Mike the Boilerman

F-i-L used to say the composition of white diesel they supplied varied through out the year, while red diesel was the same all year around. The white diesel had anti-waxing additives which started in October and stopped in March as turnover was high but can't remember what he said about red. He was not surprised however that Webastos ran better on white than red.

I agree. Designing the shapes and cutting them out of sheet steel is the hardest part. If you can find a kit of pre-cut sheets, this is the way to go. Sam Springer used to sell kits of pre-cut shapes to build your own NB with a Halfords welder. Always regret never buying a kit and building my own back in the day. Too many other things going on tho!

How can you tell? I was wondering how big they are....

Not quite, according to my father-in-law whose career was with BP as a diesel fuels chemist....

I had my tongue firmly in my cheek when typing that, you do realise??? If only there was a tongue-in-cheek smiley.....

You did notice those prices are plus VAT, and for a minimum delivery of 2000 litres,. and for heating oil not red diesel? Here is my quote for 500 litres of diesel, still more than would fit in most narrowboat diesel tanks, which has to be delivered to a postcoded address not a canalside wharf: Even the cheapest quote is 74.4p once VAT is included.

Yep, a friend of mine has a SunSeeker with turbocharged Caterpillar diesels. He reckons at full chat they drink 80 litres an HOUR! EACH!!!!! We have it easy in comparison don'tcher think?

I remember as a teenager discussing how tight to tighten cylinder head bolts on our cars, none of us being rich enough to afford a torque wrench. General opinion was the correct amount was tighten them until the thread strips, then back off 1/8 of a turn.

I too found piling hooks too unreliable to trust. Twice I returned to the boat after leaving it a few hours to find one end loose the the boat swinging around on just one mooring line. Now I use only goat chains or mooring stakes. I wonder if this tendency to come unhooked is the reason so many boaters feel the need to moor their boats with the centre line too, usually so tight it is heeling the boat over slightly.

One question raised repeatedly and still not answered AFAIKS, can you move the engine forwards at all?

I was wondering about that. Did they have Locketite back in the days when Kelvin made that water pump con rod? I can't say I ever have problems with bolts ever coming loose once done up suitably tight though. Studs however tend to be loose in the thread when not under tension.

Like Caldy for example?

I’m sure the forum can help you out with that. Where are you?? 😅

That is just their schtick. If all suppliers of red diesel simply stopped selling fuel all narrowboats would overnight become unusable, the value of boats would fall through the floor and their business model of the marina owners flogging moorings at £3k a year each would evaporate. I predict this will not happen, a few red diesel sellers WILL set up selling white at say £1.70 a litre. A proportion of boaters will twart about bringing road diesel in cans but the (fewer) canalside retailers who will switch to white will be doing a handsome and profitable trade selling it to boaters not so stupid as to waste hours of time and effort that could be spent boating, moving fuel in tiny batches from petrol stations into the boat in order to save £3 a day on fuel costs. An utterly trivial sum in relation to the overall cost of boating.

I agree with Barry, your water pump can never have been built in accordance with that engineering drawing as there are no flats machined onto the con rod to mate with the bolt heads as shown on the drawing. Therefore the holes must have been tapped and threaded from new. The might have had studs fitted as per many engine con rods originally, or the bolt-from-the-top arrangement might have just been the factory shop floor staff doing it their quicker way as often happens, and ignoring the drawing. Possibly they ran out of cross-drilled studs the day they built yours....