Ewart Hodgson

I have a Parson's F type too, on the back of a Perkins P4. I never bothered too look up the capacity but just keep the oil between the two marks (not that it changes much anyway). I have been doing this since 1991 and all seems fine. I'm sorry that's not a proper engineers' answer, but it may at least calm your nerves that you do not have an immediate crisis!

Well... if I can raise a dissenting voice... I have always blacked the bottom. Except at the very edges, where paint is sometimes scraped off, and at the bottom of the skeg (mirror-shine), I find that almost all of the paint (bitumen) is still there after 3 years, and that's on the Llangollen, not famed for being the deepest waterway. If you are new to boating, you may see more scrapes in the first few months, but when you have the hang of letting the boat feel for the channel, you will be amazed at how little damage is done to the bottom plate paint. As well as using a pressure washer, I use a garden hoe to scrape the weed and shellfish off (yes, really!), then when all is dry, I duck tape a paint roller to the end of the hoe and paint it that way. A bit messy but not impossible. I also replace the anodes, every time. With anodes, a scratch will be well protected (and you can see it works - all but very recent scratches, still shiny steel, become 'anode-coloured'). Why? My boat is many decades old and was built with steel only 1/4 inch thick (roughly 6mm) even on the bottom. On the plus side, with this painting it has remained 6mm thick except right at the outer edges, where two small sections at the turn of the bow have had to be over-plated ('under-plated' may be a more descriptive term). I think these are the places that meet the shallows first when if I am coming in to moor. It seems bizarre to me not to do this. (But then, I touch up the paint under my cars every year too, which is probably why they are still fine after 21 and 35 years respectively. I reckon that 2 hours doing that is far less hassle than buying a new vehicle. Similarly, messing about with a hoe is much easier and more pleasant than replating your hull...).

Yes - that's precisely the unit I meant. I use it every dry docking, and it's reliable and re-assuring (and also highlighted one eroded thinned area in good time).

Steel hull with wooden tops are usually cheaper than all steel. For people who just cruise, the maintenance requirement of wood (I reckon on 1 week painting every 2 years on a ply cabin now 25 years old) can be a nuisance and depress prices. For someone living on the boat, though, and therefore being with it a lot, spending this time painting may be no bother at all. Looked after properly, wood lasts well and is warm and easy to work with. For the hull, if you are not going to get a survey, there are two things you may be able to do for yourself (this is NOT the same as having a surveyor, but may be better than nothing). 1) - very cheap - buy a tyre tread thickness gauge from Halfords - the kind that have a 'T' shaped bodt and a plunger that pushes down into the tread. File the plunger into a point, without shortening it. This is a simple way of finding out how deep pits are, compared to surroundine steel (assuming you have the boat out of the water). 2) more expensive - buy a hand-held ultrasonic tester - I got one from a place in Newcastle that makes them for about £100. This will tell you how thick the plates are (and the kind I mentioned comes with calibration plates), and as long as you can get good acoustic coupling, you can use it from inside the hull. Pay particular attention to the water-line, which is not well defended by anodes as bits of hull can remain damp but not immersed in the bulk water, the edges of the bottom late (thinning due to erosion, mainly) and the inside of the bilges, especailly near welds. As I said, this does not make you a surveyor - all it does is add to the common sense you will need anyway. There is one last thing: especially at the cheaper end, buying a boat is only part of the expense of using one as a home: licences, insurance, maintenance and paying for awkward work-arounds for not having a land life all add up. If you want to do this because you really love the canals and cannot imagine living any other way, then good luck. If you are thinking of it primarily to live cheaply, then you may find better ways on land.

Quite a lot of people use (high frequency) CB for communication between lock and boat.

This is probably way out of date, but there was one in the litlte side-arm at on the top of the Crow, side-decks still visible at duck-platform height.

Mine is on the cold inlet side (between the tank and non-return valve, obviously), just because my calorifier is a vertical domestic hot water tank which, despit all of the nonsense in waterwas magazines about them not being suitable for boats, has worked perfectly since being fitted in 1993, and space considerations made it easier to put the expansion tank on the inlet side. It should make no difference to its function.

I moor on the Llangollen, up at Chirk, so use the canal for part of my trip wherever I am heading, and have seldom seen or had any serious problems. Yes, some people do take a while to learn to handle a boat, and yes it is a pity that both the hiring and selling industries encourage people to move from no boat straight to a 10-ton steel monster without ever learning the basics in a small dinghy.... but a bit of patience and courtesy usually makes potential problems into wry-smile memories with everyone still enjoying their holiday. Even at Hurleston locks (where the inexperienced do things in the wrong order and leave the short intermediate pounds very low). The people who frighten me most aren't hirers, they are canoeists who have no idea how little direct-ahead vision boatmen have in tunnels, and how little they may hear over a vintage engine in the echoing cavity, and who seem to be incapable of reading notices prohibiting them from entering. In twenty-odd years (twenty odd years? ) of mooring at Chirk, I have three times detected an unlit canoeist in the tunnel only at what felt to me close to the last moment.

"Strange how paying for the best doesn't seem to apply to the wageslaves lower down the pecking order." It applies throughout. If there are lots of people who are good enough for any job, compared to the number of jobs avaiable, you don't have to pay much. If there are very few people who are good enough, compared to the number of employers chasing them, you need to pay a lot to get one of them. It's the way the market works. You see the same thing with rock singers, footballers etc; it is not just managers. The reason that high pay tends to be seen at leadership level more than at artisan level is that one dodgy carpenter will probably not affect the whole company, but one dodgy leader can destroy it (and a really good one can make it: think of Eddison, Bell, Gates etc). Where the critically-rare talent is in a job other than management, then that person may well be paid more than their manager (think rock star and his manager).

By 'fried', did you mean that your batteries were over-heating, or just that they died? If the latter, how deeply do you discharge them? Avoiding more than a 50% discharge (= no load EMF of 12.2V from memory, but please check as my memory is unreliable) tends to make batteries last much longer than letting them discharge more deeply?

Well... I moor on the Llangollen, and have never understood the M25 comments. You tend to pass other boats coming the other way at a rate of about one every 10 mins, which seems a nice compromise between peace and saying 'hello' to people once in a while. I think the people who experience frustration are in a kind of gaggle of boats that all race up from Englad to reach Llangollen by mid-week and then race all the way back again. Avoiding that pattern would probably be a good idea. On the plus side, you will have water here even in a dry summer.

I would far rather my licence money paid decently for good leadership than small change for third-rate leadership. The difference, spread between us, is only pence each. How many private sector organizations that control a system the size of BW's are led as cheaply? BW need to attract good people, without asking them to undergo pay cuts to do so.

This does sound like a P4. The Saucy Mrs Flobster has a P4, driving the prop via a straight-through (non-reducing) gearbox. It has so far been completely reliable; it came from a crane built in 1962. These engines are, in character, somewhere between a crude vintage unit (thump........... thump...) and a modern diesel (dagadagadagadaga), being more chug..chug..chug..; quite restful. They appeared in the mid 30s, and one powered the first diesel car to exceed 100mph, according to a book I have at home. The tractor boys have lots of spares. There is, though, one really annoying thing that you will need to fix (trivial): the dip-stick pipe is placed in-line with one of the big ends, and in clockwise-rotating engines oil tends to slop up it and dribble out of the top. Lightly thread the top of the pipe and, before you are running the engine, replace the dipstick with a bolt screwed (just finger tight will do) in the top of the pipe, just removing it when you actually need to check the oil. Tumbling to that turned an oily engine bilge (tray) into a spotlessly clean one. Good luck!

There's an easy way to deal with most awkward waveforms unless they are so crude they are like the one drawnm in red above - as long as the voltage reaches the usual peak at some time in the cycle, this will work. Find a capacator (a few microfarads will do - but rated up to 500V). Connect a voltmeter (on an appropriate *DC* range) across this capacator. Connect a mains plug across the capcator, neutral to the negative side of the capacator and live to the positive side via a diode, with the cathode end of the diode connected to the capacator's positive terminal. Plug it into your inverter for a few seconds, then unplug and immediately read the voltmeter. The value will gradually fall but you are not interested in that - it is the first reading you need. This will be the peak voltage. Divide that by the square root of 2 and you will get the rms voltage of an equivalent ac source (the rms voltage is what people always mean when they talk about, say, 240V AC). For reference, a 240V AC source will yield 339V peak. NB - leave the meter in place until it reads zero, or some small voltage less than 10. In the system I have just described, the meter is the only disharge route for the capacator. You really do not want to touch a capacator still charged at 339V DC: it can kill you. Obviously, you also don't want to touch anything while it is plugged in either; put the thing in a box of some kind just in case. If you are not happy with messing about with high voltages, ignore the above and get a professional in.

I have been really impressed by International's 10-year exterior paint (from B&Q). I have used it mainly on wood and it has at least lasted 3 years (which is better than most rivals!) and still looks good.