Osprey Sprinkler

Fairy snuff - I'm obviously looking in the wrong place! This was several years air dried, which is obviously no help in a hull, but I can't get that around here for any less than £35 a cube. Perhaps that's just the softy southerners' price. Whereabouts in Notts, out of curiosity? Sounds like I should pay a visit.

Simplified wooden narrowboat diagram here (PDF) I found myself in rural northern France with an empty Transit a couple of years ago. So, caving in easily to one of my many weaknesses, made for the nearest timber yard. It seems that oak is plentiful in northern France, and there are also plenty of small, family-run sawmills ready to sell it off at less than half the UK price. I picked up about half a cubic metre of dry oak in stick for around £250, which I reckon is in the region of £15 per cube. Granted this was mostly 26mm boards, too thin for narrowboat building, but they had meatier stuff lying around. You have to haggle, and they were worryingly open to accidentally forgetting about VAT in return for crumpled notes. Fortunately, customs didn't ask for a receipt - they just wanted to know if I had any stowaways. So, if you can transport several tons of oak over or under the Channel, you might be able to shave a little off the 12K.

What a lovely image! It's a long time ago now but I did bring in the best part of a tree, one or two slices each week, tied to the car roof. The other students thought it was great - they would give me a hand lugging it in before it was sawn up and machined to size. A few of them also got the bug when they realised they could find lovely wood dirt cheap in the rough at sawmills. But I did draw the line at pitch and cow dung. Chris - of course you're welcome to come and use my bandsaw as well. But I'm based near Gatwick Airport so, unless your boat is on the Wey and Arun , I doubt if this is much use to you. Ash

I do believe you're right, now you mention it. Do you think there are any vacancies in the "getting paid a fortune for watching somebody else work" business?

... and I thought it was one swell foop. I quite like the Glaswegian "wally close" (wally rhyming with galley) meaning "posh" - so posh they could afford to live in a tenement flat with the communal entrance hall (the close) decorated with ceramic tiles (wally). Wallies are also (ceramic) false teeth. And the standard request to sling your hook - "Away raffle yer doughnuts". (Aye, an' I hope yer next shite's a hedgehog!)

I know sweet Felicity Arkwright about traditional boat construction but I've cut plenty of scarf joints in my time. Routing using a jig is entirely possible but a bit OTT unless it is cabinet work you are after. I would cut a simple plywood template to mark an identical Z shaped profile on the 2" side of each plank, then cut the entire joint on a band saw. You will need a roller stand to support the other end of long timbers (fifteen squid from Axminster Power Tools). The plank will be a bit wobbly because it is standing on its narrow edge while you saw - holding it against a square offcut cures this. Use the widest blade the saw will take, with fewest possible teeth per inch - 4 TPI skip tooth is good. If you don't have a band saw that will take 5" depth, ask around in the pub. Every secondary school has one, as do local sawmills and amateur enthusiasts, and all are open to bribery with beer. Once, in desperation, I even enrolled on a woodwork evening class just to get access to their machinery. If you do borrow a machine, buy a new blade for the job (only £10 to £15); you get the benefit of a fresh, clean cut and you've done the owner a favour. Failing that, as Carl points out, cutting the joints by hand really isn't a big job and it's good for the soul. Use a decent rip saw for the long, shallow cut (some dodgy general purpouse saw from Homebase really will be hard work) and make sure it is sharp. Scribble candle wax on the blade if it binds in the cut, and use plenty of lubrication for the operator. The angled undercut mentioned by others is generally a good thing, discouraging edges from popping up as the wood moves over time. I seem to recall that Alan Herd was shown using scarf joints on Dover - if he can do it, you will find it a doddle. Ash

That'll be why it's a bit uncomfortable then!

Do you mean the Home Service sonny? (... turns down squealing from cream NHS hearing aid!) Not to mention the Light Programme and the Third Programme.

Jack frost coming to visit - beautiful ice crystal patterns growing up the inside of the bedroom windows.

There are some nice before and after Vactan pics in Moley's build blog: Talpidae build blog

Agreeing with most of the replies above, you basically have to choose between a durable finish and a maintainable one. A durable finish such as a lacquer or even a two-pack epoxy product will last longer than oil or wax. You might get a few years use in light traffic areas, especially if you ban shoes or wear braces so tight you hover, but you'd be lucky to get much more than a year's wear around the back door. When it does start to look scruffy, which it surely will, you then have a major job stripping and re-applying a durable finish. Oil (or wax) will give you a natural looking finish that you will have to maintain by topping it up periodically, particularly in heavily used areas. But this topping up is just a wipe over with more oil using a rag, as long as you remember to do it in time. This gets my vote every time. Regarding lacquer over oil - "it was decided" a while back that I should paint a door frame that was previously waxed wood. I have tried everything from sugar soap to meths and wire wool, plus a lot of sanding, and the paint still peels off if you so much as break wind in its general direction. Never again!

... Now you mention it, having to cross out all the farthings in the school arithmetic books and make sure the answers were still correct!

Having discovered how difficult it can be to plan a simple cruise around winter stoppages, I wonder how the carrying companies kept their businesses running during the heyday of the system. The volume of traffic presumably meant that there was at least as much maintenance to be done back then. I suppose large numbers of navvies could be thrown at the task but overnight work can't have been easy. Was planned maintenance done during the summer to make best use of natural light? Are there any records of maintenance stoppages? Could the canal companies afford to close vital arteries for weeks or even months on end as we do now? Obviously some locks were doubled but most weren't - How did we cope?