Bee

Personally I have always used mid range, mid price conventional lead acid as there is a lot of them and therefore prices tend to be competitive. They work perfectly well for a few years and then one day they don't. I think the biggest problem with batts. is asking too much of them, They cannot be a substitute for household mains electric so running fridges, telly and all the other stuff found in boats these days is beyond them. If you buy a really big battery bank then charging the things is problematic. We have a cheap 300w inverter that charges phones, tools, laptop etc and an hour of telly a day, we have a 12 v fridge that is turned off at night and a few leds Two 110AH batts will last 24 hours and still have 12 v in them but we do at least 4 hours cruising a day (usually) Electricity on a boat is a scarce resource and very hard to replace and store.

Priced as a small house rather than a boat and where do you find a house these days for that sort of money? Its a mad world. I'm going to invest in some cardboard boxes, after the daft budget thingy I reckon a decent cardboard box under a desirable railway arch could be worth a fortune.

On our boat the prop dia. would be reckoned to be too large because the tip clearance is too close to the skeg, in thousands of hours of travelling we have had no problems. The clearance under the counter is not a problem so I reckon you can probably use a bit of discretion with the theory. Basically i would hazard a guess that if you spin the prop a bit quicker you would see a big difference. We cruise at about 1600 rpm and that gives 800 at the prop. I seldom go over 2000 rpm, but that is with a 4 cyl. Beta, I guess thats a bit more than your engine. Quite how you change a gearbox ratio I would dread to think. Personally I would stick with what you have got and spend the winter months looking at some way of fitting a chain or belt increase between the gearbox output and the prop shaft if you have the space. Doesn't have to be very sophisticated to see if it works and any power transmission place could supply clamp on pulleys or sprockets. Some steel plate and a bit of shaft would do the rest, not frighteningly expensive. if it works then do it properly and keep your fingers and feet out of it.

I used an old fashioned fuel tank sender unit, the swinging arm type from e bay, works fine but you do need to be able to get the assembly into the tank, simply bend the arm with the float to get an accurate 'empty' as that's the bit that matters.

Excellent work.

I think mine is copper too. Having worked in factories this sort of thing happens when Fred in the stores forgets to order something in time.

Don't worry. Its a washer. I doubt if PRM make their own, they will be a bought in part. Well done for trying to fit decent parts but over the years i have done countless oil changes on cars using either the old washer or something else that was in the shed and never had a problem.

Not just engines - that;s art

Hard to tell. The top pipe ought to rise all the way to the farthest point then turn and fall all the way to the bottom. If the stove is in the front of the boat and the boat sits down at the back you will struggle to get a rise at all unless the pipe goes up across the windows and the rads are hanging off the cabin sides. It is a simple theory and very effective but it can be difficult to achieve. On my last narrowboat I cut a hole in the floor to lower the stove to get that vital couple of inches of rise. You may very well find some sort of circulating pump is your best bet.

What Jen says is correct. It should be silent. The whooshing sound is probably because of bad circulation, it is very likely to be not circulating until the water in the boiler gets really hot then it suddenly flows, then it stops again. It needs to be sorted as this is stressing the system as it goes from really really hot to cold again and again. The pipe runs should rise all the way to the end of the circuit then it should fall all the way to the bottom of the back boiler. An expansion tank / pipe should be tee'd off from the very top of the pipe run.