phantom_iv

You make a good point. I might not have to self-isolate while my hair grows back from a botched buzz cut after all ?

Talking of hair cuts, it looks from the latest regs that you need to wear a face covering while your hair is being cut. Looks like I'm back to cutting my own hair then ?

Realistically none of these things are 100% effective, but there's a balance between benefit and cost, as with everything else. I recall in the early days of this virus we were told that whatever measures we put in place had to be sustainable in the long run, so started out with things like staying 2m apart, working from home etc - if we were too draconian then people would get fed up and stop complying. Probably should have added face coverings to that back in March. And then the government got bullied off course by populist media pressure into a draconian lockdown that of course was unsustainable and they had to lift eventually. With the result that people are now fed up and can't be bothered to comply with masks etc. I do think if they had stuck to their guns, put some sustainable regulations in place to slow the spread without being too draconian and trusted the public to comply then we'd be in a much better position all round now and have a much higher degree of compliance. See also: Sweden. And before anyone points out the death rate in Sweden, yes, I know, they had infection control problems in care homes in common with several other European countries. Personally, I hate wearing masks. They make me feel travel sick on public transport, glasses fog up etc. Can't spend more than 10 mins in a shop without having to go outside for air. But instead of ignoring the regulations I just avoid shops and public transport as much as possible.

I think a one-coat solution is quite unlikely, unless you want the rust to be back in a few months. I'd do something like this personally; - scrape off any loose paint / rust - clean and degrease everything - treat the rust with some sort of rust converter (Fertan or similar) - a couple of coats of Owatrol CIP on the rusty bits / any non-painted metal - a couple of coats of bilge paint, e.g. International Danboline or there's a Hempel one that's similar... both available in Grey (and not many other colours!)... hopefully that's close enough to Silver? Quite a bit of work, but worth doing properly if you don't want to be doing it again in the near future.

Looks like there's two dents in the stern, one each side - could those be from where it contacted the weir structure either side of the gate it got towed off? Would imagine it would have hit with quite a bit of force, plus force of water pushing it inwards could easily have made those dents I'd have thought?

Given it's a 2018 engine that's probably not got a huge number of hours on it I'd be tempted to take it apart and see what sort of state it's in before condemning it. To be honest clearing out the inside of the boat and giving it the attentions of a pressure washer might result in something that doesn't look too shabby. Would have to be pretty cheap though, but I've seen people try to fix up much worse prospects than this one!

You'll need lots of containers to put the countless litres of coolant into, assuming it's keel-cooled. Must get rid of those one of these days...

It is at least in the diagram, so you never know!

Assuming the diagram's been misread and the hot water pipe is connected to the PRV outlet then I'd suspect the cold intake for the mixer valve is actually connected to the mixer valve outlet (as this would be consistent with the same misreading of the orientation). Given the cold feed has a non-return valve built in, this would prevent any water coming out even if left uncapped.

I had to look at it a few times to work out which angle they were looking at... it doesn't help that the immersion heater is in the wrong position in the diagram wrt the top connections (as compared to the photo). It should be off to the right, not on the centreline. Edit: and of course all the side connections are in the wrong place. They've basically rotated the top pipe assembly through 90 degrees - something that it's unlikely you could do in real life without the PRV fouling on the immersion.

Is it really reading 15V, or is that a parallax error and it's more like 14?

Once spent the night in Great Bedwyn - the sound of beeping open doors on a nearby train at the station followed by mass revving of Diesel engines as a class 165 slowly drags itself out of the station doesn't lead to a great night's sleep. It seems one of the pubs has closed since then to make matters worse, and the trains are still there. Would happily not moor there again!

Can’t speak for during the lockdown but having been down the K&A a couple of weeks ago I don’t recall anything east of Devizes being massively busy - in that finding mooring spots wasn’t a problem. However we did go through only a couple of days after a multi-month lock outage was fixed, so situation may have changed since.

Having seen a couple of failed tensioners and compared a chain post-failure to a new chain, I wouldn't say it looked like the chain was trashed. But then I'm sure there are many possible failure modes. On the other hand, I am quite impressed by how many timing failures it takes to trash a BMC ?

Personally I'd run away from a BMC 1.8 because of the timing mechanism. I think I've probably averaged a tensioner failure per week's cruising. Not a fan.

I had almost exactly the same problem... new alternator wouldn't charge either. In the end it turned out I had the warning lamp and rev counter connections swapped (old alternator wasn't labelled). What really confused me was that the warning lamp went off when the engine was running as I'd expect. Not 100% sure after all that that the old alternator was actually broken but no way was I putting it back on to check! Edited to add: I figured it out when I disconnected what I thought was the warning lamp connection and found zero volts between there and ground. Much swearing ensued.

This doesn't look like a horrible bodge at all... leaks like a sieve too. Particularly like the OSB board.

“Quoin post” - thanks! I knew there was a proper way to describe the broken bit, but couldn’t recall what it was.

They've had three and a half, but not sure how many of those they've been using coronavirus as an excuse to slack off unable to work due to social distancing

What's the lock looking like - does it look like they're nearly finished if you're nearby? Picture I saw from a couple of days ago (Attached) clearly shows the problem with the RH gate - if they've done some sort of bodge that involves glueing it back together maybe they need to wait for the glue to set? ETA: one would hope that since they've known about in since March they'd have had time to get a new gate made. But somehow I suspect not...

There was also a broken swingbridge not far down the canal that seems to have been fixed today - maybe they went to help fix that for a bit? Not much point having a nicely fixed up lock if the canal is still closed a couple of miles down the line!

I was wondering wether we'll see a difference between air-conditioned pubs and non-air-conditioned pubs... assuming there's ever enough transmission there to produce useful data. Or that you can ever prove where transmission occurred.

It's so they know which way up to put the boat when it goes back in the water.

Building sites are considerably more dangerous environments than pubs. In neither environment did the staff spend more than a few seconds closer than ~2m away from us. PPE would be quite ridiculous to be honest given the other precautions being taken - especially in an outdoor environment. I'd say that both pubs I visited had much lower risk of virus transmission than any supermarket or other shop I've been to recently, regardless of PPE (or lack thereof).

Haven't been to any canalside pubs yet, but went to a couple of land-bound pubs on Saturday, and everything seemed really well organised in both - had the procedures explained to me on entry in both, both had one-way systems, table service only, distancing between tables, sanitiser available on entry. Very well organised for day 1. In the first pub I sat outside, they came and took the orders and left a tray of drinks on the edge of the table for us to pick up, and picked up the empties from the same spot. In the interests of science I repeated the process a couple of times and was pleased by the repeatability of the results. details taken on pen and paper, to be kept for three weeks then destroyed. In the second one I sat inside, only some of the tables were available for use, and they'd rearranged the furniture and repurposed their function room as an extra dining area. We were offered a choice of table service or ordering via an app (obtainable via a QR code on the menu), depending on how worried you were about keeping your distance from the staff. Details taken online via a QR code on entry to the pub and printed on the other side of the menu. None of the staff wore PPE, I suspect they've left it as a personal choice for them wether to do so or not. Overall a very positive and safe experience from both (although, frankly I'd go anyway). I heartily recommend going to pubs on this experience ;-)