BEngo

Are you measuring/adjusting the pressure in the expansion vessel with the pump off and the hot taps open to release the water pressure?. Otherwise you are reading the pressure in the pipes not the pressure in the expansion vessel bladder. N

Unless I was destitute I would not consider a GRP cruiser as a liveaboard boat. They simply are not designed for that and, as a 'doer upper' they have many difficulties peculiar to their construction and intended use. A steel narrowboat is a much better bet. However as a "total boating newbie" you stand on the edge of a minefield. There are hundreds, if not thousands.of "project boats" aka ' doer uppers' out there. Most, IMO, make little or no progress between owners. Many go down hill. Mainly because buyers radically under estimate the time, costs and sheer effort required to achieve a boat refit. You should make a careful estimate of the time, the money and the other resources (survey, purchase, licences , mooring, Boat Safety certificates, insurance, tools, travel......) you think will be needed by your project. Then double the time and treble the money, adjusting the resource accordingly. If you still want to go ahead, make friends with someone with recent experience of a project boat and pick their brains, encourage them to help you and act as your mentor. Allow for the beer, spirits and/or wine they will undoubtedly need to be provided with in your resource estimate😊. Then go and lie down in a darkened room until the idea of a project boat goes away. If it does not, Go For It. You are well placed to be one of the few who succeed. N

Looking again at the photo, and Tony's comment about the amount of thread showing on the pipe fitting, you did screw the right end of the fitting into the tap? With the nug off and the olive out it is easy to fit the thing wrong way round.q The fitting has the same thread either end, except that the pipe end has a chamfer round the hole where the pipe goes, so that the between them the nut, which also has an inside chamfer, and the fitting chamfer squeeze the olive onto the pipe. N

Free add in by the fone! N

I can see nothing immediately wrong in your picture but the compression joint is not likely to stop weeping without you doing something. Undo and lift the nut without moving the pipe. Look at the olive. There should be a uniform, very tiny parallel gap between the olive and the fixed part of the fitting. The pipe should not be crushed by the olive. If the pipe is off line the olive will struggle to seal and the gap will not be parallel. There is a pic of a badly crushed pipe/olive up thread a bit. If not as it should be you will need to redo, but a short term bodge is to give the olive and the pipe either side a dollop of Hylomar and fasten it all up again. Clean any excess Hylomar off the outside, so the bodge is not obvious! If it is OK reassemble as now, then tighten the nut, one flat at a time checking to see qq the leak stops. Do not exceed a total of one full turn from hand tight. N

And expect it to be 0tight. Something approaching 4 white knuckles on a 600 mm bar. N

Well, if the OP has not immolated themself after 4 years, or been filled in by a neighbour, either they are lucky, or behaving correctly. N

A Ray Davies pipe or a Lola pipe perhaps. The sludge will think 'You Really Got Me' N

It is less to do with the size of the market and more likely the dearth of jobbing foundries who can produce a short run batch of parts and fettle them. Small foundries have been hammered by Environmental and H&S legislation, followed by a steep rise in the cost of energy. This combines with a general lack of a small batch engineering demand as that has either died, or been sent to India and China, to mean that the foundries have not thought it worth staying open. If you can find a foundry, the patterns exist so getting some cast should not then he difficult. You could try Bridport Foundry, once you have persuaded someone to let you borrow the patterns. For something simple to mould they may be able to use an original (temporarily repaired if needed) as a pattern. Alternatively look for a laser scanner service to scan an original to give you a 3D model. You can then get a printing service to 3D print a pattern from the model. N

The National Trust will only take on a property if it comes with a substantial dowry. Usually the dowry has to be large enough to cover any major repairs needed and to fund the routine upkeep of the property. No government is going to fund the transfer of the waterways on that basis, so it is not likely the NT would take them on. NT also remember the Southern Stratford where the restoration was a success of sorts, but the day to day operation and upkeep turned into a nightmare. Whatever the future, CRT have a current funding problem, of their own making to some extent. The top management believed the wildly optimistic figures for charitable income achievable. They accepted the under assessments of costs of maintenance. They ignored the large backlog of work built up by Robin Evans' regime at BW. They then cut their coat according to the cash in hand, further neglecting maintenance, ignoring safety inspection regimes and disposing of all the staff that knew how to do things, in order to save money., whilst still wasting it on rebranding, fatuous wellbeing campaigns and the like. This is steadily becoming a problem with no easy solution. The government does not want to provide any money, except, perhaps, to maintain drainage and, if forced, for public safety ( big embankments and the like). The government is struggling for money, anyway. Charitable donations will not provide any big sums of money. Increasing the cost of boating does not provide much money, certainly not enough to solve the problem. CRT cannot charge for towpath access, and does not have English Heritage's ability to use flagship sites (Stonehenge etc.) to cross subsidise the small sites like Rollright. Where then can the money be found? N

Perhaps an ideal opportunity for a 3D pprinter😊.

Putting canal water through a pressure washer is usually a recipe for rapid wear and loss of pressure. Cut water is full of fine gritty bits and the pump and pistons do not like it at all. If you need to do this then look for a machine with effective inlet filtration and ceramic pumping elements, (or hire the pressure washer). N

Depends on how much fresh there is in the river really, and I believe even then there are shallow spots in the lower flash. I would want company and/or a local expert if going off piste. The Winsford visitor moorings are fine, for depth, generally, though you have to go canny after CRT's water ends at the bridge by the pub. N

You will get a much better pressure washer if you seek out an IC powered one, than if you rely on single phase electric ones. The big hire shops like HSS et al. do them, but you will need to book one in advance. Remember that nowadays they are likely to require you to run a diesel one on white fuel, not red. Bolt on Anodes are fine provided you get a sound, and enduring, electrical connection between anode and boat, as well as a mechanical mounting. N

I went that way last year. We were passed by several southbound walkers as we ploughed through Woodseaves. There were (wholly ineffective seeming) towpath barriers at the N end, but none at all at the N end. N

1. Eat at The Greyhound at Hawkesbury. BOOK. 2 As you say, local knowledge about piling is best. All Oaks wood moorings are very busy. 8. The paddle gear at Calcutt is the GU screw lifted type. Easy, but 21 turns to wind up. It was designed to fall gently, so you can just knock the catch off. It doesn't always behave so keep an eye on it and slow it with your (gloved) hand if it is going too fast. The volunteers at Hillmorton are usually not more than 20ft from the bottom lock. Expect a queue at the top. N

Surecal seem to be well regarded. You can probably repair the pinhole with a patch, but if there is one pinhole now, there will be another one along son after you patch the first one because whatever ate the metal will ne doing that all over the tank. N

Take it home and put it in the airing cupboard ( or somewhere else nice and warm) for a week, then try again. Expect to be looking for a replacement. N

No need for flaring the copper pipe. It's like 15mm copper, but smaller😊. Do ensure the pipe is fully into the fitting before you compress the olive, and do not over tighten. Hand tight plus half a turn. For the pipe to ball valve fitting, choose the one with the olive that is the best fit on your pipe. Either are likely to be quite OK as there is bugger all in it between 8mm and 5/16 in. Just less than 2.5 thousands of an inch. If you need to bend any existing copper pipe, anneal it where you want to bend first. Get it just red hot (so you can barely see red in a dim light) and allow to cool. A DIY shed canister blowlamp will do the job, so will a gas ring. New copper pipe is likely to be OK to use. Apply sufficient Hylomar to fill the threads on the male component, only. Wait 5 minutes for the solvent to evaporate and the surface to become less sticky. Fit the female part. Do not over tighten onto a taper thread male fitting as you are likely to split the female, especially if it's a brass female thread. Do not apply Hylomar to olives or compression fittings. They do not need it and if is usually a bodge to cover up an over tightened fitting.àq Either cellulose thinners or meths will remove surplus Hylomar. N

If this is an enquiry after Tree Monkey, his lurginess now has its own thread. However, had he taken the basic precaution of post-immersion sanitizing his mouth throat and gullet with a strong solution of ethanol in water..... N

Marking the centre of the 12mm hole then working up is a good start. The aim is to get a hole through stock and rudder which is a close fit on the bolts all along and around the bolts. That way the steering loads are spread across the biggest possible areas. The angle of the bolts does not really matter much. It will be easy to get a tight fit on the edges of the holes in the new rudder blade and at either side of the rudder stock, but with regular use, and plenty of normal vibration in the prop wake there will be fretting, wear and looseness. N

I assume you are using a hand held pistol drill. Start with a 6mm hole. Enlarge it to 8 then 10 then 12 then to 13 then 14. That way you have some chance of getting the hole close to size and for the bolts to tighten up straight. Then put either A4 stainless or HT hex cap screw bolts through the whole lot into stainless nyloc nuts. Coat any stainless bolts in grease. The bit through he rudder stock is an ideal site for crevice corrosion, and stainless is very susceptible. If you can beg or borrow a magnetic base drill life will be a lot easier. That will enable you to whack a 14mm hole through stock and new blade in one go, knowing it is square in both planes. N

Helicopters as a breed suffer from vibration. Once past the design stage, it is usually the airframe and contents vibrating in response to the fan on the roof, or the one at the back, going about its business. Each blade passing the tail boom of the helicopter generates a force on the boom and so shakes the airframe up and down as wels as sideways. Some things in the aircraft then react to that shaking and rattle around themselves. Sometimes this is deliberate. Sikorsky used the main battery of the S61 as a vibration absorber. Sometimes it was not. The Westland Lynx used to shake the engines so much that the mounting bearings wore out quite quickly. There are all sorts of tricks to reduce, but never eliminate entirely, helicopter vibration. Balancing the main and tail rotor blades, and getting them all to fly in the same plane is the starting point. There are lots of engineering dissertations on the subject should you ever suffer from insomnia! N

Make sure the stop control is pushed fully home. With the control partly put the pump will not deliver diesel to the injectors. N

Yes. Not so much in prop driven fixed wing aircraft, but rotor blade vibration generally can be a significant problem in helicopter main and tail rotor blade design. Normally it has been fixed before the aircraft are in service though. N