StephenA

As its been openly discussed on various forums for about 10 years and there are countless youtube videos demonstrating the process then the prior art clause would come into play.

There was (still might be) someone who lived in Waterside Drive in Market Drayton who basically had a serious problem with the boats on Tom's Moorings - if you parked your car on the road and he thought you were off a boat you'd come back to find notes on your car including one he'd sent to BW about the wood smoke and engine noise from the boats. He wanted it that no one could light their wood stoves etc. BW had simply ignored him and the advice from the mooring caretaker was to ignore him... But again - why buy a house near a canal or a set of moorings if you don't like boats or canals?

I agree - if Lead Alum batteries worked as well as ( or people claim better than ) Lead Acid then they'd be commercially available. The fact that they aren't suggests that they don't.

So there are two problems here: 1) The man from the house digging up the towpath and basically being an unpleasant moron 2) The CRT "Volunteer" claiming that the boat wasn't licensed properly (although given that CRT are having problems providing me with a list of currently licensed boats for the Boat Register I find it highly unlikely that anyone knows)

There are quite a few pubs along the stretch - we drank in most of them!! There's quite a bit of industrial archaeology too - you used to be able to see the remains of one of the old Douglas Navigation locks below Dean Lock, and at Appley Lock there used to be a tramway that came down under the railway bridge. The two shallow locks there were navigable when we were then back in the 1990s

The L&L between Wigan and Liverpool is very much an overlooked gem of a canal. We kept Mintball moored in the arm at Crooke for several years and really enjoyed it.

Worth posting about on C&RT's Facebook page?

Seems to be pretty much a cut and paste from a website post from 2007 : http://blog.hasslberger.com/2007/01/how_to_convert_a_lead_acid_bat.html

I don't quite see your point - the OP was asking if it was possible for the trust to charge for visitor moorings and several people have pointed out that charging for moorings isn't actually unusual and I was just giving another example. I certainly wasn't complaining.

You have to pay for mooring on the river in Worcester - you buy a ticket from a machine : its a flat rate per day or per part of per day

But a whole duvet full?

https://twitter.com/GMPstretford/status/622793053598797824

I've seen them use that method to move the fireboat round Gloucester Docks

Isn't that the current state of the railways?

I suspect Microwave and a 240v alternator. 15 minutes certainly isn't enough to put much power back into the batteries or to reheat the calorifier.

Ah but once the engine has stopped you can turn it back on......

I'd have been tempted to find the fuel cut off valve......

I didn't say I was buying a single coach bolt - I said a single one costs 60p. The single unit (and tiny blister pack) cost way over the odds. So If I need say 10 then its cheaper for me to go elsewhere where in "bulk" they cost significantly less, and if I've got to go somewhere else to get the bolts at a reasonable price then..... And when I can see 100% markup between a chandlers and a general hardware company for a common everyday item.....

Yes true but when in many cases chandlery companies are frankly taking the piss when it comes to pricing things... for example 60p for a single coach bolt..... you have to go somewhere else or bankrupt yourself, and if you've got to go somewhere else for those then you'll pick up the rest of the non-specialist stuff you need to finish off the job.

It's certainly the only way you'll learn the various foibles of your boat (something that NO "expert" will be able to teach you) such as how much engine it needs to stop in normal situations, any "drift" it develops in reverse, the way it feels when everything is running sweet, the way it feels when there's something on the prop... and so on.

I think its a combination of the two. If the regs covered the real life safety issues and got rid of the crap that surrounds it then I suspect there would be less of the jobsworths... Do they have quotas to hit? i.e. are they expected to raise X% of failure notices. The plastic spill rail fiasco was a prime example where the BSS went totally wrong in my opinion, and as far as getting any figures from the BSS office on accident stats on which they based their decisions, or pre and post BSS incident rates.....good luck.....

We had fun with the fuel filler on our gunwale. BSS says that over spill must not be able to get into the boat (actually it would trickle onto the back deck where we could put sand on it and clean it up in a controlled and safe way) but must instead spill into the canal (Which of course is a pollution incident). We pointed out that putting a a permanent diverter on the gunwale would be a trip hazard so the BSS in forcing us to implement one "safety" measure would actually introduce another risk, which in our opinion was much bigger (having never had a spill from the fuel filler). So we made a magnetic attached diverter and a little notice.... subsequent inspectors didn't even flag it as an issue (even without the label there or access to the diverter). But I think this was the same inspector who deemed that putting an earth wire to one end of the 2 inch cable which connected the BMS to the hull rather than to the BMS itself was a failure as it used the "chassis" (sic) of the boat as a power return.... oh and he also rated the wiring on the control panel for the bilge pump (via a relay) was "insufficient" for the current load of the pump when it only carried a few mA to switch the relay... Oh and the gas detector (which was near the gas fridge and cooker) had to be removed as the power feed for it was too close to the gas line... Total jobsworth, total arse. Oh and don't get me started on plastic versus metal spill rails......

I didn't say 4 abreast did I? I just pointed out that there was a navigable channel wide enough for one boat, and yes I know its been like that for years - but given it's location between a bridge below a busy junction and a lock should it really be like that?

The other week there was space to get 1 boat down the canal between their rafts of moored boats - luckily we met the boat coming the other way about 20 feet from the lock....

That's pretty good - I trust the alternator repair and the coffee and cakes were up to a similar standard.