Jess--

Mines brass (both cap and hole) but I have recently seen one that had an aluminium cap in a steel hole. the boat had been laid up for a while (being refitted) and even a lump hammer and chisel weren't opening that fitting

Did we cross paths at some point, we came off on Friday (ending up at thrupp that night) having been up to lechlade and down to abingdon. I was on my own boat (Sark) and was travelling with another boat called Freedom

also in the narrows of a bridge a lot more water (and other rubbish) has to go past your prop making it that much more likely that you will foul something

Tried the map for my location and it came up with 4 points within a 35 mile radius 1. inside a holiday park (as in you can't get to it unless you are a guest) 2. at a hotel (guests only) 3. at a toyota dealership 4. at a caravan site (3kw max / out of service) charging at home would be limited due to being at the end of the line on overhead cables (it drops everything pretty well when we test a ride that pulls 10kw so trying to use 22kw wouldn't work), in short an electric vehicle wouldn't work here at the moment

easiest way is with an oil sucker, look for one of the pela pumps or it's copies, go for the tall thin one rather than the short globe shaped one especially if sucking through dipstick tube, the globe shaped ones can collapse if they have to suck hard (cold oil / thin pipe etc) an alternative to the dipstick tube is to see if your engine has a low level oil filler (a lot do but I don't know BMC engines) and stick your pipe in there, you can use the thicker pipe which means it can suck a lot faster

it's under the water and close to the surface so it's just as much at risk as the rest of the side of your boat some people choose not to black the tube and have no problems in the time they own the boat but others have had tubes fail (rusted through) causing all sorts of problems including sinking the boat

cannot settle on a consistent running speed (think of an old lawnmower that revs up and dies down all the time)

on a bigger scale.... our wood burner / boiler runs a 10 inch flue (that's diameter not length), in a cold winter it gets a little soot that will burn itself off with a cone of orange & blue flame at the top of the flue about once a month (looks and sounds like a jet engine). in a warmer winter where the boiler isn't running as hard / hot it slowly builds up a very tough layer eventually reducing our 10 inch flue to a 3 inch flue, we have found that nothing will shift it effectively while the flue is in place so our solution has been to remove the flue and hammer through a length of angle iron (with the aid of a sledgehammer) for reference the burner pictured runs all our heating and hot water for the house and workshop 28 radiators and 2 500 litre hot water tanks

it looks like you have installed DOCtoPDF on your machine and that has reset your browser preferences to use their page as your homepage. I would start by using the uninstall link at the bottom of the page

as long as your engineer knows that the engine and gearbox are separate parts there shouldn't be any need (assuming you mean craning out the engine) usual method would be... 1. undo propshaft from gearbox 2. slide prop & propshaft backwards to give some clearance 3. remove gearshift cable 4. either remove gearbox oil cooler from engine or gearbox (depends which is simpler) 4. remove gearbox from engine

Mine have angle iron welded to the swim to form a tray and stop any lateral movement and then a plywood board over the top to prevent anything dropping onto the batteries. a 1" ratchet strap goes over everything to secure it all, ends of the strap are bolted to the angle iron frame

the only time I have seen a smaller boat make effective use of a bowthruster was while waiting in a lock channel on the thames while some work was being carried out (unexpected 30 mins of work). all available positions on the fairly short landing were taken (narrowboats 2 & 3 abreast) a dutch barge (probably a piper replica) of around 60x12 came down the channel and then held position mid channel for about 20 minutes. Watching how they were handling it they had it in gear astern (very slow / just enough to hold against the current) and were using the bowthruster roughly once every minute, with each burst being less than half a second (just enough to give the bow the tiniest nudge) over the 20 minutes I would say the boat moved less than 6 feet forward & back and around 2 feet side to side which I thought was pretty good considering that working against the current they were effectively reversing continuously for those 20 minutes

from what I have read relating to bow thrusters on larger vessels there is some damage from cavitation but a lot more occurs from scouring when a thruster pulls silty water through the blade, effectively you end up with a very wet sandblaster close to the tips of the blades.

I was always taught "Assume you are talking to someone that can understand the language but will take everything literally" I.e. if told to "put butter on the bread" expect to see a sealed container of butter placed on top of a loaf of bread

I have also attached the gps track of this trip so the exact path taken can be seen tracker-export.kml and yes we did nearly miss the turn at brentford, the whole of the trip down had been at tickover or just above (we even went out of gear for a while and drifted with the flow) but that turn back against the flow took a surprising amount of power.