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My name isn't Judith but I will forgive it. 🙄

You will be absolutely fine. I would imagine you will be on your way somewhere between 3:30 and 4:00, leaving plenty of time for a pleasant trip up into Birmingham. If you are looking to eat on board then I suggest it is well worth heading beyond the first moorings - there is a sharp left turn when you get into Birmingham (Mailbox Turn) and then the moorings start on your left. Beyond that first set of moorings is a narrows (it used to be a stop lock), then a long bridge (Broad Street Tunnel) and shortly afterwards a roundabout (yes, really, but you don't have to treat it is such in terms of which side you pass). Beyond there are nice moorings on both sides and if you go on a few hundred feet it gets a bit quieter as there are nightclubs and pubs near the roundabout. It is worth walking back to have a look at it lit up at night as it's quite a good atmosphere but mooring down nearer Vincent Street Bridge is much quieter. You will need to turn round in the morning and go back to the roundabout and turn left. There are various arms along the main line so turning in one of those is the easy option. You will probably find this a bit tricky, and may well make a mess of it, but don't worry about it, everyone does at first! One trick is to put someone on the bank on the side opposite the entrance, with the stern rope. Point the bow down the entrance and have the person on the bank pull the stern round. This is -way- easier than trying to get the boat to do it through a combination of forward and reverse, although assisting the person pulling by using the engine can help, and can also give you a sense of how the boat is going to behave. Locks. You are best off working out your own system, but here is a starter for ten to give you an idea. You are starting off going downhill. Person A steers - they stay on the boat. Person B goes up to the lock, unlocks any handcuffs which stop the paddles opening (you will have a handcuff key - make sure you have two on the boat!), if the lock is with you (level is the same as the boat going in) they just open the gate. If it is against you, they check nobody is about to come in from the other direction and assuming not, they open first paddle, then cross over and open the other paddle. Once the lock is level they close the paddle on the offside, then cross back to the gate side, open the gate and lower the paddle (do it that way round as there is time to lower the paddle while the boat comes in, and it is also less hard work to push the gate when the paddle is open as it decreases the water resistance). The lock is now ready for the boat to come in. Person B then walks to the other end of the lock, towpath side, and waits, ready to open the paddle when the boat comes in. Person C then turns up, having walked down, arriving before the boat. They stand by the open gate, ready to close it when the boat comes in. Person D arrives around the same time as the boat, walks down to the offside gate at the lower end and stands ready to open the paddle. The boat comes in, C closes the gate, B and D open the paddles. As soon as their paddle is open, B heads on to the next lock and sets it up as before; C goes and stands by the paddle that B opened. When the level matches, C and D open the gates and the boat starts moving out while C and D lower the paddles and re-lock any handcuff locks. Once the boat is clear, C and D close the gates and C walks on. D walks to the other end of the lock and locks up the handcuff locks at the top end, then walks on to the next lock. Repeat. Not sure if the above makes any sense whatsoever, and if not it doesn't matter - there are millions of different ways of doing this and you will work it out, but the aim is to give an idea of an efficient way of working through a flight of locks. Key points to note in the above - not all locks have handcuff locks on but some do; not all of them work so sometimes you can't unlock it and have to work with only one paddle which is a bit slower and sometimes you can't re-lock it, so just leave it unlocked. When there are handcuff keys in place, the above working pattern has all of them unlocked while the boat is in the lock. It is very unlikely that anything will go wrong if you take care and watch what is happening, but if it does, the ability to open and close paddles quickly can be important so I prefer to leave them unlocked until the gates are open. It does not require tremendous strength, although some gates can be a bit awkward. My daughters (13 and 15) working Brades bottom lock on the BCN earlier this year. Alec p.s. but you have five people - what about Person E - Tea!!!

It's a cracker, will be snapped up by a proper boater who is not bothered about useless bits of paper.

At gnosall festival what a great organised event free parking,no drama organised boating festival,take not especially Tim Braunston........

Today Bows to bows in Gnosal.

No, it's the one where you had a broken rudder. I seem to recall you were there for a little bit longer than half an hour! 😁

Or have a mirror with you, and blast their headlight back at them. Then when they complain about your headlamp you can explain what they were actually experiencing!

There are other companies which now use the same model but I went with Hobbyweld because they have a branch a couple of miles away and they will supply me with acetylene. Others may be a bit cheaper but the above outweighs this for me. Alec

These are caused by condensation from the cold bridge formed by roof stiffeners and the fastening battens for the linings. To cure the problem you will need to drop the roof lining and improve the insulation between the batten and the lining. Thinsulate strips or thin polystyrene strips should work. As a short term fix, wipe over with mould remover or neat Patio Magic or similar. Allow to dry. Wash with clean water. after about 6 weeks. Try to avoid making lots of steam inside. N

You are constantly trying to re invent the wheel and could easily spend £160K on a boat owner fitout with bells and whistles for no good reason. Remember that boats depreciate fast in the first few years and that money will never be recovered, particularly if it is quirky. As for relying on good fitters to do the difficult bits, you will find they are not queing up to Implement your ideas at a time and place to suit you. The good ones are busy, the others take your money and are never seen again. Research for good builders, and keep an eye on Apollo Duck, you are just as likely to find a decent boat with a good fitout that way, and save yourself £80K. You will find this is the fastest way to get afloat.

Oil lamp? We used to dream of having an oil lamp. Only posh boaters on shiny boats had oil lamps. When I were a lass, the canal company would allow us one geriatric glow worm to see'us way through 'tunnels and we were glad to have it too. The new LED lamps have the advantage of being so bright they will blast the Harecastle boggart to ectoplasm fragments. They'll vaporise a swimming cow, or other hazard to navigation in the Foulridge Tunnel at a distance of 100 yards. They can be too powerful though. At some point the extra light from the red glowing incandescent brick work of the tunnel lining is counteracted by the rising steam from the boiling water.

In the case you mentioned where the Victron refused the out-of-limits shore power, surely that was a good thing? Excessive voltage could cause some appliances etc to fail prematurely over time, whereas the Victron highlighted the problem which was then fixed. If a Combi fails and takes out the “pass through” of shore power - which can happen - then it is a fairly trivial matter to connect the shore and the boat services together just by moving the wires or by removing the wires and connecting together via chocolate block. So it is hardly a catastrophic failure. But in reality these things don’t often fail, our Combi has been on continuously for the past 13 years… touch wood! For years we used a boat with no inverter. Mains only via shore power. And we have hired boats with an inverter. Now we have a boat with a Combi and for me, it is by far the best option not least because of the scope to mix generator/Travelpower with inverter power. Plus of course the seamless switching between the various sources of power. So my point is that I have tried them all. I think the talk of “one failure and you lose the lot” doesn’t bear technical scrutiny.

Companies who exhibit at Crick know their customer base, (craftsman built interiors, not scaffolding boards). Folks who post on YouTube about fitting out are probably one off owner fit out, and if they decide to have a "industrial look" ie cheapo, they will struggle to sell the boat when the novelty wears off. DAMHIK. Owner fitouts will never look as good as those done by a top professional.

Well I would say that there is nothing wrong with doing your own gas provided you are competent to do so. No need to get it signed off by anyone. But that comes under the GSIUR (gas safety installation and usage regulations). I don’t think there is an equivalent for electricity. For bricks and mortar houses there is the building regulations part P, but that is not applicable to boats. If the building regs were applicable to boats, they’d be full of bricks. Oh, wait a minute…

That is because the drain is too low, keep your coat handy

One of the saddest sights for me was a new owner (on the K&A) who had purchased a quite nice trad boat (though not nearly as smart as this one) and was piling rubbish on the roof and painting untidy red oxide patches all over it, I assume so that he could be "part of the community". Boats like this are like historic buildings, you should see yourself as the custodian rather than the owner.

Next he will be quoting pump out prices in Shillings or Guineas.

Which I why I still think it could well be fuel vapour for some reason. You will get water if you condense the exhaust from any IC engine. I can't offer any other suggestions, so watch with interest and hope that you get to the bottom of it.

I'll give you a tenner for it, no survey, cash paid ... 😉🤣

Cracking boat Mark, unfortunately it isnt reverse layout, white inside with an IKEA kitchen so will not sell as soon as it hits the websites. The trad engine/ traditionally styled boat market is sluggish, but they are still selling when of good provenance like yours. I would have the walk away with £80k figure in your head when you talk to brokers.

I apologise if I am completely misreading the situation, but given your wish-list why not just buy a really good second-hand boat? It will meet some, but not all, of your requirements and you can then take time to fettle it to your desire. Then you can get out boating rather than spend years trying to do a self fit-out and wrangle with all the RCA etc headaches. Given the sort of boat you want surely this will be the quicker, cheaper and easier route?

This subject has been done to death, but I will still add a bit more.....had real difficulty in Braunston tunnel last week, could see two lights approaching, one above the other (mega bright small headlight and reflection in water). I thought it was close and pulled over but the boat never came, went on a bit, sure it was close and pulled over but again I was wrong. So thinking about this, when the approaching boat is a way off one just sees the light as a point source, when it gets close its light picks out the tunnel wall, time to slow down, when really close the outline of the boat becomes visible, time to really slow down and pull right over. With a mega bright approaching headlight none of this happens, you just see the light and nothing else and get no clues about distance, and with loss of night vision struggle to see how close to the edge your own boat is. Bright headlights in tunnels are really bad news. Maybe these new fangled LED jobbies should have a dimmer switch so that full brighness can be used only when you are sure you are alone?

Was asked how to do this... and the original post looked like this: ============================================== ============================================== This is how to do it on a PC-browser. Someone else can explain what happens on a phone 🙂 First, Insert the picture into the new-post screen as ususal: Then double-click on the picture to bring up the amendment menu: Two things to do here: Press the 'Left' or 'Right' on the Alignment option line. Then choose a new, smaller '(width)' under Size, having checked that the 'Keep original aspect ratio' is still ticked. Note that only the '(width)' field is amendable and that after clicking in the blank-space the new '(height)' will be calculated by the system - to give this screen ... ... and press the Update button, to give continue as a normal post.

Me neither.

It does depend on which failure mode you are considering, but most of the scenarios and thus the best practice points to connecting the screen to shore earth. Best to have a plastic case, so that the question of what to connect the case to doesn’t arise. Discussed in detail here… http://www.smartgauge.co.uk/iso_wire.html Oh dear, looks like Ian got it wrong, he will have to rewire his. Or alternatively I could be that he is right and the rest of the world is wrong, so thousands of boats will have to be retired. Yes, that is much more likely. The thing is, they don’t need to touch the hull. Just being in a strong electric field (strong potential gradient) means that the current partially flows through them and it doesn’t take much to cause paralysis, with drowning following shortly afterwards.

What about Caggys Yard at Tipton Or Phil Jones at Hatherton

It sounds like you’ve been very unfortunate to be .2mm out. An alternative could be to pit/ puddle weld where the losses are greatest. That will take it back to 4mm. Is the whole length 3.8mm or is it just in places? Pit welding lets metal back in then grind flat. Quite a few welders will do that for you. It could be worth asking Stretton boatyard on the Shropshire Union or Streethay boatyard on The Coventry who maybe well placed to advise. It seems to be the surveyors answer usually to over plate. It’s not always the best option.

You can’t book any mooring in central Birmingham, unless you want to go into the private Sherborne Wharf marina (assuming they have space). But it is nothing to worry about, there are a lot of opportunities for on-line moorings and it’s highly unlikely you won’t find a space somewhere. My preference is on the mainline between old turn junction and St Vincent street bridge, but there are opportunities above Farmer’s bridge top lock/outside the NIA, at the start of the Oozels St loop, and between Gas St basin and the Mailbox, plus a few other spaces. Most of Cambrian Wharf is now permanent moorings although there are a few spaces. Overall, I wouldn’t worry about it and central Birmingham is great by canal. If you turn down Oozels St loop bear in mind that at the far end you can’t turn right due to the angles (unless you have a very short boat) but there is a basin a bit further along towards Wolverhampton, you can turn in the entrance, or you can go round the interesting Icknield port loop.