

Bee
-
Posts
4,584 -
Joined
-
Last visited
-
Days Won
26
Content Type
Profiles
Forums
Events
Gallery
Blogs
Store
Posts posted by Bee
-
-
My guess us some sort of lash up involving whizzing chains and belts and plummer blocks any one of which would take your leg off. Probably a couple of hefty sprockets on a short shaft from the Kelvin running chains to each prop shaft. Came across a clip on You Tube recently of a motor on the front deck of a Dutch sailing barge with a shaft running across the boat and a gearbox to turn it 90 degrees, that was coupled to a long shaft with a prop on the end and lowered over the side, it had a triangular frame to keep the prop away from the boats side, getting along at a good speed too. Not uncommon in the early years of motorising sailing barges but a bit scary to say the least.
-
Thanks for posting these pics, really fascinating.
-
Couple of observations. Bee has only ever had bitumen above the waterline and two pack below. The waterline is not an accurately measured and plotted thing, the present epoxy is bright red (it was a bit cheaper) and the waterline now looks awful as the bitumen has not stuck to the epoxy and come off in big pieces the epoxy though seems to have stuck to the bitumen, it is Jotun 90 and 'surface tolerant'. The first ever paint below the waterline was Sigma and it was a coal tar epoxy, this stuff is now banned everywhere that we float and when we changed to Jotun it bled through the Jotun, some solvent must have softened it but it still seems to have stuck. I wonder if newish and smoothish bitumen is overcoatable but years of thick layers of bitumen is not? Anyway, Bee is out of the water this June so we will see. Bee was in brackish water for a couple of years so now has a horrible layer of barnacles everywhere plus a ton of Zebra mussels so heaven only knows what is happening.
-
for, John Deere 6100,6200 Engine Rear Bell Housing in Good Condition | eBay, This may be useful (?) there are others on E bay. Then maybe an adaptor plate to fit your potential gearbox , ASAP and no doubt others (Lancing marine in Shoreham do all sorts of stuff) Somewhere there will be a combination of parts that works but it might take a while to find them
-
2 hours ago, Paul C said:
Do we all agree:
1. The market obeys price elasticity of demand;
2. Boat ownership is relatively inelastic;
3. There is a determinable, optimum (max income) price of licensing according to the above
4. The current increases are short of the figure in (3), possibly due to the associated negative publicity it would bring?
I would also add a 5th point, that the whole structure is dependant on the political dogma of the government in power and a steadily reducing grant will cause a big and compounding increase in licence fees. It is not just economic theory that puts prices up.
-
1
-
-
Just a thought. don't know what hours Greenland wharf (dock??) operate but it might be possible to nip across the river in 'office hours' then leave from Greenland dock earlier ??? Probably not but you never know.
-
I've always had more success using double sided closed cell foam for windows and suchlike as long as you can get decent fixings to pull the frame down nice and flat and reasonably tight. Any sort of goo will make a right old mess and you'll be using gallons of paraffin/white spirit/fairy liquid to clean everything afterwards.
-
Batteries are horrible things. If only they had a lid so you could open the top and have a look to see if they were full or empty. What most of us don't realise is just how long it takes to charge a couple or three batteries. On Bee we have 2 x 110 AH batteries - or that is what they were 4 years ago, it takes 4 or 5 hours to charge them from the engine and no doubt you could squeeze a bit more in from a decent charger. We look after them and don't flatten them or they will play tricks like saying they are charged when in fact they are scrap. We now have a bit of solar (not much, just one panel of 30 watts????) and I think it is brilliant, it saves batteries from death and although it cannot power the boat it works all the daylight hours. This summer I will add another one.
-
45 minutes ago, Momac said:
A scare mongering story that came to nothing.
Our boat was designed and the shell built in Holland. Vat paid. The shell came to the UK where I fitted it out. Vat paid. It went to France after doing all the Southern England wide waterways and will remain in the EU because If I bring it back to the UK I will have to pay VAT on the entire boat all over again despite paying a hell of a lot of Vat already in half a dozen countries including the UK. So not scaremongering at all.
-
1
-
-
25kva! That's enough to have a nice little sideline selling electric to other boats that moor nearby!!!
-
1
-
-
Thing is that you do need an adjustable heater on a boat, its chilly in the morning, cold in the evening and warm (sometimes) in the day and turning the thing on and off is not good for it. They also use an appreciable amount of 12 volt electric and that's OK if you have a good mains supply but in effect that means you are using your charger and batteries as a 240 - 12volt transformer, maybe not too good either. The perfect way to heat a boat has yet to be invented but a coal stove has possibly less disadvantages with a couple of cheap mains fan heaters if you have mains electric (Not off your inverter though!) Others will have lots of different opinions.
-
Problem is that if you insulate the outside your gunnels will become so narrow as to be pretty much useless and also you have the problem of how to make it waterproof at the side/top join. Having put buffalo board on the sides it would be disheartening to pull it all off again. I think you might have to insulate the inside, I used to use wood fibre board for this and it worked well as well as having one fairly OK surface that would take paint/hessian/carpet or whatever. The bit under the gunnel really must be insulated and it is awkward but it will drip constantly if you don't do it. The hull sides that have the pink stuff need to have a good 3" or as much as you can fit and then some sort of cladding on top, really you are looking at a bit of a refit.
-
12 hours ago, Grim Reaper said:
She's about 10 foot to long and 4 foot to wide for the k+a, I did have the same thought with the name Semington. I used to love down the road from there at Seend.
Oops!
-
She was in Gloucester docks for a long time and i was told she actually was an old K&A boat.
-
Huh. Insurance companies. The insurers accepted the risk and it was up to them to satisfy themselves as to the condition of the thing. On that basis no insurance can be relied upon if the company can refuse to pay out if something goes wrong.
-
1
-
-
I don't really understand the picture. The pressure cap (??) on that tank(?) has a pipe going off to the right that tee's off to a vertical pipe. If that vertical pipe has coolant in it then presumably water would flow from the tank if you removed it- or if it is connected to the tank overflow then if pressure cap lifts to release pressure coolant will flow into the vertical pipe. Its all a bit puzzling and probably irrelevant to your problem but I reckon there might be a lot to be said for an air cooled engine - Good luck!
-
4 hours ago, Tony Brooks said:
Did you look at the outside of the hull where the waste outlet is? We occasionally found that when customers moored against muddy banks, the mud blocked the outlet.
Had a similar problem a few years ago. There is a variety of bee that finds holes, lays its eggs inside and then mortars up the hole. Yup, that was the little drain from the washbasin in the loo. Must have read the boats name .
-
The gawd awful smell and maybe a wisp of steam sounds to me like a leak (probably inaccessible) and the rubbery / rotten eggs smell of antifreeze / rubber hoses and all that horrible stuff. I would start there. As for header or expansion tanks that would indeed be unusual. Take a look at the engine and follow all the pipes, if a couple disappear into the boat itself then follow them, they probably go into the calorifier and that will probably explain some of what is happening. I don't suppose you are overfilling the engine header tank are you?
-
If you like the shape and so on then that is fine, I would not expect any trouble with what you get. The important thing (For me) would be that everything below the waterline is painted with a good epoxy paint - more than 1 coat - and not just bitumen, once bitumen is applied you are pretty much stuck with having to use bitumen for ever unless you remove it (What fun) and it is inferior to modern paint.
-
Logically its either not being cooled sufficiently or its generating too much heat. The black oil sounds like burnt clutch plates but to the best of my knowledge these boxes are either fully in gear or not, being halfway in or out is difficult to achieve. The only thing I can think of is to try and narrow down the cause, try and check oil and water flow through the cooler by holding hoses and pipes, disconnect operating cable and operate the lever by hand and see if the prop shaft is spinning at the speed you'd expect. Apart from that it sounds like something inside the box might have failed. Sorry, not a lot of help I'm afraid. Good luck
-
Firstly, is this an all steel boat or does it have a wood or fibreglass top? If its wood or f/glass then it is probably leaking from the joint. If it is all steel then it is most likely to be condensation , outside possibility of rust holes and some likelihood of leaky windows. Condensation is an absolute sod, I would peek behind the cladding to see if there is any insulation at all (!) If it is soggy fibreglass wool it is doing nothing except keeping everything cold and wet. There are many opinions on insulating materials but whatever is used it must cover all the steel - no gaps - and be a couple of inches thick. Same with under the gunwhale., Good luck with it, most of us have wrestled with these problems and in the end the thickest normally wins - thats the insulation - not the boat owner.
-
On Bee it is dead easy to come alongside the LH wall, coming alongside the RH wall is a different kettle of fish, it takes time and careful handling or it ends up in the middle of the lock. David Macks comment about contrary winds is also something to bear in mind. Its a bit stressful for us as we get shoved into the bit of free water at the back of the commercial locks after the big stuff has filled most of the lock and pratting around whilst everybody else waits for you is embarrassing. This is when you realise that the most important person on the boat is not the person twiddling the wheel - it is the person with the rope trying to catch a bollard before the boat bounces off the wall / runs into the back end of something really big.
-
Hmmm. Not a very thorough survey. Presumably no thickness readings? Can't really proceed without those, thickness is important. Evidence of overplating? If there are areas of doubling then the chances are that more will soon be needed. Is the boat elderly? More than 20 - 30 years and it will need a good inspection, boats also rust from inside out so a poke around under the floor is a good idea. Repairs are a fact of life, there are plenty of commercials still trading in France built in the 1960's but repairs have been done when needed, steel boats are repairable so long as its worth while. EDIT Ah, there are thickness readings, It has lots of metal left.
-
The one time we ran out of water the water wouldn't reach the taps, got it working by sucking a tap, mouth full of grit and water - been fine ever since. Does your pump now keep running or does it eventually shut off/
Blacking costs
in Boat Building & Maintenance
Posted
Run of the mill builders and repairers use blasted and primed steel in the Netherlands and everywhere I've seen in France, not sure if it makes that much difference - they tend to use thinner steel too and owners tend to spend more on maintainence. That is a lot of generalisations there and there are some old rustbuckets around too.