IanD
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Posts posted by IanD
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There's no such thing as a quiet boat if it has a melodeon on board !
Yeah, but I spend a lot of the time steering and obviously I wouldn't play the melodeon at the same time ;-)
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By far, the quietest, and best, boat we ever hired was Hector from Armada Boat Hire near Rugby. It's a 2 berth tug style, with the engine up front. Almost silent whilst running. In fact, when you drop it in to neutral, you have to check the rev counter to make sure it's still running! By far the best hire boat we ever rented. Maybe not to everyone's tastes - quite compact. And a great little company to deal with.
Fascinating little boats (hydraulic drive for both I assume?) but much too small for us :-(
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Even the relatively quiet boats I've hired (mostly with Beta Marine engines, a new boat from Alvechurch at Anderton was probably the best, Shire Cruisers not as good) were still a lot noisier than one private boat I had a ride on which had all the noise reduction methods I mentioned -- you really could barely tell whether the engine was running or not, and it was almost vibration-free.
It seems strange that hire fleets don't make more of this, the cost of doing everything properly is only a couple of grand or so (coupling is the most expensive thing if you use Aquadrive, others are cheaper but maybe less effective) and it makes a huge difference -- I'd certainly pay a bit more for silence.
Or maybe they think that leaving them noisy discourages hirers from thrashing them, the same way that it's been found that introducing low-noise surfaces on motorways increases average speed...
Happy new year in advance!
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Hi Ian
Our hire boats have hospital silencers and sound deadening to the deck boards, as well as centaflex couplings - we get lots of comments about how quiet the boats are.
Hope that's of help
Kind regards
Justin
Thanks Justin, that's the kind or response I was hoping for :-)
Any others? I can't believe there are only 5 hire boats on the system with attention paid to this...
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So, back to the original question...
Does anyone know of any narrowboat hire boat companies which have gone to the same pains that some owners have to reduce engine noise? (hospital silencer, soft engine mounts, flexible drive, multilayer soundproofing in engine bay etc.)
It's easy to find builders who will build me a boat like this, or brokers who will sell me one, but I can't find anybody who will hire me one... :-(
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Eh? Nearly all modern narrowboats have engines which meet at least three of your five criteria.
I am sure that if our Japanese friends could come up with an engine which made plenty of noise at very few rpm, satisfied the newest emissions rules and cost under ten grand, many boaters would have one straight away.
The problem isn't the engine itself, as you say there are several possibilities as well as Beta Marine, the problem is the installation. Given that all the hire companies talk about things like "gliding through the countryside" it's disappointing that none of them (that I've found) properly do the simple things needed to make this a reality as far as noise and vibration are concerned...
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Could it have anything to do with speed?
Eh? If you mean "if you're making a lot of noise you're going too fast", I take the view that if you're throwing up a significant wake you're going too fast by wasting energy making big waves instead of moving the boat. Firefly was by far the slowest boat I've ever been on (Keith Jones reckoned it developed about 3shp flat-out) and also two of the most enjoyable weeks I've had on the canals, and was incapable of raising a wake of any size whatsoever, but with long swims at both ends just slipped through the water like a fish.
I am with you IanD. if only there was a commercial demand for a small, smooth, quiet, clean and efficient engine! Pity the market is likely to only be in the 100's and not 100,000s!
I am sure our Japanese friends could come up with something in a flash! I would have one straight away!
I'm sure there would be a demand if only such an option existed, and it wouldn't need any new technology because people have already done it on private boats using engines like the Beta 43.
But despite all the claims on hire websites about "quiet water-cooled diesel" none of them are, at least not what I'd call quiet which means a hospital silencer (exhaust noise), proper heavy-duty sound insulation in the engine bays (radiated noise), and flexible engine/shaft mounts (conducted noise).
Doing all this would add far less to the cost of fitting out a hire boat than cosmetic things like granite worktops, but nobody seems to do it :-(
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Horses for courses -- the most *fun* I ever had boating was with a Bolinder (or Firefly, which was equally a hoot but even less practical), but that's not what I'm looking for when I'm on a family holiday. In this case I'd like a boat where if you're inside or in the bows you can't really hear or feel the engine, because that's what the other people on the boat want, to glide along peacefully.
I guess the best thing would be a horse-drawn boat then, which is of course more traditional than any of your nasty engines. But I somehow doubt I could hire one...
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Does anyone know of any hire boat companies which have gone to the same pains that some owners have to reduce engine noise? (hospital silencer, soft engine mounts, flexible drive, multilayer soundproofing in engine bay etc.)
I've had hire boats from many of the recommended "high-quality" companies over the years (Napton, Shire Cruisers, Wyvern, many others) but have always been disappointed at the engine noise levels, especially compared to some private boats which I've passed which were almost silent.
I realise nothing's going to compare with the steamer "Firefly" that I hired in the 80's, but I'm sure it's possible to get a lot closer than any hire boat I've found so far...
Ian
P.S. I know about the electric boats on the Mon&Brec but not enough to do for me and they only sleep 4, I need 6 berths (3 doubles)
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We hired a boat from (IIRC) Wyvern Shipping many years ago which was one of a pair -- the signwriting said "Goldfinch I" on one side and "Goldfinch II" on the other. Presumably both boats were painted at the same time and the signwriter did both nearsides and then both offsides without realising that having the names in the same order wasn't quite right...
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You have just made me laugh a lot
1. Killer shark
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2. Kwik-save deep frozen haddock
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3. Kilmarnock
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-- it's a place in Scotland
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OK -- name three fish with names beginning and ending in K...
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We went through on a Shire Cruisers hire boat in 1h40m, would have been faster but my teenage daughter took the second half and was rather slower than me (but loved it!). Plenty of bashes but no major damage, great fun but I wouldn't have liked to do it without a guide -- the boat was familiar to the guide (Terry?) who told us the record for the fastest passage was well under an hour (45-50m?) in a BWB boat when the tunnel wasn't open to the public and nobody was worrying about the state of the boat...
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Has anybody on the forum really gone to town -- no expense spared! -- to try and come up with the quietest possible diesel narrowboat, and what were the results? I'd guess the cost of even the most expensive sound and vibration reducing measures (smoothest engine to start with, flexible mounts and couplings, engine room/well soundproofing, biggest hospital silencer) would be far less than the cost of just a hybrid engine setup, never mind the batteries.
(I guess the Beta Marine cocooned engine route would give similar results, but probably at higher cost and can't be retrofitted into a standard shell)
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Once. After a lunchtime music/beer session in the pub on Xmas day. Through the ice...
I'm told that all that could be seen was my arm sticking up through the hole in the ice, just like the lady of the lake except holding a tankard instead of a sword.
The tankard was still full of beer afterwards, but I was shivering so much I couldn't drink it...
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A folding pruning saw cuts through most things...
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Yes, though according to this (scroll down towards the bottom) it lasted at least ten years:
http://nbalbert.blogspot.de/p/al.html
It had the alternator and no solar panels when we hired it, given that you could hear the engine slow down when the alternator was charging this was a big improvement. You can see the long stern swim in the photo, the bow one was also very long and went past the front of the cabin.
That brochure in the 90s would have been Blakes, I think we went through them. It's a shame there's nothing similar around today, it was a really enjoyable trip, great for sneaking up on wildlife and anglers, not so good if the canal got shallow due to relatively deep draft and low power but then we weren't in a hurry. 200rpm flat out sounds about right, The prop was massive and in a deep canal it just swam along effortlessly with no wake to speak of, but you still couldn't keep up even walking fast.
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I don't know if anyone else remembers it, but for a few years in the eighties there was a steam-powered narrowboat called Firefly for hire from K E Jones at Foxton -- a huge (500,000BTU?) gas-fired boiler near the steerer's left leg, a two-cylinder simple Mamod-type (oscillating cylinder) engine with maybe 3" bore and stroke just under the rear steps driving a *big* prop, skin tank condensers, automated feed watre control. With about 3hp flat out in a 55' hull -- but with very long swims -- it glided along beautifully with no noise apart from the muted roar of the boiler, but didn't exactly start and stop in a hurry...
We hired it for a fortnight -- which involved being one of the centrepieces in a rally at Windmill End when President failed to make it -- and had a great time, especially in cold wet weather when you could close the back doors behind you and gently roast in the heat from the boiler. From memory, in 2 weeks we emptied the main gas tank (85 gallons) plus 3 50kg Calor gas bottles, that would cost about £150 a week nowadays which tells you why steam power is not so popular -- at least with an inefficient single-expansion setup running at about 100psi.
I'll see if I can find some photos when I get home...
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If you do go up the Caldon and stop at the Black Lion at Consall Forge (great pub!), make sure your dog doesn't have a taste for chickens or you'll be very unpopular...
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Blimey!
It seems that this chap has had a couple of bad days!
I was thinking of having a go at the HNC on a northward trip from the River Weaver in a week of so, but, perhaps I'll leave that till next year.
Nipper
Don't let bad reports about the HNC put you off, it's a splendid trip!
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Are you talking about what I believe is called the Pennine Ring, ie Calder & Hebble, Huddersfield, Ashton, Rochdale? (If you start and finish at Sowerby Bridge.)
If so, then just about anywhere between Sowerby Bridge and Portland Basin is OK for overnight mooring. Not the Ashton, except the very bottom end. Overnight mooring OK at Piccadilly, which of course is very near the station of the same name, but I wouldn't leave the boat unattended overnight. I don't know much about between there and Littleborough (where I have left my boat), but it doesn't have a good reputation. OK for the rest of the Rochdale back down to Sowerby Bridge.
Edited to say that you should be able to do it in 10 days in the summer, but not when days are short. And it depends on being able to book Standedge Tunnel on an appropriate day.
And don't assume that you'll be able to stick to a "normal" schedule like you'd get from Canalplan. There'll almost certainly be unexpected delays (especially on the Huddersfield) from things like low pounds, partly because there's almost no traffic over the summit -- in a one week trip over the HCN (Portland Basin to Sowerby Bridge) we had four delays of a couple of hours each, but I'd deliberately built in some slack to allow for this when planning the trip.
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It's easy for people to say "anyone with any knowledge wouldn't have done this".
We did the HNC west to east last year and had a great time, and fortunately I knew about the top cill problem via this forum. So when we did get stuck coming out of one of the locks (the one where boats had sunk) I realised what was happening, and by acting quickly we managed to get off the cill and reverse back into the lock to wait for CRT to run some water down the flight. But if I hadn't read about the sinkings I doubt that I'd have realised what was happening and how dangerous it was, in more than thirty years boating this had never happened to me before and I've never heard it mentioned as something to watch out for.
The sinking at the start of the thread is the much more common cill problem which everone should be aware of, but with only two people and a deep fast-emptying lock all it takes is a bit of lack of attention and maybe some complacency -- which 99% of the time wouldn't cause any problem -- and you can rapidly get into trouble, especially if you can't move too fast. At least this time nobody was hurt or killed, but there still seems to be rather too much schadenfreude in some postings for comfort...
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If you want a real challenge, try playing squeezebox along to an idling Bolinder...
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Maybe Axiom haven't done themselves any favours by over-caliming what they can do, but I suspect people claiming that it's all snake oil are equally off the mark.
As has been said, conventional propellors (like Crowther) haven't changed much over the years because they're pretty close to the optimum design for propelling a boat forwards -- though if you look at some of the designs used on large container ships where efficiency is the #1 design priority, they're even more complex in design with spiral-shaped backwards-curved blades.
http://www.wartsila.com/en/propulsors/fp-propellers/fpp
However conventional props aren't so good going astern because the blades are then far from optimum -- the container ship ones are presumably even worse, but then they hardly ever have to go astern.
Looking at the blade forms and the explanations by people who've actually tried to understand what they're doing instead of dismissing it as rubbish, the Axiom trades off a little bit of ahead performance for a big improvement in astern performance by using symmetrical blades -- which is partly a throwback to the early days of prop design before people had cottoned on how to shape the blades asymmetrically for better forward performance. There's also more blade near the tips so you'd expect more thrust to come from this region, this together with the bigger blade area should mean more thrust from a given diameter prop, though this is complicated by the fact that unlike a normal prop the pitch is not constant along the blade.
If Axiom had just said this -- "symmetrical blades giving much better astern performance by losing a litle bit of ahead performance" -- then most of the ordure beiong dropped on their heads could probably have been avoided...
Ultra-quiet hire boats
in Holidays Afloat
Posted
I'm looking at the Aqua boats -- which do look excellent! -- but the boatyard location is not exactly ideal unless I want to do the whole of the Leicestershire ring :-(
Any other suggestions? Still haven't found another hirer who emphasizes quietness...