George Kennedy

Is it too simplistic to suggest that a 20 litre jerry can from Screwfix at £20 and a bit of scouting to find a local filling station selling red diesel might be the answer?

Hi Mike, the seller that I mentioned trades on ebay as ajaysales so I think that it must be a different one on currently.

The pictures on ebay reminded me of something. If you do buy a boat with that engine, there is a small cup on the water pump which you should regularly fill with water pump grease to save wear. Most people don't know about it so the inevitable happens. The same engine was also imported and marinised by Ajay trading in Southampton. He still has some spares and last time I spoke to him a brand new engine that he would only sell as a unit rather than break for spares.

My advice would be to avoid. You will have difficulty in finding spare parts, my water pump went and I spent £600 getting Tony Redshaw building a Jabsco conversion. Great job but the following year the gearbox sprung a leak so fed up with hearing air being sucked through teeth I swapped the whole lot for a beta38 and PRM150 gearbox. The KD26 is a great engine but unfortunately was built in China, I believe that it is still built there but no-one imports the parts any more. If the boat ticks all the boxes that's great but put some money aside for an engine replacement! My advice would be that before you buy any boat you should ring RCR and ask them about how they would support your engine / gearbox.

Thanks to you all for the advice, I'll check them all out although probably not the one above the weir!

Sorry, Please and Thank You. First of all an apology for forgetting my manners in the original post - no excuses, just carelessness I'm afraid. Secondly, please forgive me for that misdemeanour. Finally, a big thank you for the advice regarding Wesley windows, I had a look at their website earlier and it all looks very interesting, thanks again.

Work will take me to Wakefield for a year starting next spring and I think that rather than commute / live in hotels I might move my narrowboat up there. Any suggestions for a good secure, preferably offline, mooring within 10 miles of the Wakefield - Normanton area?

I'm looking to install a quadrant shower in my narrowboat and rather than spend any more time trawling websites and trying to work out which combinations will fit, I'd like to find if someone has successfully installed one recently and can point me in the right direction of a decent combination of tray and enclosure.

Thanks for all of the replies folks. It would seem that as usual the horror stories are just that, stories exaggerated and embellished by people who have never actually experienced anything particularly bad. Even Top Cat only got a mattress around his prop, not ideal but not a disaster either. The amount of money that we wasted on that machine gun turret we had installed for our journey through bandit country in Birmingham prompted me to make the original post. I'm sorry to tell the northerners that there will be at least one more boat on their waterways in the very near future. Again, thanks for all of your help.

We have been boating around the midlands for the last six years since we bought our boat. Retirement beckons in the next few years and we intend to become liveaboards. The current boat is 52' and has been adequate for our needs but of course we have the ongoing discussion about buying a longer boat to live on. We know that buying a boat longer than 57' begins to rule out access to some of the northern canals and so it makes sense to keep the length below that restriction. However we continually hear people telling us to keep out of Liverpool, Manchester and Rochdale, avoid the Standedge tunnel and keep off the tidal Trent. If we followed all of that advice we would be as well forgetting the northern canals and just buying a 70' boat and be done with it. We're not timid boaters at all but we've never heard the same avoidance advice about any of the places that we have so far visited and that has included Birmingham, Leicester, Nottingham and London. So we're confused, is it really that grim up north?