engines with exciting names like 4 iw 5 lw etc. as the new owners were fooled once in the boat their crankshafts all went wibbly , to go at tickover you could hear the bearings rattle as they went past and when they were put in gear the towpath was washed away along with anglers ducks walkers. The batteries also went flat coss they were turning at 400rpm with 3 alternators thats why appalling duck is full of boats with huge grey lorry engines that dont sell. This knowledge has been passed down from the greybeards of the 90s to the present. It is fact. Did i digress ? No , crankshafts tick kms tick battery chsrging tick im going to sleep now maybe ive got a touch of delirium and not the tremens type.

Yes, sent to me by some kindly towpath walker on the K&A. If I see someone taking pictures I often shout my email address across and ask for a copy.

Obviously. You wouldn't send an elephant out of the room without a small hairpiece/wig, not in this weather.

Watch yourself using Alibaba , last time I lost over 2 thousand pounds dealing with a trusted gold seller , nothing at all I could do about it , only half what I ordered was sent and even then the quality was very poor , I have never been back.

It's not about the advertising - in most magazines editorial and advertising don't really talk much, and WW's no different. (Though it's a far cry from the magazine I worked on once where the editor would cross the road to avoid talking to the advertising staff!) Historically it wouldn't have made that much difference anyway - the majority of boating magazine ad income was from brokerage ads, much less from new boat builders. (Sadly this "church and state" separation between advertising and editorial is being lost with the internet - look at how everything from Buzzfeed to the Guardian now carries "sponsored content" which is advertising trying to pass itself off as editorial.) My logic while I was editing WW, which I picked up from Emrhys Barrell when I worked for him at Canal Boat, was simply that I didn't want to waste six pages of editorial on a sh-t boat. The reviewers would always look at a company's boats before deciding to review one, and make sure that it was something we could be comfortable recommending. Boat reviews are really 80% "here's some ideas for your next boat" and only 20% "this is a particular boat you might want to buy" anyway, because most narrowboats are bespoke to a greater or lesser degree, and built by companies who only build a comparative handful each year. It's not like car reviews - if Ford produce a crappy Fiesta then millions will still buy it and so there's almost a responsibility for the magazines to review it and warn people, whereas if Fred's Boat Co produces a crappy narrowboat then probably only 1 of WW's 10,000 readers will ever buy it. We obviously didn't have the space (or budget!) to review boats from all 300 boatbuilders. Instead, I figured it was more effective to run a regular page of boat-buying advice on "don't get stiffed", listing all the checks and research you should do before buying a new boat - something that would hopefully help people towards buying a decent boat, whoever made it, and not losing their money to a dodgy builder. At about the time I joined WW there was a plague of dodgy builders losing people's money and I wanted to do something about it. But that's only my rationale - I can't speak for any other magazine editors past or present, obviously. This will have been way past the proof-reading stage! It's a production-level foulup. My guess as to what happened is that the production staff had two four-page articles called "Cotswolds.pdf" (one being the Cotswold restoration piece, the other being the Cotswold history piece), or two articles on the flatplan marked "Cotswolds", or something like that - and uploaded the wrong one to the printers. There would have been a time when the printers would have spotted it (on the first magazine I worked on, the printers would routinely check the 'folio' - page number - of each page and let you know if it was out of sequence), but I suspect everything is automated beyond that now. Bit of a shame as the missing Cotswolds history piece is lovely, though I would say that because I wrote it! As Ray says, you can download the missing article from the WW website - you don't even have to have bought the magazine.

Something very odd here, if anything its the exact opposite of what I would expect. It might (note might) be a poor electrical connection that expands during the day causing more resistance but when it cools at night contracts enough to make a better contact but that seems a bit far fetched to me. If you have screw type connections and bus bars on the main fuse/MCB board its worth a few minutes to make sure all are tight. Ditto battery terminals. If it is temperature related it might be a failing domestic master switch but the again I would expect that to be lower pressure when cold. I suspect we are probably back to a failing micro-switch in the end of the pump so my usual advice is to fit a remote switch and be done with such problems for tens of years.

Well it seem that every forum has one or two, I posted my first question simply to ask advise, within minutes I get an answer telling me I'm not the man to plan a build, and not to try re-inventing the wheel. If I did not need help or advise then obviously I would not be on this site and I would not be asking. I thank each and every one that has answered my question and left me with positive feed back ( and before I get another smart remark I can take negative response as well as positive) but I do feel that as a newbie to this forum comments as above are not the best way to get others interested in canal boating.

My absolute main bit of advice is DO NOT buy a new shell for your first boat. Buy a used boat first and find out what you realy want and if you realy like it first.

Oooh, I really like doing the locks, standing on the back of a boat down in the bowels of the earth is womens work, a man should be sat on a lock beam, looking at the countryside, and playing games with all that lovely hydraulic engineering. ............Dave

The same trouble can be had trying to park a normal size car in Aldi's car park, between huge great brutish SUV's and the like.