Ronaldo47
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Posts posted by Ronaldo47
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I did get this on my very first holiday on the canals more than 40 years ago, but never had it in subsequent years.
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Haven't seen genuine Mole-brand grips for years: didn't they use to be made in Newport, South Wales? I have an American-made Vise-Grip and some unbranded ones. One pair has jaws with serrations terminated in smooth tips, the serrated jaws of the other terminate in a criss-cross pattern that will grip screw heads in any orientation. Also good for removing nails that have lost their heads from wood: attach grip and then use a claw hammer or wrecking bar against the grip's jaws.
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Mole grips are also excellent for cracking brazil nuts without crushing the kernel.
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Just been doing this a few days ago when re-handling some old gardening tools. I roughly measured the thin end of the socket ( bent sheet metal sockets rather than solid, so readily accessible), drew a circle that size on the end of the shaft and used a plane to rough it to size. Marked the inside of the socket with a carpenter's pencil (dry earth or mud would do) and pushed in and twisted the taper firmly. On removing, the graphite showed the high points, which were then trimmed with a Stanley knife and rubbed down with a piece of 60 grit abrasive paper wrapped around in a cone shape. Repeated as often as neccessary. to get a good fit.
I do have a spokeshave, but the plane/ knife/abrasive paper worked Ok. You need to mount the stick in a vice to use the plane, and have to keep unclamping, turning and reclamping to roughly shape it. For the second phase you can hold the stick in one hand and whittle with a knife with the other hand, resting the stick on the jaws of the vice to steady it without having to clamp it. Doing this with a spokeshave, as I did for the first one, involved more repetitive clamping and unclamping, as you need to use both hands to draw a spokeshave. I found it was quicker to use the knife.
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Walkie-talkies can be used in places where there is no mobile coverage. There are plenty of places with poor to non-existent mobile coverage. We have virtually no mobile coverage indoors, and we are in a built-up area. In addition, for users like ourselves that are on PAYG rather than on a contract (not much point having a contract when we have no signal indoors), calls can be relatively expensive if you need to make lots.
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Pre-plastic, toilet seats used to be made of wood, we had them in the Victorian house I grew up in. I remember reading in the papers that when the Pope visited Ireland, for the toilets they put up for the crowds, they had WC seats made of wood by the woodwork departments of local schools and technical.colleges.
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A good smear of Vaseline on the contacting surfaces, as well as over them, can help prevent corrosion. Vaseline is very different from lubricating grease. Unlike lubricating grease (which is designed to stay put), Vaseline will flow readily under pressure when clamping up battery terminals and so does not affect contact resistance.
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I wonder how travellers get on with taxing and insuring their vehicles? Many are constantly on the move with no permanent home address.
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The object of any business (other than statutory "not for profit" ones) is to make money. The stuff about mission statements, social responsibility etc. that often gets spouted these days is usually just pure BS.
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Thinking about it, wind might not have been such a problem to a fully-laden narrowboat. Many old pictures show fully-laden boats sitting right down in the water, thereby offering much less exposed area to the wind than modern leisure craft, which have considerably more air draft than water draft.
Taking a run at the gate under power was the only way to negotiate some of the locks on the Southern Stratford in the 1970's due to the state of the gates. The joints on some were so loose that, when the top of the gate was fully engaged in its recess in the lock side, the bottom was not, so you had to use the power and momentum of the boat to push it fully home to enter or exit.
More recently, the only time that comes to mind was winding at a badly-silted winding hole on the Ashby a couple of years ago. Progress had been so slow compared with our last visit some 30 years previously, that we had decided to abandon our intention to go to the end.
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I would think that, when horse power was the norm, the canals were still relatively new and either hadn't had time to silt up significantly or were regularly dredged, thereby offering lower resistance to passage than many of today's shallower ones.
On the revving solution point, I recall some 30 years ago doing the 4 Counties Ring and having to really gun the engine on that long straight embankment on the Shroppie, due to a strong cross-wind blowing off the Welsh marches. It was a real-life example of the vectors I had learned about in school maths lessons, as we were going straight ahead with the boat at an angle to the direction of travel, with the bows close to one bank and the stern close to the opposite bank. I guess in horsepower days they would have had to wait for the wind to drop.
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I did wonder how the Minis coped with all that weight in "The Italian Job".
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14 hours ago, MtB said:
Electricity travels at the speed of light (IIRC from skool)....
Electricity is something that people think they understand, but things are not always what they seem. You can describe and predict electrical behaviour mathematically, but sometimes I think no-one understands what it actually is, which is why early theorists came up with the concept of the ether as a mysterious, undetectable, medium capable of supporting wave motion. Electricity can be considered as a form of wave motion, like waves in water, and you can consider electrical energy to be transferred as kinetic energy in the same way that a wave in water transfers energy without the actual water molecules moving laterally , other than oscillating to and fro.
The speed of transmission of electricity in a cable is the speed of the wave of energy, not the speed of the electrons. This wave speed is only the speed of light when the wave flow is in in free space. When a dielectric is involved, the speed will be somewhat lower depending on the relative dielectric constant of the material surrounding the conductor. This is because a flow of electricity in a conductor is accompanied by an electric and magnetic field in its surrounding medium, and the interaction between the fields and the medium affect the speed of propagation of electricity in the conductor. The velocity factor of the signal in the coax cable for your TV is typically about 0.7 of light speed. In fact, depending on how you arrange Maxwell's equations, you can consider that the flow of electricity in a conductor results from the passage of the electric and magnetic field around the conductor, which is effectvely what happens in the transmission lines known as waveguides, hollow metal tubes that are used at microwave frequencies.
But this is all rather irrelevant to the original query so I will say no more.
14 hours ago, MtB said: -
11 hours ago, David Mack said:
Actually in most cases it is CRT's responsibility to clear it up. If waste is fly tipped (which is what littering/dumping amounts to), then it is the land owner's responsibility to clear up the mess. And in most cases boaters dumping their rubbish would be doing so on CRT's land.
Which is why CRT won't withdraw most refuse facilities. They face the costs either way, and it is generally cheaper to deal with it when the stuff is mostly dumped at specific locations, rather than scattered across the whole CRT network.
It's like the present situation with Civic Amenity Sites run by my local County Council. Since restricting the types and quantities of rubbish they accept, and introducing charges for some types to save themselves money, there has been an increase of fly tipping in the carriageways of country lanes. The cost of clearing this up falls on the local council, not the County Council. So for the County Council it is a win-win situation as they have cut their own costs, but at an environmental cost and a financial cost to the local council. It really annoys members of our local council but there is little they can do about it.
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While it is practical for a single user of a bin to know what has previously been deposited, someone depositing something in a communal bin has no way of knowing what or how much stuff of a particular category has already been dumped by others. Possibly the only way for Biffa to ensure that the 7kg limit was observed was to prohibit the deposit of any refuse of that category.
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When I was a child, dad used to get up at 6AM to go to work and always used to put a cup of tea on my bedside table before he left. It was always stone cold by the time I woke up, so I got used to drinking cold milky tea.
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The last time our family used them (pre-lockdown), London's Boris Bikes had to be returned to a docking station to terminate the hire period. .
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The vicar's earth closet "flushed" itself after every use, so no exposed poo to attract flies.
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When I visited the Centre for Alternative Technogy in North Wales in the 1970's, they had a vertical bale of straw in the gents that visitors were invited to urinate into instead of the conventional urinal that was also provided. A notice said that you could do this at home with a bale in your garden or greenhouse, and later use it for compost.
When a mixed group of us used to hire boats, the ladies always went on ahead on the way back to the boat after our nightly pub visits, so that the guys could (carefully!) fertilise the nettles that always seemed to grow so abundantly along the towpath fence.
As a matter of interest, what do the modern composting toilets "flush" with? I have books on domestic sanitation that describe the "Earth Closet" that was invented (and patented) in mid-Victorian times times by a vicar, and widely used on the railways at remote signal boxes and other locations well into the 20th century where there was no access to sewers. A 1960's book recites the then-current building regulations that had to be met for using them for dwellings, incuding the need for access to only be possible via the open air. They used fine dried earth or the ash from stoves or fires (signal boxes were provided with a sold fuel stove cum oven for the signalman's heating and cooking, so there was a plentiful supply if ash: sieving to remove clinker and unburnt fuel was recommended), and some types automatically deposited enough ash to cover the deposit after each use, operated by rising from the seat. The dry and sterile ash was apparently effective in rapidly dessicating poo.
In UK patent law there is an order for costs that can be awarded to one of the parties called the "Earth Closet Order", after a case which involved litigation over a patent for such a device.
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The great thing we found about a Monday (or any other non-Saturday) start is that you virtually have the canal to yourself for most of Saturday.
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Just watching "Take Me High" on Talking Pictures TV (FV channel 81), a 1973 Cliff Richard film I had never heard of, set around the Birmingham canals. Cliff converts a working narrowboat to a live-aboard, and is seen driving a small hovercraft on the canal underneath spaghetti junction while a business rival is stuck in his broken-down car in a traffic jam on the flyover above.The plot is a bit corny but some nice views of the canals.
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On 03/08/2021 at 10:19, ditchcrawler said:
There were electric bikes wizing up there a couple of weeks ago, not the pedal assist type,
We have two elderly "Powabyke" electric bikes that can be used in either assist or power mode. They are limited to 12mph in power mode. While new electric bikes with power mode can no longer be sold for use on public roads, ours were legal when sold and are still legal to use under "Grandfather clause" provisions of the present legislation.
N.b. our nearest canal, the Chelmer & Blackwater, is well beyond their range, so it wasn't us!
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One of the boats I hired in the late 1970's had a gas boiler providing gravity circulation. When I installed my own central heating (it was during the energy crisis, 3 day week, days of the mid-1970's) I designed it so it would work without the pump if the mains failed (the boiler would have beren operable from 24V from batteries). You need to use 22mm pipe rather than small bore, connect the hot water input to valves at the tops of each rad and the cold returns to the bottom, and use slow bends wherever possible rather than short right-angle bends to minimise flow resistance. Slow bends seem to be difficult to find these days, so a pipe bender might be needed.
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I think you will find fewer canalside pubs in some parts of the system than there were 30 years ago, many having closed well before covid. There will also be more semi-permanently moored boats that you have to slow down to pass.
On the positive side, you should find more towpaths in better condition due to the extensive use of piling, and the occasional presence of volunteer lockies to help you through certain flights, although some posters on this forum consider them to be a mixed blessing.
Lack of maintenance
in Waterways News & Press
Posted · Edited by Ronaldo47
It could be effectively over 100% for one year, I think 1949 or 1950, because for the very wealthy there was a tax on capital on top of the 95% income tax, levied on the interest from savings and other unearned income.