Bee

I like T studs at the fore end as you can easily throw a loop around a stud while standing on the bank, ordinary cleats are harder to catch and reaching out to a cleat is risking wet feet and more, to place a cleat at the wider part of the boat means falling over the rope every time you get in or out.

Have just made som fenders out of carpet tiles (90p from E bay, pre loved) can get 4 equal width strips per tile. a stack of 6 strips seems OK cut them on a tablte saw, no bitumen in the ones I bought, 3/4" inch hole either end, splice a rope in one end and tie together with cord the other. I'll see how they get on this summer, fed up with every other fender I have made or bought, these should be rotproof, tough as old boots and are about £1.50 each.

There is no such thing as a grease gun that doesn't make a hell of a mess. I use one on the stern gear and using it is not too bad. Filling the b***** leaves me and the boat very slippery and needs a lot of parrafin to clean everything up.

Quick reply from total cheapskate. We used carpet in 'bedroom' and living area. Changed it when it got muddy and horrible. Vinyl in kitchen and loo. Changed it when we got fed up with the pattern. Boats get a lot of mud / wear. One day you will need to get it up to get at leaks fron plumbing or something worse and that will suddenly become far more important than appearance. Boats are not little houses and suffer from stuff happening under the floor.

Probably just teenage kites fighting over mating rights, See the same thing outside the local nightclub every saturday night. Ah, the good old days when I were a lad.....

That could even be something as daft as the cork gasket on the rocker box. As Tony says, it seems to be running OK.

Its not a huge job, its a simple engine and easy to work on so Joe Bloggs with some rusty spanners could do it. Thing is that Joe Bloggs would just bung another gasket in and wind the head bolts down really tight and never mind the torque settings. As others have said it really needs to be checked for flatness and cracks as oil and steam escaping is a bit unusual and checking for that is not that easy and stripping the head down - valves out and so on - if it needs the head skimming is bothersome and lost collets is really bothersome. You need a real mechanic and I would reckon £ 500 would be about right but cracks or warping could add to that so fingers crossed that its all OK.

I've arrived at something like that with our vacuflush. The automatic side of it no longer works but the vacuum pump does, that is connected to a on/off switch. Use the loo, turn the vacuum pump on, build a vacuum, press the pedal down, contents of loo get sucked into the cassette, turn switch off. The stinky gasses are vented out of a skin fitting. The toilet has no permanent vacuum so the water in it does not drain away and the whole contraption is reduced to its simplest and therefore its most reliable state, like most things you can chuck half of it away and it will work better. Oh, you can tell when the cassette is getting full as the vac. pump only runs for about 10 secs so you do need that microswitch.

I think epoxy is the best at the present time until someone comes up with something even better but its quite expensive so there's not much point in using it unless its applied to a good surface and there is the problem. Facilities to get a boat docked, hauled out or craned out used to be scarce but more places can do it now so there could be a case for just slapping on something black and sticky but doing it more often - say every two years or so. So long as there is something covering the steel then its protected. As for the bottom then yes, certainly do it.

I've steered a selection of boats over the years. Some go backwards, some simply do not. Hired a boat last year from Stone, a very ordinary hull and it was really brilliant going backwards. Our last narrowboat (a Colecraft) was pretty good, various cruisers were damned nearly impossible and our present boat will go a few yards before the bow starts to swing and once that happens there is very little that you can do. Narrow boats are usually pretty good, those slab sides keep the boat straight but shallow draught boats with a bottom like a saucer are usually hopeless.

Firstly it depends on budget. As a Yotkdhireman you will look at depreciation on a new boat and think 'How ***** much'?!? As a Yokshire man (Or a tight git like me) you will wonder about doing it yourself. Both those options are expensive and / or time consuming. I would suggest looking for a very good quality boat from a very good builder, the sort of thing most of us are jealous of and who pretend not to be impressed by. It will be a pleasure to own, you can feel really smug, it will always sell at a premium and although it might take a while to find it could well be quicker than getting a new boat. A bit of refitting is not really such a big deal if you have to. It will quite likely work out less expensive than a new boat too.

if you can get at the tank I'd have a quick look all around it just to see if there's any pin holes or leaky bits. You probably can't get at it without taking the boat apart but these things do eventually fail. There's biology and chemistry in that tank that would make you shudder and it can be awfully smelly. I guess vents might help but it'll be tricky to fit. I can well understand that changing to something different would be the last thing you want to do but it might just be better to put the rubber gloves on and call it a winter project.

Fascinating - really, not being sarcastic - stood in front of a cutaway radial engine from an aircraft a while ago thinking sod that for a lark, if that ever went wrong somebody else would have to fix it, I wouldn't lay a spanner on it.