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36national

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Posts posted by 36national

  1. 22 minutes ago, dmr said:

    Is the locker floor permanently below the water line or does it just get a bit wet from time to time due to little waves or turbulent locks etc?

     

    Many, probably most, gas lockers get a bit wet. Derust the floor if required and paint it with a good epoxy and live with it. Don't worry about it, just do a good check for rust every year or two.

    Any sort of false floor including leveling compounds is a BIG risk. Unless it is 100% watertight, and I stress 100%, then water will get trapped below it and rust out the steel floor where you can not see what is going on.

     

    ............Dave

    yes i agree and i ve never been happy with what ive done. ( i hope this comes across from my post) Which is why i made it easy (ish) to remove and inspect the space below. but a vent which can go below the waterline is definately not safe and so far no one has posted a better solution

    what is an FRP lining?

     

  2. dunno if you asking me but ill answer anyway, with a full water tank and too much junk on the roof (usual) then the vent is on the waterline. My boat is deep drafted so im often more or less aground when moored especially  in  unfamiliar places. If a pound goes down or i get washed into the bank the boat will start to adopt a jaunty angle which may mean that the vent goes underwater. hence i raised it. 

  3. i had this problem with the vent being close to the waterline  allthough my gas locker is in the front. I blocked the original hole  cut and shaped 2 bits of 1 inch thick  plywood  to raise the gas locker floor by 2 inches sealed the plywood with blackening drilled a new vent then sealed the plywood in with decorators caulk (as its non adhesive) then blacked over the lot. that was 4 months ago. Ill pull the whole lot out next year to see if there is any corrosion going on underneath. if its ok ill replace it and then pull it out every 2 years which is the maintenance cycle for my wet lockers anyway. I know it aint an elegant solution but if you weld a new floor in then you have a space that you cant inspect and using foam or similar means you re using something which can retain water in a place where it will get wet.  ( i know that plywood isnt the best performer in the wet which is why i blacked it but hey at least its cheap to replace). My BSS examiner said that some pour concrete to fill the gap which he didnt like but didnt fail) I dont like my solution but at least it can be undone with relative ease. A vent hole 3 inches above the floor is about as much use as the proverbial chocolate ashtray on the proverbial motorcycle in the Sahara

  4. love david mack's photo definately deserves a greeno but i dunno how to award one. Im pretty sure i would not have made that jump a) in the first place and b)succeeded in  landing on the hard stuff if i had tried. For a bonus point can we discuss mooring up elegantly when there is a 40 mile an hour wind blowing off the tow path ? I  reckon crash the bow into the bank is as good a way as any of bringing the stern in

  5. I've seen that diagram and it don't bear much resemblance to the pump I've got. However, at least the inlet and outlet are in the positions shown with a grease cup at the top. Then again that don't matter as the pump isn't mounted upright on the engine, which in turn doesn't matter because the engine isn't mounted upright either. 

  6. Conclusion. The Jabsco 5870 was rendered obsolete in 1978. It seems that Kingfisher bought up the old stock in the early 90's altered the mounting plate to fit the kingfisher base engine and renumbered it the Jabsco 5870 KD. In short even if I find one its unlikely  to fit without a degree of McGyvering.  The face plate needs remaking from scratch, the body skimming as Tony suggested,  the pump  body  tapping,  none of which is the end of the world but it still leaves  you  with  a pump which is  a   right    $"%&%£-nard    to get at and which will set you back £44.00 plus VAT when you need to buy one of the 2 impellers currently available in this country.  The owner has decided to replace with a 12 volt electric pump as soon as its convenient, (got to admit it sounds like the common sense decision.) 

     

    Questions:

     

    Does matching flow rates matter that much? Its a skin tank system with a total volume of about 30 litres. 

    Does it matter where the power comes from? Straight of the alternator seems simplest or maybe from the ignition.

    Are there any disadvantages to using an electric pump as opposed to a mechanical one? From an engineering point of view, not the purist in me going,"yeah but its just like err  wrong innit."

    Anyone need spares for a Jabsco 5870 KD?

     

    Thanks for your help and especially Jabsco technical support who were spot on," I've worked here for fifteen year and its the first time I've been asked about one of those."

     

  7. 9 hours ago, Tony Brooks said:

     

    re gaskets, that thin really !! I would guess that cereal packet plastic is 0.1 mm.  I tried 0.3 mm gasket paper and thought it might be too thin with the impeller holding the face plate proud, the cereal packet is about 0.5 mm.

     

    The bolts are slot head 3 BA I think and I can get em but one of the originals is missing and an M4 has been used instead. Theres probably enough brass to tap em out to M5 and use hex heads.

     

    Is there anyone who can refurbish the pump properly ? I dont want to bodge it as its not my bote.

     

    9 hours ago, Tony Brooks said:

     

     

  8. thanks for your replies, am considering an electric pump but was advised against it and didn't have the presence of mind to ask why at the time. (Any ideas?) Sorry but the only part  available on that link is the impeller. My problem is that I can't get the pump to seal properly. Mating surfaces are scratched, gasket is Bran Flakes packet (Ive never even seen an original so have no idea how thick it should be), face plate is dished and the bolts are knackered. its on the engine and working but leaks slightly. Long term it needs sorting properly. 

  9. 7 hours ago, TheBiscuits said:

     

    No, the logic is that most stemposts are angled, so you carefully slide the angle down the cill as the water level drops.  That reduces the chances of getting stuck, as if it jams you just add water and it gets unstuck again.

     

    If you're facing into the lock and your stern gets jammed against the cill with your bow jammed against the gates you might be properly stuck.

     

    Depending on the shape of your bow, you can also overlap the cill with the critical few inches of boat, hopefully enough to open the gate.

    cheers TheBiscuits,  that solves that one then

  10. I've been  down Salterhebble forwards in a narrow boat that is 60 feet long to the inch. Don't know how much clearance there was coz I couldn't find my feeler gauges at the time but I was glad I didn't apply that extra coat of paint. My boat has an elliptical stern  which meant that I could draw it further back  in the lock when opening the bottom gates than might have been possible if the boat had a square stern. Coming down (or going up backwards) the shape of the bow is probably irrelevant as even though you can get a pointy bow further into the angle of the lock gates, you still have to move the gates past the bow in order to get in/out of the lock. I think you'd have to raise the counter by more than a few inches to clear the cill but if you are 60 feet dead with a rounded stern then y probably ok.

     

    Many boaters I met on the C&H said that you were better off taking a 60 foot boat boat down Salterhebble backwards. Dunno why, maybe just because there is less chance of smashing the rudder, so if you're coming up, go forwards  and then you've probably got the best of it.  Besides the short locks, the downsides to bringing an overlength boat up the Calder and Hebble are that the ground paddles tend to not work, the headgate paddles leak so badly that they might as well not be there, also the walkways over the locks are attached to the upstream side of the lock tailgates. So pull the boat forward as soon as the bow clears the cill or the tiller will catch on the underside of the walkway either bending it or pushing the stern under. Many of the locks bear evidence of this kind of contact. At least coming up  you get  find out if you can actually fit into the lock before you have to operate it.

     

     

     

     

  11. Mine did this. The Eberspanker draws a lot of current on startup dropping the battery voltage. This low voltage is detected by the control unit which then has a paddywack and shuts everything down. It would fire up ok with the engine running coz current is supplied by the alternator preventing the voltage drop. It started ok after I changed my ragged batteries but frankly it was never really a problem, not least because I hate the blasted thing. a) it makes a nasty whining noise and b) it'll rag y batteries. I only run it once a year coming up to winter to see if it still works just in case the world runs out of coal. Dunno what the spanker considers to be a low voltage, should be in Tonka's manual, 12.4 sounds quite reasonable though.

  12. 28 minutes ago, LadyG said:

    Not turned fridge on, yet, ran out of fresh meat today, fshcakes tomorrow, real steak burghers next day.

    So we ate the rich in the 1980 s. Now were starting on the middle classes.

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