Ronaldo47

I seem to remember it being said that the restored Bow backwaters would be used to transport building materials for the 2012 London Olympics as a green way to reduce lorry traffic, and that a firm had suitable barges available. In the event, nothing went by water.

This worked for us, but the boat did also have an airing cupboard. It was in 1977, during the very wet Jubilee week.

Fabric tape (Duct tape) is good for temporary jobs, but unless you have folded the end back onto itself to make a tab for pulling it off with, often needs cutting to remove it.

A good quality standard bayonet BNC connector (and the more robust type N connector with screw coupling nut) has a rubber compression gland to seal the cable entry, and a rubber gasket within the coupling nut to provide a waterproof seal when the plug is mated with its socket. This applies to ordinary type of plug with compression nut cable entry. Crimp-type connectors do not have such cable entry seals but special tools are required for assembling them anyway.

Good point about the Llangollen. When I have had Monday or Friday starts, I have virtually had the canal to myself for most of Saturday.

3/8" BSP is 19 tpi, not 18. How accurately was the tpi measured?

To the best of my knowledge there is no standard metric pipe thread. The ISO standard for iron pipe theads is BSP for countries other than the US sphere of influence, where threads based on the Briggs pipe thread are standard ( NPT , SAE Dryseal, NTPF etc). 18 tpi is not a pitch used in the BSP range, but it is used in the American range. From my copy of "Machinery's Guide to World Screws" it corresponds to the nominal 3/8" NPT/API pipe size (approx 0.62" external diameter) . Iron pipe threads are still referred to by the original nominal pipe bore diameters, and are always somewhat smaller than the actual external diameters.

sewage --->> swage? possibly brass thread (26tpi all diameters), bsp parallel or api thread.

Running diesels on vegetable oli is not new. I have a book on diesel engines published in 1912. The author got Dr. Diesel himself to contribute the preface, in which the good doctor mentions that, at an international exhibition in Paris in 1900, one of his unmodified engines had been successfully run throughout on peanut oil, and that this opened up the possibility of diesel engines still being able to be run by using energy derived from the sun after the world's supplies of oil from the earth had been exhausted. Of course, engines were simpler then.

Some 15 years ago we were unable to enter a lock on the Fenny Compton flight because one of the bottom gates would not fully retract into its recess. CRT soon came out and diagnosed it as a piece of wood from the cill that had come away. They fixed it in under 3 hours from the time I rang them.

My understanding is that in the canals' heyday, wages were high enough for a family rent a house on land, and that the "tradition" of families living aboard only came about when competition from the railways depressed wages. I can't think that the canal companies would have tolerated large-scale static residential mooring as it would have slowed down commercial traffic, especially when horse power was the norm. When we first started taking canal holidays in the 1970's, there was seldom need to slow down past moored boats. Nowadays the frequent need to slow down past the stretches of what seem to be permanent moorers, even away from large conurbations, has put my wife off the idea of taking any more canal holidays.

I remember reading that, during WWII, spivs found that the carbon filters of gas masks were very effective removers of the dye from fuel.

We hired a boat at Easter 2001. My recollection is that some restrictions had bern lifted but we still had the bowls of disinfectant for our boots on the boat and plastic fencing at the locks the guide you through a disinfectant-soaked pad. Lots of mud-stained sheep in muddy fields. We had to revise our plans at the last minute when a landslip in a cutting blocked our intended route.

In The Navy Lark his frequent catchphrase was something like "Left hand down a bit" when ordering change of course. The only time I have used an anchor was 40-odd years ago when one of the crew had forgotten to collect one of the mooring pins at our previous stop. We had no spare and at our next stop there was no Armco to thread a rope through. The anchor worked well on the very muddy towpath!

Tungsten has a non-constant, non-linear temperature/resistance characteristic, meaning that the resistance of a tungsten lamp bulb filament at room temperature is about one-tenth of its resistance when hot and operating at its rated voltage. Hence the need for an anti-surge fuse, as the current at the instant of switch- on will be around ten times the operating current at its rated voltage. A tungsten bulb can be used as a rough approximation to a constant current load, because as the voltage reduces, so does the filament resistance, meaning that the current does nor reduce by as much as it would if the resistance were constant.