pete.i

Ah Okay Springy thanks for that. I didn't read the ads to be honest. Some of them ffom America were priced stupidly in the hundreds of pounds although there were cheaper dual core varieties. I have ordered an equivalent for mine now which is a Durite 0-130-12-12v. £35 plus £3 postage for 4. Not the cheapest but also not the most expensive. Pete

HHMM okay. To be honest I did wonder about that myself. The heater pin is not very fat. The EBay ads say that they are for BMC 1.5 engines and the picture certainly looks like my glow plug. http://www.ebay.co.uk/sch/i.html?_trksid=p2050601.m570.l1313.TR0.TRC0.Xbmc+1.5+diesel+glow+plugs&_nkw=bmc+1.5+diesel+glow+plugs&_sacat=0&_from=R40 That is the link to the EBAY page. But I think I am going to go with the cheaper ones. Thanks everyone for the input. Pete

Well it was a general inquiry on dual core glow plugs against single core glow plugs, mainly, because dual core are significantly more expensive than single core. But my engine is a BMC 1.5. My assumption is that instead of having a single heater core the dual core ones have 2 heater cores therefore (I assume) heating up the cylinder combustion space (I know not the technical term but I couldn't remember what it is called LOL) quicker making starting easier. I have to say that I don't seem to have much trouble starting my engine. It starts after a ten second or so blast on the heaters in the summer and it takes around 30 seconds in this cold weather and that 30 seconds was enough even in that really bad winter we had a couple of years ago. The problem with my heaters is that one of them seems to have a loose spindle where the wire connects to the glow plug. My thoughts were that if I was going to replace one then I might as well replace them all. I am aware of the difficulty replaceing these glow plugs and mine have been in for a good few years at least. Pete

Hi all. Just a general question on glow plugs. I need to change mine and it would seem that I can buy single core glow plugs and dual core glow plugs. The dual core ones are significantly more expensive than the single core. What is the benefit of using dual core ones and would the extra expenditure make any difference to the starting on my 30 year old engine? Cheers for any replies. Pete

Surely it's all a bit of a non-question. Charge it, try it. If it works good on you you saved the price of a new battery. If it doesn't work then buy a new one. I know that everyone is going to say that "well it could fail at a critical time blaah blah blah" but so (and they do) could a new one fail. Pete

I think you may have to give a little more info such as type of gearbox. Can you see the prop shaft inside the boat and if you can does it seem to be turning at the correct speed for the tickover speed of the engine? As Julynian has said oil level can affect the drive and gear cables can (and do) stretch and go out of adjustment. I suppose the worst scenario, from the point of view of repair, would be if the prop is spinning on the shaft. There is a pin that holds the prop on to the shaft taper along with a big nut on the end of the prop shaft and I suppose that if that pin shears, Which I am fairly sure it is supposed to do if your prop hits something heavy, then, concievably, the propellor could just be spinning loosely on the shaft. Good luck Pete

There ya go.

I do volunteer work for the RNIB and CRT and as I am retired I can, virtually, volunteer whenever I want. But, as has been stated, that poll is so completely vague that there is absolutely no point in filling it out. Pete

Hi again Yep it seems to an IE11 thing. Doesn't work now I'm posting from IE11. I don't use Internet Explorer too be honest I always use Firefox and everything seems to work with that. There are too many, reported, security issues with Chrome and I don't like Chrome's layout anyway so I wouldn't use that personally. Pete

Hi Just trying this using Firefox. The quote appears whilst I am composing the reply. Lets see what happens when I post it. Pete okay so that works, for me anyway. Trying IE11 and 8.1.

Hi I had the same problem. I checked every joint and I only have a small boat and most definetly every joint was tight and not leaking. On the advice of one of the forum members who had owned my boat previously (Leo) I fitted a non return valve, the type you can buy for domestic water systems. Fitting the valve cured my pump's phantom forays. It seems that, in my case anyway, the pressure in the system was slowly leaking away back through the water tank. The pump then sensing low pressure would come on and repressure the system etc etc. I got my non return valave from Jewsons and they aren't very expensive. Worked for me. Pete

LOL I have the same problem. this wont be much help I'm afraid but the problem is not the mats that slide as such it is the pile of the carpet beneath. When you tread on the mat this compresses the pile of the carpet beneath the mat and when the pile springs back it moves the mat ever so slightly after a short period, because in a narrowboat it doesn't have to move far, the mat soon finds itself curling up the edge. As I said not a lot of help so if you find a solution I would be interested. I have tried the rubber mesh stuff and that didn't work. I have replaced the original mats, which were those "mats that eat all the muck" things, with heavier, feet wiping type, mats and they still move. At the moment the only solution that I can see is either to nail the damn things down, I did seriously think of that one time but decided against that, or velcro but as you have pointed out that means sticking velcro to the carpet. I think the only solution is to wait until the carpet is old and the pile is not so springy. Pete As I said I tried the home base webby stuff. It didn't work for me because it isn't the mat that moves as such it is the pile of the carpet that moves the mat and whatever is under the mat. In my case it is because the carpet is new and the pile is still springy.

Hi This is exactly as I did mine. I have teed off at the same place and mine feeds 2 rads. It only works when the engine is running as it uses the engine water pump to circulate the water around the rads. when it is working it works well but if it does develop an air lock then it is the devils own job to get rid of it. I have put my bleed valve at the highest point in the system which means that I have had to fit a bleed valve into the pipe that feeds the radiators. I also used 22 mm pipe except for the bits that actually attach to the rads. Also I have put 2 isolator taps into the circuit where the ts are to isolate the rads from the engine cooling system. The reason for the isolators is so that I can isolate the radiator circuit from the engine circuit when I do an engine service. This (hopefully) means that I do not have to bleed the rads after doing an engine service i.e. coolant change. As I said if I do get an air lock in the rad circuit then I have to attach a hose from an outside tap to one end of the circuit and another to the other end to allow the water out of the boat, after detaching both ends from the engine which was another reason for the isolators, and then blast water through the rad circuit. So far this has cleared any stubborn air locks and my system has been working for 2 years so far with only one one air lock that needed hose blasting out.

Hi I was told (and still am told) that the prop shaft gland is supposed to leak a small amount of water. This is so that the prop shaft is lubricated. My boat leaks a couple of drips a minute, when I am cruising, into an old 5 gallon oil container that has one side cut out. My bilge pump sits in this container and every so often empties it. The grease is pumped in and that, also, lubricates the gland and "pressurises" the gland to help keep large amounts of water out. At least that is the way I have always understood (and was told) it to work. Either way replacing the packing is a relatively easy job as long as the stern gland is accessable. When replacing the packing an amount of water will get in if the job is done whilst the boat is in the water so I suppose the idea is to have everything to hand and get it done as quickly as possible. I have to admit that it is not a job I have done yet but will have to soon so, hopefully, my understanding of it all is reasonably sound. Pete

Hi I have just had my boat out for blacking and had this very conversation with the boatyard. My boat is 30 foot and I have very slight pitting in the middle of my hull. The boatyard reckons that the area that an anode protects is 8 foot either side of the anode. I reckon it is 8 foot in total therefore 4 foot either side of the anode and that is why I now have slight pitting. (My boat is only occasionally connected to shore power.) If it had been 8 either side then, in theory, I shouldn't have had any pitting. Putting anodes in the center of the boat would, again in theory, have protected the center of my boat from pitting. The problem with putting anodes in the center of the boat is that the anodes are then on the most exposed part of the hull. This means that they can get caught on lock walls and when the boat rises or falls with the operation of the lock then the anodes could be ripped off or the boat could get caught between the walls because of the, minimal, extra width added by the anodes. Your front and rear anodes are, usually, fitted before and after the fore and aft curve of the hull and therefore not on the widest part of the boat. I have to say that whilst anodes quite obviously do protect your boat the extent to which they do that protection is a very debatable point. Also the place where you will more than likely get rust is going to be at the water line. This is because that is where oxygen, and it is oxygen in combination with other elements that causes rusting, is at it's strongest because that part of the hull is in contact with the atmosphere. Another reason, especially if your boat has been in ice or there has been diesel or petrol in the water, is that ice will stick to bitumen based blacking products and to a lesser extent 2 pack and pull that product off the hull and that IMO does not matter how much you pay for your blacking product. It is, usually, a tar based product and so can easily be removed from the hull. Resin based blacking products are a lot tougher and therefore should be a lot more resitant to the pulling power of ice but they are by no means immune. Petrol or diesel will actually dissolve bitumen based productsand with the best will in the world there will always be some diesel in the water that your boat is sitting in. So the bottom line is that none of these products are going to be 100% effective especially if there any oil based products in the water such as diesel or petrol. If your boat is moored in ice that ice will cling to whatever blacking product you use and pull it off to a greater or lesser degree depending on how much movement your boat experiences whilst it is encased in that ice. If whoever applies your blacking product, be it tar or 2 pack, applies it when the hull is rusty then it will not protect the hull from that rust it will only slow the development of that rust down because blacking will cut the amount of oxygen down that gets to the rust. I also do not think that blacking will last for five years. In my experience my blacking has only lasted for 2 years. I will qualify that statement by saying that my blacking is bitumen based and that my boat was encased in 2 foot of ice for 3 months in 2011/2012. regards Um Pete (as well)

Show me the legislation that states that. I took all dealer advertising stickers off my car when I bought it and changed the number plates with ones made up by Wilcos. If they want to advertise on my vehicle thay can damn well pay me. I do think it states the original owner on the registration docs but there isn't much I can do about that legally. Pete Pete

Hi you may have to bleed the engine if fuel has back flowed from the the engine when you remove the pump. If you find that it cranks well but will not fire then, possibly, air has got in and it is causing a lock. There is a very good You Tube video about carrying out this reasonably easy job at:- I have to add that when I replaced my lift pump my BMC 1.5, apart from the difficulty of access, it was straight forward and I didn't have any air locks afterwards. Pete

Oh come on! most boaters didn't even know there were council elections or even cared. It's what I keep saying on and on and on. Another one who hasn't in any way grasped the meaning of my post. I don't think there is a lot of point in me saying anything else on the subject. I wasn't suggesting that and in fact said that in my post it was aretorical (if thats how it's spelt ) my point, again, is that CWDF only represents a very very small number of boaters. Okay what day? The canal is way down on water at the moment and very weedy but I will bellow hello as you pass if I am at the boatyard. Pete

I'm afraid I don't know who John Sloan is and that was one of my points that I was trying to make. John Sloan did not email me nor did he telephone me or write and ask me if I wanted to attend (I am not complaining about that, why should he contact me in those ways ). I do not always read the forums and when I do I generally only look at the recent posts list rather the view new content. So I may well have missed that invitation. As I have said I am moored in the Selby Boatyard and there at least a half dozen other boaters there, probably more, who also had the right to ask for one of the limited places at those meetings for northern boaters. There are at least three of those boaters who have never even heard of CWDF but might have wanted to go to one of those meetings but were never given the opportunity to make that known. Canal World Discussion Forums is not the centre of the boating world therefore a lot of boaters, I would hazard a guess at the majority, have no idea about the discussions that go on this forum or that this forum even exists and that, to my mind at least, is unfair on some boaters who are paying their way like the rest of us Pete

Hi I have read this thread with avid interest being a boater myself. My small narrow boat is purely for mine and my wife’s pleasure. We are not live-aboards and we haven’t (so far) travelled any great distance in our boat. Keb is based on the Selby Canal and is moored at Bank’s boatyard in Selby. I have read every single post in the thread and even contributed to the thread myself. My licence is current, my insurance is up to date and my mooring fees (some of which also, indirectly, are paid to C&RT) are paid till next year as well. I would like to talk to C&RT possibly at some point and I would also like to have someone who can represent me purely as a boater. I am a member of the IWA who are able to represent me as a canal user but I could well have specific boating problems that the IWA cannot or will not deal with. I also, occasionally, pick up rubbish from in the canal and deposit it in C&RT rubbish bins at the Selby basin and I do volunteer work for C&RT with the River and Canal Explorers. I have been called a “chugger” and “some C&RT person in green with a high vis vest” or words to that effect. As it happens I do not chug and to be perfectly honest I find that tag slightly demeaning which I am sure it is meant to be. As I have said I have read all of this thread with avid interest. This is going to be a long post so if you do not want to read it then please don’t. The bottom line to all of this is that the government, whatever you think of it, decided that B.W. was no longer going to be a government department and they have discarded us and B.W. to the charitable sector to make our way as best we can and B.W. are now called C&RT. There are masses and masses of organisations wanting our money. I will not contribute to most of them partly because I cannot afford to contribute to all of them and partly because I seriously object to my money going to fund wars in distant countries or to line the pockets of the people who “run” those countries which is what I am told happens to some contributions. I am constantly bombarded with highly distressing pictures and videos of poor little children dying and tigers with tears in their eyes because their foot is caught in a trap of some sort. My immediate reaction is turn those images off and try to forget about them all and I would think that that is the reaction of quite a few people if not the majority. Perhaps a case of me burying my head in the sand but there you go that’s me. The point I am trying to make is that C&RT needs all the money it can get and more. It will need to get all the money it can from whatever source it can if it is too survive. C&RT are up against an absolute plethora of people wanting our money and face massive competition. If C&RT are to survive as a charity then fees and what C&RT get in from other sources will have to go up. Sooner or later C&RT will lose all government funding and the only income they will have is what comes in from the general public including boaters. C&RT is all we have so we, whether we like it or not, have to work with it. We have nothing else. The government have decided that E.A. are not going to come across with us to the charitable sector after all. Well blow me down why didn’t we see that coming. E.A. look after flood containment and disaster management and all that stuff. Wouldn’t it just be stupid of whatever government is in power to put that sort responsibility into something as whimsy and unpredictable (as far as funding is concerned) as the charitable sector. As for representation. Some of us on The Canal World Discussion Forum are making the assumption that CWDF represents the majority of boaters. Whether we like it or not CWDF is not the center of the boating universe nor does CWDF represent the majority of boaters. Believe it or not there there are actually boaters out there that don’t even have computers or smart/I phones and have never heard of CWDF. Whilst I commend the 3 named individuals, and the others, who are trying to put boaters views across I do not know any of them. They have not, in any way, contacted me and asked for my views or even whether I would want to them to represent me. In fact reading the way some of the content that occasionally appears in some of their posts is put across, interesting as it sometimes is, I would not want them to represent me and they would have a big job convincing me that they could represent me. So as far as I can see C&RT have a massively huge job on their hands. They have to get as much money in as they can from whatever source they can. Some of those possible sources are going to be extremely hostile to paying more money or even any money at all. To organise a boaters representative organisation is going to take a huge undertaking by somebody and the contributers to CWDF cannot be the only people that are given the chance to join this hypothetical organisation. It has to encompass ALL boaters including those that are not part of CWDF and those without computers. I do not know how to do this nor, if truth be told, would I want to organise anything like that. I do believe we need something to represent boaters exclusively but boaters, anglers, walkers and bikers all will have to work together, without any animosity, if we are to keep our inland waterways alive. These are my opinions. It is what I believe. I may be wrong. I sincerely hope I am wrong in some of the things I have said. I probably have another 8 years on the canals if I am lucky. By that time I hope I will see that the canals and waterways of Great Britain have survived and, indeed, thrived. Pete

And that is precisely what the problem is at the moment. I have been following the posts on here so I do have a rough idea of what has been going on. Unfortunately not all boaters read these forums and if we are going to take effective action then ALL boaters have to be involved. I have to say that looking at the maliase that seems to affect British people as a whole on the standing up and making themselves heard front I do not hold out a whole lot of hope on that score. What is for sure though is that an official, organised and representative body of boaters is the only way to go (isn't the IWA "supposed" to be that). That will entail organisation, funding, publicity etc etc etc. I sincerely hope someone can organise all of that and if they do I would support whatever comes out of this. From reading this thread I understand that this John Doddswell, or whatever his name is, is, or was, the CRT representative put forward by the IWA. I am a member of the IWA and if that is the case then my membership will cease and IF a representative boaters organisation comes out of this then my subscription will go to them. I am not a Friend of CRT but I am a volunteer for The Canal and River Explorers. This does not entail me paying CRT any money but I do give them my time. My reason for joining that organisation was to catch the younsters early and teach them about the heritage, history, wildlife, water safety etc of the canals with the hope that when they grow up they will have an understanding and empathy for the canals. Obviously from my point of view as a boater then I am flogging a dead horse if CRT are only interested in Fishermen, cyclists and walkers. I do hope that this John Doddswell (or whatever) has just been having a bad day and has, wrongly, taken it upon himself to utter these idiocies. I'm afraid that this is probably wishful thinking on my part and I fear that what everyone else has opined in this thread so far is the actuality of it. Pete