PeterF

I had an RCR mechanic out for a problem and and he did a quick check over everything and adjusted the fan belts. He used the large set of pliers he had for gripping and removing oil filters, he set one jaw on the end of the adjustment arm and the other of the lug on the alternator and squeezed the two together then nipped up the bolt. Seemed quite useful as the jaws open quite wide. Oil filter pliers

Perhaps you should have registered as "the_real_ditchcrawler" Perhaps knowing this forum you will now set of a spate of registrations using "the_only_ditchcrawler", "anotherditchcrawler" etc. type screen names.

Hi, Regarding the issue of loan / mortage then I suggest you google for "marine mortgage" and that will bring up many of the comapnies who offer mortages for boats including inland waterways. Also suggest going down to newsagent and pick up a copy of an inland waterways mag as these seem to be full of adverts for all aspects of boating. PeterF.

Reading Martin Clark's article it appears that BW will be there for advice & guidance only, leaving the boat steerer as the responsible person and if the BW people do steer then it is with consent. I would imagine that you will have to sign a disclaimer beforehand and the only way you could then try and get recompense if BW employee did damage the paint would be if it was due to negligence perhaps. Is it still better going through under own power than being hauledbehind the tug in a chain of boats using the tunnel sides to steer in places. I may be tempted to try it this year.

Hi, Just had my 55ft cruiser stern narrowboat completed. Boat is about 6yrs old and we bought it 2 years ago which may seem a litle early for a full repaint. When we bought it the paint was mostly sound but the boat had accumulated a lot of knocks and scrapes which had not been touched up and the taff rail had been pulled off and rewelded. Also the original painting had been done outdoors and it had obviously rained on the wet paint so it had a slightly mottled / blemished appearance, therefore when we bought it we factored in a repaint as we got the boat at a good price and have been waiting for the pas 15 months to get through the waiting list. Cost for repaint in two colours with double coach line, sign writing, varnishing external woodwork, some welding, and blacking was between £4,500 and £5,000 inc VAT. We had seen a lot of the previous work as we moor at the boatyard it was painted at and also seen other local boaters who were happy with older paint jobs.

Just to agree with other replies, we moor on the C&H further downstream than Brighouse and have had no issues mooring anywhere between Brighouse and Hebden bridge apart from one occaision of rowdy passers by at pub closing time in Brighouse when we did moor behind Sainsburys. We have moored at all the places noted above and one other spot not mentioned that we like is above Cromwell lock, 3 locks above brighouse as there is a concrete sided section with rings there, some dog walkers but otherwise it is very peacefull being out of the town.

I checked this out and I got it from the internet, a place called coventry industrial supplies, however, I can not find them anymore so perhaps they have gone out of business. Try searching for expanded neoprene sheet self adhesive to come up with other suppliers which is how I found CIS. Peterf

I insulated mine with 3mm expanded neoprene which came with a self adhesive backing and this stopped condensation. Only issue has been occaisionally it bubbles when warm and has to be stuck back up. PeterF.

Alan, Only had it running when moored at the moment and on my list of winter jobs is fastening it down securely after the topic a month or so back which highlighted this danger. Hopefully as the feet are cast they should drill through easily as I have always believed cast iron / steel is softer than wrought. Guess I am going to find out soon. Cheers, Peter.

We used to borrow my father in laws boat and that was reverse layout cruiser stern so it was good that the galley was at the rear as someone going into the galley was still in contact with the steerer. Also, the galley tends to have waterproof flooring that is easier to clean if entering the boat in wet conditions. When cooking a rear galley does not cut off the rest of the boat, with a mid galley you have to pass the person cooking to go from lounge to bathroom. We now have our own boat and that is bedroom rear standard layout. This has a large well deck and a lot of glazing between the lounge and front so it is like having a patio which we like on summer evenings. It does not have the detractions of those noted above, but the boat is for the two of us now the children are older and find the mid galley design to be OK whereas with 4 on the boat the rear galley seemed better. PeterF.

Alan, Result : Alan 2 Peter 0 Thanks very much. I was looking at it yesterday after comments that stoves should be fastened down and this one is not and does not have any holes in the feet so I wondered if it was a narrowboat one or not. I discussed this with my wife and she commented that she thought it was larger than most of them normally seen on narrowboats and she was beginning to think it was a domestic unit. I have to say that we had worked out how to use it after trial and error and it can't half kick out some heat, if we put too much fuel in the boat easily gets unbearable, another clue it is a little too large. Looking at the link you gave, rated heat output up to 6.6kW, no wonder we cooked ourselves the first time we really loaded it up. The best thing the link you provided has installation and operating instructions to download which is what I was really after. Once again thanks, Peter.

Result - Alan 1 : Peter 0 I went down to the boat to drain it down today and no I could not empty water back from my Surecal calorifier out of the drain valve I had installed and planned to use with the drill pump. I now know there is an NRV built into the 4 way coupling to go with the NRV I installed. I emptied it using the method big Col listed in Post #13 which was to empty via the PRV, connected the drill pump to the outlet of the PRV pipework, lifted that onto its cam and hey presto. Another indication of the usefullness of the forum. CHeers, Peter.

After a topic on stoves recently, I posted some questions about oepration as there were none on the boat when I bought it for our stive. Liam suggested I post a picture to see if anyone could identify it. Any details would be welcome. Many thanks, PeterF.

Heres our boat fresh out of the poly tunnel after a complete repaint. Been waiting for the repaint to post a couple of images.

I hired a boat with an Alde where you could turn the pump on on its own and it worked like this. Not sure with the erbe though, the boat I bought has an erbe and I wondered about this but have not followed up. However, my thought is that connecting the pump to its own 12V feed could well activate the rest of the unit and to stop this you may need to add some diodes or add a relay into the positive supply to the erbe pump so that when external power is flowing into the pump it does not activate the rest of the unit. The erbe wiring diagram does not show this in any furtehr detail, the internal wiring in the controller would be required. Erbeshpacher instructions including wiring diagrams Mechanically, I would not expect there to be a problem running the pump on its own without the burner running, the unit will heat up as in normal operation. I had been thinking about adding a separate pump on its own switch to do this. However, with various comments about reliability of the erbe units I may leave well alone. PeterF

If you have high pressure rubber tails, i.e. they are between the bottle and the regulator then there has been a known problem where stuff from the rubber can get leached out, the plasticisers I think. I have posted on this before and you may be experiencing something similar but from your description not exactly the same. Previous post on liquid in gas regulators There have been reports of liquids in regulators on caravans / motorhomes, but I believe this is linked to remote gas regulators with HP hoses between the bottles and resultors rather than the bottle regualtors. See clicky and read the pdf document for details

I am afraid you have completely mixed up the difference between the board of trustees and the employees that form the management organisation that runs the national trust. The board of trustees are not employees of the national trust they provide an overview function and goven the dirdction of the trust, they do not provide the management of the trust. The next section covers staff costs, copied below The numbers of full-time/regular employees whose pay and taxable benefits exceed £60,000 fell within the following bands: £170,000 – £179,999 1 £140,000 – £149,999 1 £130,000 – £139,999 0 £110,000 – £119,999 2 £100,000 – £109,999 2 £90,000 – £99,999 1 £80,000 – £89,999 7 £70,000 – £79,999 17 £60,000 – £69,999 19 Thus, for the National Trust to attact and retain appropriate employess they do have to offer a circa £200k salary for the top person in the organisation. PeterF

You could try Stanley Ferry Marina, they are the nearest to Lemonroyd that I know of, half day journey away by boat, not sure if they have a mobile service though. See Stanley Ferry Marina. I have not used them and have no relationship with them. Also try asking other boaters at Lemoroyd. PeterF.

Alan, Are you sure there is a non return valve, have you tried poking something in to check this, there does not appear to be that much room for an NRV to be installed there and the surecal info does not mention it. I have installed one of these calorifiers last winter and did not think there was an NRV, I put my own NRV in with a drain between the NRV and the calorifier inlet and use a drill pump to empty it out of the window into the canal. Peter.

Can't agree more, we had a post a few weeks ago discussing and recomending better prop for one member in which someone quoted reducing rpm by 25% to give same boat speed and more relaxed cruising by changing the prop. Although the one thing that I did find interesting is the before photo showing the wake, in this photo the vortex shedding from the prop can be seen in the wake, just beyong the aerated part of the wash you can pick out the surface pattern of the wake going from side to side. I could scan and annotate the picture apart from copyright concern. If this was a truly technical article I am surpirsed that noone picked up on this obvious illustration of one of the inefficiencies of the previous prop. I do not know if this was because the inital prop was a poor design or what but I have not observed it on my boat before, I will look when I am out next. Certainly, the after picture did not show the same effect in the prop so maybe a PSB* reason for it being better. * - PSB = Pseudo Scientific Bulls**t. As I am an engineer, the marketting people used to say, we do not want to get involved in the detail, just give us something impressive sounding and plausible for the customers, i.e. PSB. PeterF