aread2

An object lesson in how not to insulate with PU board NB Westwood Build (see the pictures near the end).

I concur with Roger on this. You need a good vapour barrier to prevent moisture getting through the insulation. Spray-on foam is it's own vapour barrier. Any sheet material will have many joins and each join must be taped to make a continuous vapour barrier and any edges will be a problem. As for Celotex, it's very good. Better that expanded polystyrene. Our house has four inches of celotex (1 inch + 3 inch board) underneath the tiles and this is equivalent to eight inches of rockwool. When it was installed all the joints had to be taped carefully. You also need to be careful about making dust when you cut it. The manufacturers recommend that you use a knife rather than a saw because of this.

A vapour barrier is now a requirement in building work to prevent vapour getting through to the dew point. Unless you tape the joints scrupulously with board insulation you'll get condensation on the steel. Spray foam forms it's own vapour barrier.

I believe John Mortimer was referring to Rider Haggard's "She".

Try http://autos.groups.yahoo.com/group/vegoil-diesel/ for lots and lots on running your diesel on veg oil. I ran my car on veg oil for five years and 50000 miles.

The Rover car company had a gas turbine project in the sixties that never made it into production. I saw one of the P6 prototypes in the Gaydon motor museum and they have a P5 prototype in the National Science Museum in London. There were a substantial number of gas turbines produced for the cars which subsequently found their way onto navy ships as fire pumps (a firend of mine recounted lugging one around the bowels of one of HMs ships in the eighties). One of these would run on kerosene and would be in the power range required. All you'd need would be a means of reducing the output revs to the required level. Or maybe you could use the pump as a sort of water jet...

I hired one of the few remaining electric hire narrowboats on the system last year. Castle narrowboats on the Mon and Brec have two boats that use milkfloat/forklift technology exactly as described earlier in this thread. Range 18 miles. There are about 5 charging points on the 33 miles of the Mon and Brec, so you're tied to stopping at specific points every night. That said, it was wonderfully quiet in motion, with a faint electic motor whine. The loudest sound was the prop-wash behind the boat. The technology is tried and tested. There is even a modern after-market system from the Thames Electric Launch Company that you can add to an existing diesel powered boat. The technology is all there but there is no off the shelf diesel eletric propulsion system. There's no real advantage to installing such a system at the moment. Direct drive diesel is cheap and readily available. If you need to locate the engine in an odd place you can do it with an off the shelf hydraulic system more cheaply than a bespoke diesel electric solution.

Vegetable Oil. If diesel for the inland waterways becomes as expensive as it is for road vehicles it would be economic to convert a narrowboat to run on vegetable oil. I've just sold my peugeot 405 after running it for 50000 miles on vegetable oil. The car was converted in 2001. I fitted a second 42l tank in the boot with the associated plumbing and wiring, cost approximately £200 and approx. 10 hours of my time, most of which was spent trying to do as little damage to the car as possible. In use, the car behaved exactly the same with diesel fuel and vegetable oil. I'm still a registered producer of a fuel substitute and paid duty to C&E at the rate of 27.1p per litre, declaring the oil as biodiesel. The oil came from the supermarket in 3l bottles (cheapest available). Had I been of a mind I could have collected old cooking oil from restaurants and filtered it but I have other things to do with my spare time. For more technical detail http://www.asmy29.dsl.pipex.com/Cars.html

I believe it also has to do with the flame speed of the gas in question. A jet designed for a particular gas will not function properly with a different gas. If the flame speed is slower for the "new" gas, the flame will lift off the burner and likely go out. If the flame speed if faster, the flame will develop yellow tips etc. It's apparently complicated. Gas Interchangeability

DB built the butty reviewed in WW with hydraulic transmission. It has a cocooned Beta generator in the forward cabin with a hydraulic PTO piped all the way to the stern. Prop is mounted on the traditional butty style rudder with the hoses going to the rudder. It works somewhat like an outboard. I seem to remember the article said it was not intended for long-distance cruising and that the hydraulic gearbox was surprisingly noisy.

There's a boat reviewed in last month's WW with an unusual hydraulic drive. It's a liveaboard butty with a generator in the forward cabin with a hydraulic PTO driving a prop embedded in the traditional rudder for when it's to be moved.

According to the book "Jar Head", this is what US forces in the desert did in the first Gulf war. One of the less popular tasks was burning the poo in an oil drum. A quantity of diesel was added and the drum set alight. The unfortunate given the duty then had to stir to ensure complete incineration.

No. They don't generally give the specification of the car in the papers. You're welcome to have a go if you want

Quote from HSE http://213.212.77.20/pubns/indg286.htm "WHAT ARE DIESEL ENGINE EXHAUST EMISSIONS? Diesel engine exhaust emissions (commonly known as 'diesel fumes') are a mixture of gases, vapours, liquid aerosols and substances made up of particles. They contain the products of combustion including: carbon (soot); nitrogen; water; carbon monoxide; aldehydes; nitrogen dioxide; sulphur dioxide; polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. The carbon particle or soot content varies from 60% to 80% depending on the fuel used and the type of engine. Most of the contaminants are adsorbed onto the soot. Petrol engines produce more carbon monoxide but much less soot than diesel engines.

A thermocouple is a device (usually a junction formed from two different metals) that generates an electric voltage when heat is applied to it. Thus, there is a manual override on the burner (usually hold the knob in) which you have to use for a few seconds while the heat of the flame warms the thermocouple. The small voltage then serves to open a valve and hold it open. You can then release the manual override and the burner stays on because it is now being supplied with gas via the automatic valve. If the flame goes out, the thermocouple cools in a couple of seconds and stops producing a voltage, the valve closes and the gas supply is cut off. Voila! No mains electricity required but there are volts involved. I'm sure there are other designs of FFD which do not involve thermocouples - I could think of one which uses bimetallic strips straight away.

After a few dozen boaters have banged mooring pins into the towpath, I'm sure they'd consider putting in mooring rings.

I saw in one of Waterways World's recent new build reviews that at least one builder is ducting the saloon vents through the bilge and fitting 12v fans in them to give bilge cooled fresh air.

Maffi's boat has fairleads at the front. I am assuming Gary knows which way round to fit them Maffi's Fairleads

It does make the room look wider. I saw a boat at Crick with not just diagonal flooring in the saloon but a contrasting dark inlaid strip to frame the diagonal section and a six inches of straight flooring outside that. It looked like a dance floor and fooled the eye into thinking it was much wider than it actually was. I've also seen it done less spectacularly but no less effectively with the whole saloon with diagonal planking. Sorry, I didn't take a picture of the show boat. I won't need to show it to my builder - it was his show boat.

I have often heard of the 58 foot limit for narrowboats. I have also heard that it is feasible to visit the affected canals in a 60 foot boat, with minor inconveniences. Has anybody experience of taking a 60 foot narrowboat through the locks with the supposed 58 foot limit. I believe it applies to the Huddersfield narrow canal.

Does anybody know which is better: Pigeon box/Dog box or houdini hatch? I understand hatches are a bit prone to condensation and the last thing I want is a chronic drip above the bed.

Also, the shape of the hull underwater can affect handling. The length of the swims etc are all things to bear in mind. Is anybody still making a slipper stern like the one on Earnest?

Open Office Draw is free and is very similar to MS Visio. I've used it to design the interior of my nb (the name's a secret at the moment because nobody else has thought of it and I don't want it imitiators before the build even starts).

I was disappointed with the level of detail in the programme. Generally it was a good high level introduction to the whole biodiesel thing but lacked depth of coverage - a subject you cannot cover in a ten minute segment in a half hour programme. The biodiesel in question was transesterified vegetable oil. The engine in question was likely to be less than fifteen years old. The process of transesterification of the vegetable oil likely used methanol and a sodium hydroxide catalyst. There are two approaches you can take with vegetable oil as diesel fuel. Modern diesel engines are designed to run on fossil diesel fuel and common rail diesels are intolerant of variations in fuel quality. Vegetable oil is considerably more viscous than fossil diesel and has a higher flash point. There are two ways to make it suitable for use in a modern automotive diesel. Either transesterify it or heat it. At 85F vegetable oil has the same viscosity as fossil diesel. You can run an older automotive diesel on straight vegetable oil. I've been doing so for the last four years. The choice of injector pump is important. Lucas pumps have a reputation for failing under the extra load imposed by vegetable oil. It's quite likely that Dick Sawbridge's Land Rover was fitted with a Lucas pump and so would be unsuitable for use with straight vegetable oil. Bosch pumps are more robust. My Peugeuot's XUD9 engine has a Bosch pump. Forty thousand miles ago I fitted a second heated fuel tank, filter and fuel line for vegetable oil. I always start the engine on fossil diesel (if I manage to forget, it is extremely difficult to start on vegetable oil), switching to vegetable oil as the engine warms up enough to make the vegetable oil as thin as fossil diesel. About 500 yards before stopping (just over a minute) I switch back to fossil diesel to flush the vegetable oil from the pump and injectors. I'm too lazy to collect used chip oil and filter it so I buy new oil from Tesco. I am registered with Customs and Excise as a producer of a fuel substitute. Vegetable oil qualifies as biodiesel. Every month I fill in a return and send my duty payment off, keeping my receipts safe. The rate of duty is £0.271 at present. After duty has been paid the oil comes in at 82p per litre. To drive, my car behaves no differently when it is burning vegetable oil. There is no smoke and no loss o performance or fuel economy. Here's a link to my web site which has pictures of the build and discussion of the issues but it's down at the moment.

Why do folk run their engines in gear when they are charging batteries? I can't think of a good reason. I can think of a few to do it out of gear: higher revs = greater charge rate, lower load = more fuel economy.