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A quick update - engine set to 1400 rpm, a kettle of hot water added at the start of the cycle, and no heating attempted by the washing machine, no smoking from the alternator, and a load of washing completed without problems. Thank you to everyone who contributed to the solution!

What a judgemental individual you are! Firstly, the volunteers appearing in that photo are predominantly not members of Chesterfield Canal Trust. They are volunteers that have chosen to come along for the day to help maintain their canal on a programme organised by Chesterfield Canal Trust in partnership with CRT. I am sure those in that photo who are in their 30's, work full time and chose to give a day off to assist the programme of works will appreciate you wholeheartedly ageist opinion of them. In fact 6 out of the 10 volunteers that day work full time and we get fully subscribed at weekends because so many people who usually work Monday to Friday choose to come out at weekends. Perhaps I should tell them they should not come as they need to go and do some overtime instead? I will conceded that the programme is predominantly organised by this old fogey and her husband (even though I am still have several years to go before I qualify for a pension). Yes we find things to do in retirement, we organise stuff so the workers can join us on their day off. Today we have been joined by a lovely chap in his 30's who works in the NHS. He decided to book some annual leave to join us. Also a lass in her 30's who usually packs dog food for a living. She wants to come back with her 16 year old son when she can slot it in as she says he would love it. It seems they should have more important things to do with their time according to you? I just spend my time thoroughly enjoying myself surrounded by passionate individuals from all walks of life. Each of them has a part to play, we all have our strengths and weaknesses and that is how working as a team comes into it's own. Experience comes with age, an experienced boat handler is important to keep a deep draughted boat from going aground when you need to reach litter or vegetation. Experienced people overseeing volunteers who might never have been on a boat before keeps them safe, clearly because they are retired they should hang up their windlass and don their slippers and take up a pipe because in your view people who have retired have no value to the restoration or maintenance of the canal system. I am finished with this discussion. I refuse to engage any further with someone who spouts such a lot of drivel passing it off as factual when you clearly have spent no time at all researching what the truth is about the restoration of the Chesterfield Canal before forming your opinion. Your opinions are, in my view, very offensive to those who so freely give their time to benefit the canals. That includes me.

I don't see that we need a dedicated section for it. There's only really one dedicated thread for electric boats at the moment, although it does come up in discussion on other threads. Do we even have one single thread on converting a boat to electric drive yet? We do have TLNI who keeps talking about fitting electric drive because he thinks a BMC 1.5 is too powerful for canal use, but he talks about a lot of other things that don't seem to make sense too.

That is not correct - 'perpendicular to' means at 90 degrees to. If you are below a high bank so your lines are actually coming 'down hill' having a mooring pin perpendicular to the line would mean that it is actually sloping towards you and the line could slide off the top of the pin, or once reaching a critical angle, would just pull the pin out of the ground. A mooring pin should be at an angle at least 30 degrees (45 degrees is better) away from the boat so the mooring line is pulling into the angle between the ground and the pin. The lower the boat is in relatation to the pin the more effort it will take to move it.

Looking at stats it would suggest the vast majority use site search + VNC and there's also a lot of traffic from search engines such as Google. We need to be careful not to risk going overboard with the number of forums/sub-forums. Too many and we risk cluttering the site which isn't great from a usability perspective particularly for users using mobile devices/tablets etc. It can also be intimidating for newer users who may not know where to post. Personally it seems appropriate to keep things simple. Also, the software we use to power VNC (ElasticSearch) is very powerful. We have invested a lot in this and it's currently running on its own server so that we can ensure it's fast & reliable without impacting the rest of the site. Finding content irrespective of where it's posted is now much easier in comparison to the old site search 3+ years ago.

Hi Alan i have contacted butler Technik, and found out I have a standard heater, but the wrong timer control, so I’m going to buy a new controller the one I have is for the air evo and won’t work. I’m still waiting for confirmation, but on just four numbers on bar code it does look ok at the mo im waiting for a call back

Have you ever steered a full length narrow boat . I mean a 72 foot ex working boat. They are a joy. The canal was built for them, they fit locks they fit landing stages and they boat well. The only issue is mooring as moderns are generally 57 ft. The only time we had wind issues was getting off the bank in a gale with the butty, and the motor bow up and clothed up. Our current motor has the bow down and will come off the bank with one hand while slab sided boats struggle. Of course you can’t go everywhere but where you can go a full length boat is by far the easiest. The canals were designed around 72 ft or so.

I am sorry but - Clearly your ability to read what I have written without reading your own agenda into it is a struggle. I apologise of I come across as self righteous but I have far too many conversations with people who have had a chat down the pub with someone who says the canal will never get joined up and they believe them. These people have rarely done any proper research on how far the restoration has got themselves and so they form an opinion based on hearsay. or, misreading what someone else has written as you have done here. There is a wealth of information on Chesterfield canal Trust's website that you can read if you are genuinley interested. I apologise that I do not have time to start digging out the appropriate links to answer all your questions now and clearly my own words are insufiicient to convince you that this restoration really is on a trajectory to be completed, and to be completed during the lifetime of a lot of people reading this thread. I would suggest if you want to hear this information from people who know far more detail than I do - drop a line to Rod Auton, his email address is on the website. As for the basin, the finger pontoons in the plan were lost with the £250K funding that went down the pan with the arrival of HS2. Elsewhere on The line of the Chessie there is another lovely marina to be. It is not linked up yet but it is all ready to go except for finger pontoons. It is currently a fishing lake. Chesterfield Canal Trust do not own the basin. The pontoons that are probably going in there will be for narrowboats to bring an income to Derbyshire County Council. They are the navigation authority and so are responsible for maintaining the canal at that end. Meanwhile I am sorry I do not have time to discuss this in more depth with you myself. I am busy assisting CRT to maintain the other end of the canal This was the team we were supervising yesterday. Just 11 volunteers! We worked on a short section between Shireoaks Social club and The Lock Keeper at Worksop. We picked 16 bags of litter and carried out planned preventative maintenance on Doefield Dunn and Haggonfields locks. It was a lovely sunny day and everyone enjoyed themselves. We would never manage to get 16 bags of litter from Staveley! That was a total of 110 volunteer hours our team gave yesterday. Tomorrow is day 6 of 10 days spent spring cleaning The Chesterfield Canal across just 2 weeks. We have a total of 91 volunteer days tied up in improving the canal for those who use it. There are a total of 22 brand new volunteers joining us during this period. (two more had to pull out due to testing positive for covid) Earlier last week out teams were on the summit pound spending their days getting branches and logs out of the water (as well as PPM at locks) - rural or urban The Python team deal with whatever they come across. There is a lot of organising goes into this type of programme, there are a lot of volunteers we need to look after, many of whom have never been on a boat before. If I come across as self righteous then I apologise, I am busy and have not had the time I would have liked to formulate a fuller response to you questions. Perhaps I am optimistic because I spend my time surrounded by passionate people wanting to give something back to their canal and the communities they run through. We clear up the dog mess, we clear away used syringes, and get down on hands and knees to get the cans and bottles from under the hedges where %^&*(*% have dumped them. I know what run down looks like, the basin is not in a run down area. Perhaps you might consider coming to join us for a day and see whether any of that optimism rubs off? You would be made very welcome. I am sorry I am unlikely to be able to respond further in this thread for the rest of this week as I have 5 of the next 6 days overseeing a team of volunteers with Python. - 51 volunteers in the next week, including 8 students and their tutors coming to join us so they can learn about the heritage of the canal, be close to nature and put something back to their community. If there is something you require an answer to perhaps you can ask it here and someone else may be able to reply - or I can check in when I get my breath back next week. Or you can direct it straight to Chesterfield Canal Trust where you will get the latest details rather than the opinion of a some boater you chatted to who had formulated his opinion on who knows what

Don't fancy this one though ...

Best opportunity you'll get Governor

I have to switch the engine off and drift to experience that, it really is lovely.

I did do it cheap Ian and so have others, it's not hard to either find the kit to do it, or indeed do the conversion. The other plus is the reduction in license fee. My conversion was made easier by having the solar to start with, yes I had to add more but solar was as cheap as chips maybe not so cheap at the moment. I don't regret going electric at all, in some ways its made my boat better to live on, the extra solar heats water in late spring to early autumn, in winter it makes me mostly independent of plugin power. As for silent cruising its awesome such a nice experience creeping up on nature because it doesn't hear you.

Apologies that I seem to have unintentionally caused your club some inconvenience. This was inadvertent because since the link showed up in a Google search I had not realised it was confidential. The link was live for me on the date I posted it. There's another detail that might be useful to you that I will PM you now.

About the same time. I too was looking for contact details to help the original poster, but when I refreshed this thread the pdf was linked so I didn't repost it. I do note that the handbook in question is the 2020 version so has presumably been available on that link for more than two years - the link itself didn't turn up in google results because of @alias's recent posting but it is quite likely that the spammers picked it up via this site.

Maybe the landlords would be more willing to negotiate the rent downwards if empty commercial properties were charged a special high rate of council tax. It is not just shops, it is office blocks as well.

Parents or grandparents birth certificates, basically. Getting hold of them can be ‘amusing’ though. My wife’s grandmother spelled her surname three different ways, and had two different birthdates. Long, friendly, chats on the phone with helpful registrars sorted it all out though. At one point the Irish embassy in Paris phoned our local Mairie to confirm that she was Irish, so she could vote.

Machine screws have a thread all the way along the shank. Bolts only have a partial thread leaving some shank without a thread. they can be hexagon machine screws, dome headed, counter sunk and so on. I still think that you have bolts because of the need to have a good fit in the cap. I have seen such things with indentations in the hexagon but I would not call them slots. If they are hexagons then the tool would normally be hex, bi-hex, or flank drive socket. I suspect the man cause of pulley and pulley boss problems is the torsional oscillation that is normal and on ant reciprocating engine takes place throughout the rev range. Never seen corrosion around the key. A marine 1.5 should have a heavier flywheel or bulk ring added so its inertia that will slow the rate of rev up. As the 1.5 had a top rev speed of 4400 rpm I doubt it would ever get close to that in a displacement boat, in nay case the pumps were, I think, de-rated to a degree from automotive settings.

Regarding the ROCKER cover gasket, I've always found removing and replacing the rocker cover n my 1.8 a right faff. A few years ago Calcutts offered me a 'deluxe' version made of some kind of rubber. Well worth the extra cost and it's truly reusable.

Must be taken off the duck because it worked for me yesterday

I'd love to see you stand on what I think the OP is on about. Standing on the rocker cover I'd agree with but the side covers (plural) hidden under the manifold not a chance. Personally I doubt a modern scrapyard would have one but I think petrol ones will fit so look an MGB spares places. If it has been crushed by over tightening I would make up a rectangle from scrap odd to support the flange where the gasket fits and use a hammer and drift to tray to reshape it. Taking care not to crush the breather baffle (old type) I doubt the newer thick ones would crush. Did you check the holes in the base of the chamber situated between the cam followers are not blocked? PS The most usual cause of leaking rocker covers are the gasket on the manifold slide slipping into the rocker cover when fitting. The oil then runs down over the side covers. In the end I used to stick the gasket to the rocker cover with a smear of silicon.

Doing up an old boat is usually a loss making and frustrating activity unless you have something special or historic. Lifeboats do not make for good conversions and you would still spend the same amount of money as fitting out a new purpose built narrowboat shell and probably more because of the complex shape. GRP cruisers such as Broom and Princess can be found at reasonable prices if you fancy going to sea otherwise ex broads grp cruisers say 36ft by 10 ft are the best bet for a project with enough room to live on and unlikely to have the problems of an old steel boat.

I am single-handed on a 57ft narrow boat, no way would I buy a 65ft boat. It's more difficult to find mooring spaces between moored boats, awkward in locks, more wind age in strong winds. I often find it much better to moor near others, probably means the canal is deep enough, the area is fairly quiet, and not too far from civilisation. Marina hopping was one of my ideas to access shore power in winter, but its not worked out, not all marinas will have vacancies for transient boats, they may be fully booked in winter, or they may not have shore power, you may not be able to get to them : winter stoppages, unplanned breaches, all throw your carefully calculated plans out the window.

Pretty much, yes. They are very crap boats, but they beat the pants off either staying on a burning oil rig or trying to swim in the North Sea in January ... I'd still fancy one go on being dropped in one though.

I've no idea how you would get on now post the 'B' word. All our very happy Europe wanderings were done when we didn't have to think about not being European, a freedom that now my children can only dream of. Brexit brought us back as we couldn't see a way around it and is why we can't help but good luck. Maybe look at being French residents then you would not have the 90 day problem. Of course then you would have to pay for their healthcare and if you are pensioners, that's another problem (message me for more on this and banking if you like). We were offered Belgian residency but our narrowboat is now too long at 70ft to comply with regs that were brought in while we were there but didn't do anything about once we knew we were having to return. How long is your boat? Ideally keep it at 15m incase they change the 20m rule again. Cruising for all the years that we were in Europe was the happiest time of our lives and if there is a god, we thank him that we did it when we did!

Hence me not wearing a wedding ring, shorted out up behind a Hillman dashboard. Had a blister and scab for weeks.

There is a whole other dimension to surveyors' comments on corrosion, barely been touched on so far in this thread. Insurance. There are two reasons for getting a survey and while boat buyers often think they are employing a surveyor to produce a condition report for their information, the surveyor sometimes seems to think they are working for the insurance companies and are being employed to protect the interests of the insurers. Hence the astoundingly conservative advice one sometimes reads about where some 2mm pitting on an elderly boat has resulted in a survey report recommending whole extra skin of 5mm thick steel is added to the hull. A grossly unnecessary recommendation from a practical point of view in my opinion, but necessary given insurance firms generally demand a minimum hull thickness of 4mm as a condition of offering comprehensive insurance. So when a survey report comes back baldly stating 5mm overplating below the waterline is required, I think it is well worth enquiring why. The buyer might, like me, take the view that a 30 year old boat is two thirds of its way to the end of its life and so what if it can only be insured third party? What are the risks of it sinking from some 2mm pitting in 6mm steel after 30 years? Approaching zero in my opinion, although yours might be different. The main reasons for boats sinking are skipper error in a lock (i.e. not corrosion) and some sort of mis-management of the boat i.e. leaving a weed hatch off or a coolant hose splitting. I can't think of a single incident ever, of a steel NB unexpectedly and spontaneously sinking from corrosion. Consequently I'm happy to take the risk and take extra care not to sink my own boat.

Don't let it get to you, people are keen to help and sometimes get a bit frustrated by posters who don't quite get the place or the speed people will answer an initial answer, there have also been a few who seemed to take the pee and so peeps can be a bit sensitive. On a more positive note there are a lot of very helpful people who are sometimes willing to go to extraordinary lengths to help

Clearly your expectations are far higher than mere mortal volunteers can achieve. Please explain what you expected in the 12 years since 2010? You acknowledge HS2 blight which stopped the restoration in it's tracks. You have not (as far as I recall) mentioned losing the best part of two years of momentum due to covid. You say you are always pleased to see the volunteers along the canal. How often do you deviate from the sections in water to see all the volunteers working there? I can't help but wonder where this run down area is you keep mentioning? The canal runs through a former mining area around Staveley and there used to be a big chemical works at Hollingwood. They are all gone niw. There are trees and nature reserves where they used to be. There are communities of friendy people who are proud of their canal. Have you been through Rotherham recently by boat? I can see that has seen better days but equally I can see the regeneration happening. You are very welcome to your opiniin but The saddest thing is that it precisely the people, like you who keep telling everyone that it's never going to happen and it's a waste of time that make those hard working volunteers wonder why they bother. Except they do bother, and, for those who are genuinely interested in learning about the progress and understand the challenges they will continue to explain and continue to put their heart and soul into making it happen. I sincerely look forward to the day we can prove you wrong

If all the various canal society volunteers over the last 50+ years had displayed the same attitude as you, you wouldn't now be able to take your boat on the South Stratford, Ashton, Lower Peak Forest, Caldon, Kennet & Avon, Basingstoke, Huddersfield Narrow, Rochdale, Warwickshire Avon, Droitwich, Montgomery, Forth & Clyde, Union canals, as well as the Chesterfield between Worksop and Norwood Tunnel and the Staveley section. And a lot less of the 'always navigable' bits of the system might now be unavailable as well.