BEngo

From experience: It's got to be dry steel. Lob some heavy cardboard under the boat- or a sheet of 8 by 4 hardboard if you are flush. Slide around on that on a car mechanics guzunder. Wear paper disposable overalls. Soften the muck in your hair with cooking oil before trying shampoo. The black will go on better if you warm it- stand it near a radiator overnight. Get an assistant to be i/c refills- you don't have to get out from under so often that way. Put it on with the cheapest Buy it and Queue hairy roller- not a foam one. Wrap the roller in a poly bag overnight and work it in the black to soften it up again in the morning. Throw everything away when finished. Praise the Lord that you don't have to do it again for four years. Have another beer. Regards B

Mary I have a selection of works from dead Palomas (split heat exchangers) which I collect for spares. March is usually a good month for new items I'm not sure which of the two main types an LF5E is - the rounded one or the square one? PM me a description or a piccy of the heater and I'm pretty sure I can put a bung in the post for the price of a pint. The rubber sealing ring I can't guarantee- but you should easily be able to find an o-ring that will fit. B

You can service as many Springer Spaniels as you like - but don't get caught if you want to stay off the front page of the News of the World! B

Once you have extended the holes to comply with the BSS I would fit a "self bailer" to each vent. Find a piece of pipe big enough to cover the holes and about 3" long. Slice pieces off it diagonally so that you have two parts of a cone. Weld these 'cones' over the holes, point forward leaving the gap at the back open. As they go through the water there will be a 'dent' in the bow wave which will cause the water in the gas locker to drain out. The only thing is to ensure that the area of the gap at the back is big enough to to comply with the BSS requirements for area of gas locker bottom vents. Mine worked wonderfully and paseed 3 BSS inspections, but then I raised the locker bottoms so don't need 'em any more. For the principle have a look at the self bailers that the dinghy sailors use to get the water out. (Not Transom flaps) N

Derek, We are talking about the same spot here- along the concrete edged towpath from bridge 129 to 130. The Red Lion is at bridge 130 and I thought it was a better modern reference than The Ship (in which I suspect you may have had a pint whilst I was only able to buy an icecream!) N

There were a number of recognised tying places for boats which were en-route, either loaded or for orders, along the GU, where large rings were installed at about 70ft spacing and presumably there was sufficient depth to get a loaded butty alongside. Where where they all? Starters for 10: Brentford Bulls Bridge though not in the lay by Ricky (where?) Cowroast: on both the offside and the nearside above the lock Maffers: Opposite the Red Lion Leighton- towpath outside where Tesco is now? Fenny - where exactly? Cosgrove- On the towpath near the current sani station Stoke Bruerne Blisworth Buckby Top Please add any others, particularly north of Braunston, but let us try not to confuse things with later BW pleasure era 'Visitor Moorings', though I suspect some originals have been improved and turned into vistor moorings, though without the depth.. regards N

To find the pump cut-out pressure check the accumulator pressure with the pump switched on, but after it has stopped running. To find the accumulator pressure switch the pump off, or disconnect it, and then turn on a cold tap until the water stops- this will de-pressurize the water side of the system. Measure the accumulator pressure then. It is possible that the cut-out pressure will appear low if there is no, or not much, air in the accumulator. In this case measure the accumulator pressure and set it at about 20psi. Switch the pump on and then check the cut out pressure, adjust as necessary with the pump off and the system depressurised. I like aboput a 5-10 psi difference between cut-out and accumulator- it allows a little more air compression, but is rather dependent on how big your accumulator is. If you get water out of the accumulator air valve the diaphragm has split and you need a new accumulator. HTH N

One beautiful Saturday afternoon, Stoke Prior. Loads of intending BP hirers working out how locks operate, plus half the local population admiring the scenery. Super B goes stonking in through the bottom gates bracket open, touching nowhere and intending to select reverse, give it some welly and stop in fine style plus cloud of Lister smoke just to show em how it's done. Unfortunately, on selecting reverse the gear lever broke off at the bottom (as mechanical Lister box levers were prone to do) leaving the engine still driving ahead. Pull stop cord, hang on tight to cabin slide, look nonchalant and wait till top cill stops the boat, noisily. Attempt to look as though all this is part of intended manoeuvre, probably failing miserably. Fortunately not much damage to interior though a few things ended on the floor but not broken. Ah well, that's life. I seem to remember a mooring pin served as a gear lever, albeit a bit short, until we got to Penkridge, where Teddesly welded the old lever. N

I share a silencer box between generator and engine. I don't have a flappy non-return valve but use a lever valve in the exhaust to so the engine cr@p is not being blown into the generator. (The engine produces loads of Scottish crap of its own so it can stand a bit extra from the generator.) The whole thing is plumbed in 2 inch black iron water pipe so when the valve in its exhaust is shut the generator, (a 15 HP Italian thing) won't start because of the back-pressure. This reminds me to open the exhaust valve! The noise characteristics between the 3000 rpm generator and the 1000 rpm engine are somewhat different so I have an extra silencer which can replace the tall pipe when running the genny. That ensures everything is not anti- social. I have never tried running both engine and generator at the same time. The engine and generator also share a skin tank, so the water piping is similarly valved. Beware that a skin tank is not ideal for a generator though because they are less effective when standing still and so need to be larger than for a similar size engine. since I rarely need the whole 6 KvA from the genny it doesn't seem to be unhappy. N

It's not so much the flat bottom as the sharp transitions from the sides to the base at the stern, and to a lesser extent the bow. The water wants to go under the boat, rather than round the sides, ( which is why deep water helps) but it has to come out again at the back. If there was a curve from the base plate to the sides of the swim the water wouldn't have to go round sharp corners and there would be less drag. The double curved stern swim ( never reproduced by washer josher builders!) on a Saltley josher is probably as good a compromise as any, but also probably is the cause of joshers' reputed ability to 'pick up a tea leaf'. It does seem that you might be slightly too over bladed. If 7.2 mph and ~ 550rpm is bracket open then there's another 200 rpm to be had. Using this might save a little diesel- because you are putting diesel in at practically the max rate achievable but it's not delivering all the power it could ( flat torque curve) so at say 740rpm and 7.2 mph there would be the same need for power but it would be obtained more efficiently. It's all rather academic though- theres only a few stretches where you could get the benefit. Once in that wavelength=boat length trough the only way out is to plane- and I doubt Alnwick would do that even with two TS8's. I've seen a few skippers of lighter modern boats apparently trying though. Regards N

I don't think I can add to the general debate, but I do feel that it is important when breasted on a paid for mooring that only one mooring fee is paid-the charge is generally the same for a single 14 ft beam boat as for a 7 ft beam boat so I always refuse to pay a second charge when breasted. If breasted to a friend or willing stranger I'll always offer to go halves. I well remember a night on the Severn at Upper Lode pub moorings. There was a plastic gin palace tied up so as to take up about half the moorings leaving not enough room for anyone else except maybe a Dawncraft Dandy. No water on the inside of the pontoon. We arrived alongside (well, about 6 inches off) and asked nicely if plastic would move so there was less wasted space. Mrs on board was not able to move (no petrol!) and hubby was away getting some, but she was wiling to be moved. Off crew, rearrange mooring, making about 45 ft of good space. My mate fits nicely into this. I breast 60 ft up to him, mate no 2 breasts 60ft up to me , mate no 3 breasts 70 ft on the outside. Now five boats in the space previously occupied by one. Narrow boaters have supper. Hubby off plastic eventually returns with one gallon of petrol, about dusk and well after locks are shut. Plastic flashes up and roars off. Not sure how far he was going to get but we just went to the pub. N

BSS always has invented its own rules! The original requirements were no more than the collected bees from the bonnets of a number of surveyors supplemented by the ideas of a non-professional zoologist and moderated by the BW management. Examples are spill rails, wiring and the large number of 'requirements' that changed regularly from 1981 to 1994. Eventually common sense and sound engineering prevails, but few of the requirements not directly linked to an ISO/EN/BS Standard are backed up by any sort of justification process such as HAZOP or risk analysis. Even Bill Schlegel's review about 5 years back didn't attempt that though it did introduce a note of sanity. Nor is there an effective QC/QA process, as any perusal of the BSS topics an any waterways forum will reveal. Most people just do what the examiner wants as it's easier to pay money than try to get it right. This works both ways though and there are boats with a BSS certificate which should not have had one issued. They may or may not be less than safe too. The fact remains that a boat can be built to fully comply with the CE requirements and yet not pass the BSS, because the BSS is prescriptive and the EU directive is not. N

Road lobby or no, this is all about cost. The majority of the cost today lies in wages. One man with a 38/44 tonne truck can achieve more ton-miles in a day than two men with even a big inland boat. If double handling for water is required more men are needed and the costs get worse. Until that equation changes water transport will be in niche markets such as the Denham gravel, waste around London and waterborne aggregates and coal in the NE. Even in Europe the 1350 tonne standard is becoming marginal on costs and water freight is declining. At sea the equation is changed by big ships with small, often cheap Fillipino or similar, crews (and the lack of roads from China to Europe or America). Low cost registration regimes enable the crews to be smaller and cheaper than the DfT/NUS would weaar in a British registered ship. Real freight competition to the roads should come from the railways but the conurbations commuter traffic has political priority ( freight doesn't vote!) and this hampers the running of efficient freight. It is growing by rail though. I don't expect it to grow by water until the cost of fuel outweighs the cost of labour. N

Try Wolverhampton Boat Club. Details on the AWCC website. They have always been very helpful to us in the past. N

Cooking Oil. Warm it up after application- it will act as a varnish when it gets hot. It will of course burn off, but then you just put some more on when you've finished barbying. N

Couldn't disagree with the suggsestion that best of all is to remove rust, but hydrochloric acid is a very effective remover of rust. It can be found in the sort of toilet cleaners sold by janitorial supplies companies, often as xxx hydrochloric toilet cleaner, and is ideal for small pitted areas- because unlike needle guns it will get right to the bottom of the pits and unlike angel grinders it doesnt take away any metal. Squirt it on, wait until rust disappears and wash it off. Dry out quickly- a can of air duster is good for small areas, or an airline, prime and paint. Bog cleaner is usually thickened somehow so it sticks to the pan and this stops it running down on things like cabin sides and bulkheads. The other really good way to get rid of dry rust is high pressure water- at about 40 times the pressure of a top-notch pressure washer. It is at least as effective as grit/shot blasting and makes almost as much mess! Because it's a wet process the paint has to be suitable for wet surfaces, but most of the big names can supply. Wet (underwater) rust comes off lovely with a good pressure washer - and it gets right into the bottom of the pits. N N

If your alternator is charging OK it will be fine. You can happily start an alternator into an open circuit, as you seem to have done, because the charge controller will control the voltage on the output and provide the minimal field required to maintain it. The charge controller isn't worried about there being no current. If you had subsequently just turned the isolator on I don't think there would have been any harm either, though i thinbk the dreive belt might have had a bit of a surprise, depending on how flat your domestic battery was. Again, turning off the "ignition" usually only disconnects the initial excitation power supply. The warning light may come on, or glow, but the alternator is by then making its own field current so it won't even notice. Depending on how it is powered any external alternator controller may get switched off with the 'ignition' as may any instrumentation like Gibbmos, ammeters etc. The charge however should continue to go down the main cable into the battery. However, if your 'ignition' disconnects the main power output, through a relay or whatever then watch out! You cannot connect a running alternator to an open circuit which is what opening the isolator with the engine running is doing. Gibbo and Snibble (at least) will have a better explanation of why, but I think it is all to do with the energy stored in the inductance of the alternator coils which suddenly doesn't have any where to go, so causes a massive voltage spike and either the demise of the rectifier diodes or allows the magic smoke to escape. Interestingly Gibbo and Snibble seem to think that alternators will not come to any harm from being connected to a short circuit, though I'd want to be pretty sure of my wiring before giving that a whirl. N

An electric welder will be much the best, unless your boat is unusually thin. More important is to look closely round the area to be welded, and the other side of the steel to be welded to ensure that there's nothing to catch fire. What is your insulation? Spray foam chars and falls off, rockwool doesn't seem to care much and some polystyrene melts and burns. Other polystyrene just melts. Make sure you have an effective water or foam fire extinguisher handy and stand by with it whilst the job is done. Then don't go away for at least an hour. Inspect all round the weld before you do leave to make sure there won't be a fire after you go. Happy welding. N

Have a look at the hNBOC/horseboating society (I think- Laurence Hogg also maybe) video of horse boating up the Worcester and Birmingham to see how fast locking can be. With two loaded boats, a competent team of 3, proper gate paddles uphill (or the 2'6" square paddles on the concrete locks) and a good road/lock wheeler I'd reckon 3 minutes was doable on the GU. The boats never stop moving- either forward or vertically. BW would not be happy if everybody did it though! I'd love to see another video made of 'how it is done' but this time on the GU- uphill, downhill, loaded, empty and above all using running blocks, before there is no-one left who can remember how. Unfortunately the hNBOC don't seem interested. N

Water injection in aircraft piston engines works for several reasons. 1 It Cooling the air from the supercharger so that more of it can be got in the combustion chamber. More air, more oxgen, more fuel, more power. 2. Because it cools the combustion chamber (steam is an effective absorber of heat), meaning that again more fuel can be put in before problems result. 3. Because it delays the onset of detonation in the fuel air mixture (like pinking, and seriously bad for valves and pistons) allowing higher compression ratios and greater supercharging at low level. This is a secondary effect of 2. 4 The additional water increases the mass flow through the engine. Some of the reasons (cooling, increased mass flow) also apply to gas turbine (jet) engines so the Harrier has about 50 gallons of water on board, with methanol (which also burns) to stop it freezing at 30000 feet. N

Can you get the rudder off? If so its easy to do. You will need a short spare piece of tail shaft. It also helps to have a mate but is not essential. Remove rudder. Disconnect tail shaft inside the boat and remove the coupling and keys etc. Fasten a piece of rope from the outside of the boat securely to the propellor by going down the weed hatch. Secure the other end of the rope to the outside of the baot. Push the tail shaft back out of the boat until it is flush with the gland. Use the spare piece of shaft to push the tail shaft through the gland and bearing, pull on the outside rope at the same time so that propellor and shaft are now free from the boat and the spare tail shaft is stopping the water coming in. Grease the gland a bit if needed to help it seal. Lift shaft etc. from the water, change prop. If the prop is stuck on the tail shaft after you have loosened the nut then I find that dropping the prop and shaft into a vertical bit of scaffold pipe will shift it. Replace in reverse fashion. Re-fit rudder. Done this twice myself. N

I'd go with grind it out, rust treat it ( Fertan/vactan/...) prime and paint. IWe used to do that on warship flight decks and, if done properly would last about 5 years. Then it all got blasted. After painting leave it well alonne until the paint has properly hardened- 2 weeks before any boating and 6 months to be fully hard. Then wax it with a good wax. Some bloke who posts on here sells one and it sems to work well on the boat next to mine. I usually use Turtle Wax or Autoglym (cos the old Queen Mum used to do the Daimlers with it. Every Sunday before the lunch-time G&T I heard.) There are other good waxes available. Since you plan to sell next year you won't need to worry beyond that, but a good polish is sometimes necessary after a few years if the paint starts to fade or chalk/bloom with age and weather. G3 and/or G10 with a proper polisher are good for this. N

Not much of an expert on Volvos, but the helpful people at DB Marine at Bourne End, on the Thames, are. Suggest you try them. D.B.Marine Cookham Bridge Cookham on Thames Berkshire SL6 9SN Tel : 44(0)1628 526032 Fax : 44(0)1628 520564 Web:dbmarine.co.uk Usual disclaimer. Sure it's not a re-badged Bolinder? (Volvo own the Bolinder Munktell name and sold the key-start Bolinder 105x as the 111x series. That's what the 'BM' in those huge VOLVO BM earthmovers stands for) Regards N

It's also possible that the OP has Special clag, manufactured at start-up on heavy loads when the drive belt slips. This is a quite common occurrence on my set-up caused by a huge pulley on the engine and not enough wrap-round on the small as I dared alternator pulley. It's quite helpful because when the build-up gets significant I know it's time to get a new belt out so's it's handy. In my experience, Engineers clag is slightly gritty to the fingers, Special clag isn't. When mixed with old engine oil either are useful for starting bonfires, making the stove smoke heavily in tunnels and causing handkerchiefs to be irretrievably ruined. N

I assume you have checked the blades are clear. The next possibility is drawing in air (often wrongly called cavitation). What happens is that as you go along the prop sucks in a little air, often because the start of the swim co-incides with trough in the waves that the boat creates as it goes along. The air then causes the prop to amke a different noise but also to lose thrust. This causes the boat to slow a little, moving the wave trough away from the point where air can get binto the blades, and stopping the noise. The baat speeds up just a little and the whole thing starts again. The speed changes are not big enough to be noticeable from the boat. The cure is to put the stern down a bit- empty the water tank if it's at the bow or put some extra ballast near the stern. Either can be done as a test measure to see if it cures the problem. This cause would not be entirely consistent with your statement that more grease stops the noise. If it's not air entrainment, I suspect a worn stern tube bearing. The shaft is 'whirling' (sort of rotating off centre) inside the bearing and making the noise you can hear. With the engine off, and at a time when the whirring is present, open the weed hatch and grab hold of the prop and shaft. See if it moves about at all in any direction. Try levering gently with a bit of wood against the blades up/down off the skeg and left/right off the hatch sides, if necessary. There should be little or no movement. If there is movement at some point you'll need a new bearing. The time for a new bearing is a) when you are planning to come out for an underwater paint job AND When the whirring isn't stopped by adding more grease. I would live with it as long as possible. Regards N