phantom_iv

My head hurts now. Seems like the throttle would be the easiest to ‘dual’ though, as it’s just a one-way pull against a spring? Personally I’ve just learnt to operate the morse lever with my knee ? That said, a bolt-on hand throttle on the tiller and just using the morse control to engage the gears would at least make some situations easier. Or have a floor mounted, foot operated gear lever to go with it ?

Have to admit I was wondering exactly how such things would work as I wrote that, but thought that as such things exist it must be a problem that’s been solved by now.

Just buy a generic lawnmower throttle control lever and bolt it to your tiller. Or else one designed to bolt to a gearstick for disabled drivers if you need a heavier duty one. Might even get away with having a second one to operate the gearbox? Run them in parallel with your existing controls like a dual control setup. Then if your new throttle cable goes ping you still have some control...

Can't work out if the 17.7 miles he's travelled in a year is the total distance his boat as moved, or the distance between the two furthest locations he's been to in each direction. Either way, that's a day's cruise! ?

I disagree, the barge was much nicer than the George (at least last summer). Better location, better food, better service, better beer, better garden. But as for Claverton the pumping station's well worth a visit if you can see it on a running day.

This sounds like nonsense to me. I would (perhaps somewhat naively) expect the most efficient (and therefore least polluting) speed for a vehicle to be at the point at which it is just in top gear with minimal engine loading, so probably more like the 55mph range ish bracket for a lot of vehicles. I guess however it depends on wether you're measuring pollution emitted per minute or pollution emitted per mile... clearly the latter is far more useful unless people leave their house and decide they'll drive for 30 mins then stop, rather than going to a destination a set distance away...

"Zero emission capability" would imply to me that some sort of diesel/electric hybrid would be acceptable as long as it is capable of running on batteries only in urban areas... where presumably plentiful charging points could be installed canalside. Then out of urban areas (where realistically charging points will be like hen's teeth) you can fire up your diesel and continue as before, with the difference being that you've now got a much better battery pack on board than before. As long as the regulations are sensible and have exemptions for historic vessels etc then I can only think that the development of mainstream marine hybrid technology and battery packs and subsequent price reductions can only be a good thing. Is it just me who quite fancies the idea of a vintage diesel engine driving a generator powering a modern lithium battery/electric motor combo?

Petrol outboard plus point: easy to clear stuff off the prop. minus point: sucking plastic bags through the cooling intakes is a less pleasurable experience.

Certainly is an awesome sound - having checked wikipedia it turns out the railway locomotives bolted 6 'triangles' together to form an 18 cylinder, 36 piston engine. Then installed two of them to give 3300 horsepower. Now if only someone made a miniature version that would fit in a boat...

They were called deltics because they had six pistons in three cylinders arranged in a triangle (like greek letter Delta). The two pistons in each cylinder opposed each other and (almost!) met in the middle. Very cool!

But what about all the jobs create developing / manufacturing / installing / maintaining these self-checkouts? I make sure to use them so I keep all these people in jobs. And generally much better jobs than waving something in front of a machine that goes 'beep'.

The hire boat case is an interesting one. I don’t really see how they could go after the hire boat company. The hire boat company has definitely not entered into a contract with the mooring provider, however they spin it. They could ask for the details of the hire boat customer, but I can’t really see as providing this would be in the interests of the hire boat operator, so they can just say no or even cite data protection laws. It’s not at all like speeding offences in a hire car as that’s an offence (against the law), mooring outside Tesco’s in Reading definitely isn’t!

But as there have been no laws broken here prosecution is impossible. This is purely a civil dispute, for breach of 'contract'. This is pretty much the same deal as parking 'fines' on private property (unlike actual parking fines on public highways / council owned car parks which are actually fines as parking restrictions there are enshrined in law - albeit local bylaws in many cases).

Which has no legal basis, other than to encourage you to pay the money you've promised them in the 'contract'. It's basically an invoice, rather than a fine. Which you don't have to pay, unless you so choose. The only legal recourse they have is to take you to court for breach of contract. For which they first have to prove that you've knowingly entered into a contract. This might prove tricky in front of a judge with even below average common sense, especially if you have a good selection of photos, maps, etc... what they like to call 'evidence'.

Not a lawyer but as far as I'm aware they have no legal basis to 'fine' you, they can only claim that you've entered into a contract to pay them a stack of cash by mooring there as per the terms set out in the sign. However if they haven't made the sign obvious then they're in a rather dubious position to claim you've entered into a contract of which you can't reasonably be expected to be aware. Therefore I'd invite them to see you in court if they really intend to press their claim.

Luckily this wasn't a narrowboat, but a smaller and lighter vessel - the second time round it still dragged, but still bought me the extra couple of minutes I needed to get help before ending up on the rocks.

Good point - I'm still not sure I'd want want to pull up too many 10s of metres of 10mm chain though with a decent anchor attached. I'd love to see that technique demonstrated by a narrowboat on the tidal thames though with say a 25kg anchor and 30m of chain ;-)

Bear in mind that chain is (intentionally!) very heavy, so unless you have a powered anchor windlass you'll be needing to be able to lift the combined weight of anchor + chain to recover it following deployment - or at least be able to lift it over the side if you're considering it an emergency consumable. However bear in mind in may not set and hold fast on the first attempt, so you may need to recover it and have another go. You might think its unlikely that your anchor will fowl some unattached debris on the river bed that'll stop it setting properly - but that's exactly what happened to me the first time I deployed an anchor in a dangerous situation following an engine failure... not fun! It should be fairly obvious from the design of the danforth anchor that it's designed to dig in and resist horizontal forces, not vertical ones - so having the intentionally heavy chain keeps the anchor aligned to the sea bed, then you need a long enough line to make the angle the anchor is pulled at approximately horizontal - the more line you have the better this approximation is, but obiously there's a tradeoff with storage and handling (& indeed cost!) So I'd say get as much chain as you think you can manage with your anchor, then attach plenty of rope.

Thanks for the responses, we’ve managed to find someone to take a look in a couple of days time. We’re hoping it can be coaxed back into life to run for another day and a half, which is all we need to get home. After that it’s definitely new engine time!

Thanks!

Does anyone know of a decent engineer in the Hanwell area who’d be able to put a BMC 1.8 engine back together? Timing chain tensioner has gone ‘ping’ again, some unscheduled valve/piston interaction has happened resulting in us going nowhere. Any recommendations for someone who could resolve this mess back into a working engine very much appreciated... at least we’ve broken down outside a pub - small mercies!

"04/08/2016 @ 14:09 This Lock is now open, as the damage was not as severe as first though. The boat has been removed from the lock and the navigation is now open"

yes, it turns out that this was a miscommunication over a dodgy phone line. Very much as everyone expected, the headline items are bent pushrods and broken rockers, caused by failure of the timing chain tensioner. All in all could have been a lot worse, hopefully will be back in service soon!

Someone came over to look at it today - I wasn't there to see for myself but two broken valves and a camshaft apparently... hoping that is all that is required to fix it. Oddly it was working fine last time it was run - the only think I can think of is that the timing chain slipped when trying to start it, leading to an unscheduled piston/valve interaction. Thanks everyone for your help and suggestions!

Did you ever get the impression that Apple would rather that you just bought a new ipad with more storage? The optimize space on device looks promising up to a point, but if you really want to get rid of the photos from the device and just keep them in the cloud then it seems like google's photos app will do what you want (albeit your photo's will be in google's cloud rather than icloud). I haven't tried this myself though, so can't comment from personal experience. How much you trust external organisations to back up your photos and not lose them may depend on your own level of paranoia.