Keeping Up
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Posts posted by Keeping Up
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We normally leave a couple of fan-heaters set to frost protection level for the whole winter, they normally use between £35 and £50 of electricity for the whole period, depending on the weather.
Unfortunately this year at some point the thermostat on one of them went wrong and so we are due a bill for about £150.
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There is one just a few miles further south, near Simpson
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It's the end of an era ...
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3 minutes ago, vicvdb said:
There was a curator at the little museum before the Blissworth tunnel who was seriously explaining to an American how the canal had to be shallow enough for the horse to swim ahead with a rope attached to get the boat through the tunnel.
I once sat opposite a group of Americans in the bar of the Boat Inn there, and heard one of them ask what "legging" was all about. I solemnly explained that to get the boats through the tunnel they trained the horses to lie on their backs on top of the boat so they could propel it by walking along the roof of the tunnel. They believed every word of it.
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We moved here to MK (next to bridge 83) over 30 years ago, and we still love it!
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Yes a full length boat sinks by 1" per ton, so this one should go down by 2" per ton, but if they are all near the stern you should manage to sink that end by more than 3" per ton; and you get about 12 people per ton, so you could push the stern down by 6" with maybe 24 people. We once "recruited" 20 people from a road in Birmingham, and they all thought it was great fun to stand on our boat and get us through a bridge!
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7 hours ago, MartinC said:5 hours ago, Athy said:
Not much of an advert for the city, is it? "MK, so grim that even CMers won't stay there".
I like it, let's keep that rumour going!
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The most convenient supermarket is at Wolverton; there are plenty of other shops nearby too. You can easily moor, almost anywhere, depends what you are looking for. It's nice by Campbell Park with a pleasant uphill stroll into the City Centre (though MK isn't really a city), but everywhere has good piling to moor to & a good towpath.
1 minute ago, frangar said:From what I can gather the CM brigade are moving into Milton Keynes so you might have fun finding a space at all.
No, there is plenty of space nearly everywhere.
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1 hour ago, frangar said:
You know nothing......ask the vlockies at Hatton.....they are hydraulic.....thats why they yell at you if let them lower under their own weight.....?....an earnest discussion ensued...I offered to show them the patent drawing....and now I get left on my own when boating through Hatton.....?
Absolutely! I have the same argument with them every time - plus arguing that as a narrowboat I only need one gate opened at any time. I remember speaking to the (then retired) locky who had first put up signs saying the paddles should be wound down. He had meant that after dropping the paddles (under their own weight, of course) you should check, using the windlass if necessary, that they had seated themselves properly and he was almost screaming with frustration at his signs being mis-interpreted in the way they are now.
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Our first encounter with Hatton was in 1969, on a Wyvern Shipping hire-boat. After climbing 19 of them we found there was a stoppage because of a broken paddle so we had to turn around and go all the way back down again!
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12 minutes ago, Jerra said:
They should have been instantly banned when it happened, if they could be identified.
It's not always that easy. Back when I was a mod I had a running battle with a group of people who continually changed their login names (at any one time they had about 4 names each) and had dynamic IP addresses that changed every time they logged on. Identifying and banning them was a major challenge.
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I have another way of testing, without a bubble tester. Once a month I turn off the gas, at the bottle, overnight - without the boiler being lit, of course - and in the morning I look at the auto-changeover valve. If it has not turned red, I know that I don't have a leak.
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19 hours ago, Tacet said:
Generators are strange things. They are all near-silent to their owners and yet, noisy and annoying to everyone else.
Once when were moored up for the afternoon, a boat moored behind us and then proceeded to carry a small petrol generator half way alongside us. He placed it right next to our open lounge windows - which was the limit of the length of his extension lead - and started it going. When I remonstrated with him about it, he replied that it was too noisy for him to use it near to his own boat. Strangely enough, every time he returned to his own boat it would mysteriously stop working; after half a dozen times he gave up and carried it away again.
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13 minutes ago, Higgs said:
Most marinas off CRT waters will be paying 9% - full or empty, on the full capacity reckoning. Access fee. Not charged to online moorings, on CRT water.
Our 80ft on-line mooring on CRT water is classed by CRT as a small marina, and we have to pay them a fee (roughly equal to the local EOG fee) whether it is full or empty.
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19 minutes ago, pearley said:
When I was looking for a new one, all the -2 versions had the same symbols as that. I took the view they were referring to lumpy water boats where the atmosphere inside might be a touch damp. A Narrowboat shouldn't really be much different to a caravan in my view.
That's exactly what the man from Kidde told me, when I queried it.
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18 minutes ago, Bee said:
I think there could be a case for removing dead boats for scrap before licencing a brand new boat but I wouldn't like to argue that in a pub full of boaters
I remember when they did that on the Norfolk Broads, there was a rush by the various hire companies to scrap old (and sometimes historic) boats in order to licence new ones in their fleets.
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When our boat was built, the plate was only just below the water line at the extreme stern. I always reckoned it would be better if it were slightly lower, and this was proved to be the case when the extra weight of overplating lowered it by between 1 & 2 inches. The boat goes slightly faster at the same engine revs, steers more easily and positively, and most of all stops in a much much shorter distance because going into hard reverse doesn't lift it clear of the water to suck air in.
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I find that a bicycle cape is perfect on a trad. With the doors shut and the slide pulled half way, not only does all the water run away smoothly but also the inside of the cape fills up with lovely warm air.
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5 minutes ago, Scholar Gypsy said:
That's very fine (does it correct for BST/GMT?!) I got mine from an Australian website, which needed a bit of twiddling to get it to work in the Northern hemisphere.
Yes, there is a separate image for each month and BST/GMT are highlighted in different colours. I actually centred it on Birmingham but that is near enough for all the English and Welsh canals.
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1 minute ago, Scholar Gypsy said:
Here's one of my favourite gadgets, a sun compass. Only requires a watch to operate it. Oh and some sun.
Not unlike my Satellite Sundial, for finding the Sky TV satellite.
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I think the waviness is crucial. Plastic pipes can expand and make a snaky zig-zag whereas copper pipes stay straight and have to move the radiators.
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Our first boat's heating circuit was all copper. I was amazed when I saw how much the radiator at the far end would move as the copper expanded (the previous owner hadn't allowed for this and wondered why he kept getting leaks or broken radiator brackets)
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1 hour ago, LadyG said:
I'm not sure what to do with my only long warp, it's currently on the anchor, what length do I need for the Thames,
Anchor warp
Locking rope.
As a single hander, I assume one rope to centre line in the lock?
Thames locks require you to use two ropes, ideally bow and stern but you can usually have bow and centre or stern and centre if that is easier.
Do you have some chain on the anchor or is it just rope?
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3 hours ago, pete.i said:
I am so glad that I no longer have a boat. The hassle was just getting too much.
I know just what you mean. After more than 50 years with canal boating as my primary passion, I think I will be selling my boat later this year.
Engine seems to be getting louder
in Boat Building & Maintenance
Posted
Maybe the drive plate or possibly the gearbox.