MisterDave

There's a narrowboat around here with a big Eminox stack up the back, sounds lovely.

That's the same amount my 1979 Springer has lost!

Without actually knowing about any specific incident, that's basically what I assumed was the problem with putting in rings, someone's tripped or cycled into a ring. I've come close to tripping over rings a few times, it's easily done. Perhaps what should be put in is a series of small squares of grass or dirt, level with the hard surface but left soft so that mooring pins can still be hammered in. At one location where we struggled to moor I found the outer shell of a couple of rawl bolts in the stonework well placed about 50 feet apart, a couple of M8 eyebolts would have enabled mooring. I now carry eyebolts, just in case. Don't think I'm cheeky enough to start drilling the edging stones and installing my own though!

Seriously considering adding a large battery SDS drill to my boating kit to help get mooring pins through surfaced towpaths, following a breakdown incident earlier this year where I had to haul the boat half a mile just to be able to moor up and have a look what went wrong!

When our bottom pulley decided to break and fly off right on the junction at Kidsgrove (on the thursday afternoon before a bank holiday), Dave the RCR/Canal Contracting guy went so far above and beyond the call that I'm still singing his praises months later. Although he was on call for the bank holiday weekend he used our boat as a base to work from so he could keep on working on our engine between callouts. He sourced us a new pulley, took it away and machined it to accept the jabsco pulley on the front, sourced us a new oil seal, all on a bank holiday weekend! The only reason the repair took until the tuesday to complete was difficulty accessing a lathe. You'd be lucky to find a boatyard anywhere to do a repair of that magnitude on a bank holiday weekend!

RCR are great, possibly the best money you could spend!

Pair of cheap computer speakers will do what you need without taking up too much space.

They looked quite nice! they also looked secure, and there was someone around every time I passed (which was literally dozens of times over the long bank holiday weekend we were broken down there). If you do take the mooring, check out the Blue Bell pub about 50 yards further up the towpath from the bridge, they do some really nice beers.

We were broken down near there for a few days earlier this year, didn't see any actual trouble, all the locals seemed nice but saw dodgy looking (older) youths drinking cheap beer at 9-10am near the station steps a couple of times. To clarify, are you talking about the offside moorings between the tunnel and the bridge or between the bridge and the junction?

So Peel think they can transfer the "debt" onto the new owner of a boat? Is this in writing anywhere? Sounds pretty unrealistic to me!

I just went in the garage and got out my Ring brand 50 amp charger. Uses 1488 watts according to the manual. I would be surprised to see efficiency anywhere over about 60% on any of these modern chargers, They weren't built with efficiency in mind. Other thoughts occurring to me. The IG2000 might suffer a shortened life if it spends all its time running at 75% load, pretty much as you'd expect if you bought a car and only ever used it for towing caravans uphill. If the only thing you intend to run is a charger you don't really need an inverter generator, a more conventional genset might offer better value for money.

I have one of those Kipor IG1000, It's a good little generator but I wouldn't really expect it to run a 50A charger. Typical 50A charger is going to need around 1500w, IG1000 is rated at 900w. IG2000 should just about do it.

I probably shouldn't be weighing in on this issue because I'm fairly new around here, but with 20+ years experience of administrating and moderating forum and chat room environments I feel an urge to say that there does seem to be a massive increase in "dick" behaviour when certain people on this forum end up in the same thread. This is not doing anyone a favour, there is no argument that can be "won" by acting up and the ones who suffer are EVERYONE ELSE ON THE WHOLE DARN FORUM. To the perpetrators, you know who you are, please stop bickering and spoiling everyone else's mood, just put each other on ignore and both declare victory or something!

I was just thinking how pi55 taker would be a great name for a pump-out boat!

Small children don't have a monopoly on that, unfortunately. A few years ago, an acquaintance of mine's car was in a major collision and the Police believed he had left the scene of the accident and absconded, they even put a piece in the local newspaper looking for him. Weeks later they found his remains where he'd been thrown hundreds of yards in the collision and died in a ditch. Emergency services should not even be looking for stickers, they should assume that casualties exist until they've made sure one way or the other.

Get rid of all mooring fees? That would be enough to persuade me and other people who keep a mooring in a private facility to stop handing over my hard earned every month and dump the boat on the towpath somewhere. Marina owners everywhere would be going bust!

I had the same problem, I had to get delayed whiplash in order to make the person who hit me do the right thing, although I'll never know if it was my aggressive claims company or the large number of greasy bikers kicking on his house door at 6am which persuaded him. In future I will always think i can smell alcohol on the breath of anyone who runs into me, and I will always get whiplash (probably true due to surgical appliance in my neck, can't even turn my head quickly without causing pain), everything can be handled by the police and solicitors that way. If he'd settled with me as we first agreed he would have been paying about £400 out of his pocket, just the actual replacement part costs for the damage to my bike, in the end I received £3600 and he appears to no longer have a car. Someone with more legal training than me might correct me on this. What you need to do is obtain a Norwich Pharmacal Order which will force the bank to disclose the details of the account holder. Unfortunately you may find that the "account holder" is actually a hopeless addict who sold his bank card to fraudsters for a £20 bag of drugs.

I'd figured the same, became very obvious after a 270 mile journey in a boat with a BMC1800 and an eroded prop which tried to do an unsteerable 0.3mph on tickover and drew complaints at 1.4mph, people are complaining based on engine pitch and nothing else. I'm in the middle of converting my little Springer to Electric drive, I plan on playing a recording of an old Bolinder or similar everywhere I go for a year as an experiment to see if that reduces the whiners. After the first few slow-downers on my last journey I adopted this as standard technique, GPS lives on a patch of velcro on the hatch, anyone shouting slow-down gets my actual speed as a reply.

I wonder if any of these volockies would still work for free if they realised the chuggers are on £9 an hour!

No they're not obliged to, and the ICO won't be interested either, I tried all that already. They're not obliged to stop sending you "network information" texts as long as you're still a current customer. I tried this with Orange so many times I lost count, it had no discernible effect whatsoever and when I sought the help of their store staff they gave me attitude for trying to stop their marketing spam. I tried it with Vodafone and they will remove you from their marketing list but they automatically re-add you the next time you give them any money which makes the whole process pointless. I was removed and re-added over 30 times, was even removed twice by the complaints handler inside the CEO's office but was put straight back on after topping up both times. Eventually the CEO's office even stopped trying and told me to eat my spam, causing my temper to fail and the phone to end up in half. I was in a position where I needed to be contactable 24/7 for health emergencies but my livelihood was at risk if I wasted too much time on frivolous calls, trapped between a rock and a hard place. I was even considering doing without a phone and getting a pager to eliminate the network spam, but as a last resort (and only expecting another failure) I tried Three. Top marks to Three for treating me like I'm a paying customer rather than cattle!

You can get these features as an Android app if your phone doesn't already have them. I had all that and more on my Symbian Nokia a decade ago. Unfortunately some telemarketer types already use the "ring twice in quick succession" trick because it persuades people to answer calls they would otherwise ignore, as well as spoofing a "local" number and various other blatant criminal behaviour.

Just checked with my neighbour, his was a genuine XHose Pro, the black one with the brass fittings, it came apart at the end, pipe separated from fitting after about 3 or 4 uses. He's returned it and got a refund. The Victorians had another good solution as well, for those rare occasions when beer isn't suitable. Commissioned by Queen Victoria herself to make sewage-laden Thames water safe for the royal household to drink, it's still available. For some reason it's now down to about half the RRP on ebay as well. It's called a Doulton British Berkefeld gravity water filter and the cheapest I've managed to find is here http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/171392054936

The same applied to a boat I recently helped to move, in fact it is so deep that my arm isn't long enough from armpit to fingertip to reach the skeg at all but when the weed hatch didn't seal properly due to a slightly distorted flange it let in a frightening amount of water in just a couple of hours. I'm still partly in shock that so much water got in so quickly through such a small gap, but I learned to never underestimate a leak! I temp-fixed the leaky distorted weed hatch in a similar manner, but using stern tube grease applied in a thick layer with a 1/2" paintbrush. A bodge I'll admit, but it lasted the next 200 miles and got us home just fine and didn't need peeling every time the hatch was opened.

Most operator service messages are sent without an associated number and therefore can't be blocked by number blocking software. I already tried this before I left Orange, I didn't really want to end a phone contract which I'd had continuously since 1994, tried just about every other possible remedy first. Three don't seem to be aware when a user is tethering. Someone I know was recently leaving his phone in hotspot mode in a tupperware box on the roof of his boat every night and inviting all the other people in the boatyard to use it to download films, he managed to use over 100GB one month and 85GB the next month, on the £15 a month PAYG "unlimited internet" package, his phone still works fine and he's had no extra bill for the data. My own data use has been mostly tethered as well but is yet to cause a problem. The only issue I have with Three is that their coverage indoors is occasionally poor, at one friends house my phone will only work in the toilet. I'd be annoyed if I lived there and had to keep my phone on the cistern to get a signal. I have been informed that this is at least partly due to the house being made of very dense "railway bridge" bricks which are a problem for all 3g and 4g signals.