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Too good a bargain to be true?


EdwardMeades

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I have since been reading about the serious problems regarding Moroccan-built boats around that period. You may be lucky and this could be a reasonable boat that was delivered and finished to a good standard. However alarm bells would certainly be ringing and I think the chequered history would be a major reason for the seemingly low price. Let us know if you do go and view. Good luck. 

 

Edited by MrsM
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1 hour ago, EdwardMeades said:

It said on the apolloduck listing - didn't realise it missed this on their site.

 

https://narrowboats.apolloduck.co.uk/boat/narrow-boats-semi-traditional/646779

Its still not worth anything, if you pop in there tomorrow you would probably get a mooring. I didn't see mention of a calorifier and am surprised at polystyrene in 2007

 

Just read the Apollo site and it mentions calorifier and insulation as foam

Edited by ditchcrawler
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3 minutes ago, EdwardMeades said:

Ah so what about the myth that finding a mooring is harder than finding a boat?

 

It's a myth.  Finding a good mooring at a price you're willing to pay can be difficult, but there have been a lot of marinas opened up in the last 5 or 10 years.

 

Moorings for a 57 foot boat range from about £1,000 (unserviced, North) to over £30,000 (full residential, London) a year.

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13 minutes ago, EdwardMeades said:

Ah so what about the myth that finding a mooring is harder than finding a boat?

 

Good to know though, I'm new to this and blogs only get you so far.

Permanent residential moorings, especially down south, can be tricky. Depends where you want to be. If the boat is in your ideal location then a guaranteed mooring sounds a nice bonus. Some marinas have waiting lists, others have spaces all year round. For what it's worth* I think it looks a lot of boat for the money. As mentioned earlier, any big teething issues should be sorted. I note that Liverpool based ESF boats were in business for a reasonable length of time - 2006 till 2015. Obviously getting a pre-purchase survey would be very important, as would spending time checking everything yourself. 

*I'm a newbie too and therefore not worth very much! 

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From what i understand after finishing the steelwork they coated these boats  with a layer of filler..something to do with protecting it from the atmospheric conditions in morroco..but people have been having problems over here  getting paint to stick to it..as in it comes up in enormous blisters..

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3 hours ago, stablemabel said:

From what i understand after finishing the steelwork they coated these boats  with a layer of filler..something to do with protecting it from the atmospheric conditions in morroco..but people have been having problems over here  getting paint to stick to it..as in it comes up in enormous blisters..

Yep

 

I actually went to look at this boat. The thick surface coat is peeling away, as you can just about see in the picture, and to his credit the broker said it'll need a bare metal repaint and so we knocked the cost of that off what we'd have sold it for otherwise when I asked how bad it was. On the plus side, it's filled in untidily with paint and so untidy rather than corroded

 

Chatted with the guy in the yard who said there's no chance of a DIY job with an orbital sander, and if I really wanted him to do it I was looking at 12k and an April slot.

 

Someone else was viewing, so I didn't bother hanging around to look inside.

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2 minutes ago, enigmatic said:

I actually went to look at this boat. The thick surface coat is peeling away, as you can just about see in the picture, and to his credit the broker said it'll need a bare metal repaint and so we knocked the cost of that off what we'd have sold it for otherwise when I asked how bad it was. On the plus side, it's filled in untidily with paint and so untidy rather than corroded

 

Chatted with the guy in the yard who said there's no chance of a DIY job with an orbital sander, and if I really wanted him to do it I was looking at 12k and an April slot.

 

Thanks for that info - it explains the price perfectly.  To get a £45k boat for £32k you need to spend around £13k on it!

 

Scabblers are only a few hundred quid though! ;)  A large portion of the "back-to-metal" repaint is labour ...

 

If you only care that the metal is protected and don't care about the shiny finish, a bucket of hammerite smeared over bare metal would get you quite a bit of boat for the money from what I can see. 

 

 

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1 minute ago, TheBiscuits said:

 

Thanks for that info - it explains the price perfectly.  To get a £45k boat for £32k you need to spend around £13k on it!

 

Scabblers are only a few hundred quid though! ;)  A large portion of the "back-to-metal" repaint is labour ...

 

If you only care that the metal is protected and don't care about the shiny finish, a bucket of hammerite smeared over bare metal would get you quite a bit of boat for the money from what I can see. 

 

 

Not sure how evenly the coating would come away which might be the bigger issue. The guy definitely wasn't touting for business when he said he reckoned it'd need grit blasting to get it all off

 

I was happy to redo paintwork in principle (I say, having just put down a deposit on the boat with the best paint job I've seen in my price bracket :D ) but figured that this might be beyond my DIY skills or patience. That and knowing it was Moroccan and suspected there might be other interesting design choices made (I failed to find the threads about issues linked above but did find someone's rant about the firm that built it conning him)

 

Still, I think if you only care that the metal's protected, the mess that's already there does the trick and the fitout looks fine from outside. Best pay asking price though: they'd already turned down two offers by last Thursday

 

-

 

Speaking of quite a bit of boat for the money, someone with a tolerance for square windows snapped this up from ABNB less than 24 hours after the listing went up http://pdfs.abnb.co.uk/3679abnb.pdf

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3 minutes ago, enigmatic said:

Speaking of quite a bit of boat for the money, someone with a tolerance for square windows snapped this up from ABNB less than 24 hours after the listing went up http://pdfs.abnb.co.uk/3679abnb.pdf

 

I'm not surprised it went quickly.  That is a lot of boat for £29k in the current market.  Not to my taste exactly, but I love the super-sized hatch arrangement!

 

Hmm ... I'll get out the tape measure and engineers' chalk ...

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11 hours ago, TheBiscuits said:

 

Thanks for that info - it explains the price perfectly.  To get a £45k boat for £32k you need to spend around £13k on it!

 

Scabblers are only a few hundred quid though! ;)  A large portion of the "back-to-metal" repaint is labour ...

 

If you only care that the metal is protected and don't care about the shiny finish, a bucket of hammerite smeared over bare metal would get you quite a bit of boat for the money from what I can see. 

 

 

Trouble is that you have no idea what the metal is like underneath, as the filler was likely used to cover poor welding and deformed steel plate. 

  It's hard to tell from the pictures but it looks a lot like the top heavy, slab sided craft with gaudy chinese door furniture and lion head "mascot" on the stem. 

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Had dealings a few years ago with another boat built in Morocco by a different builder.

 The steelwork looked great when it was new, but after a few years there were slabs of filler falling off the sides. The steelwork underneath was crap.

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2 hours ago, dor said:

Had dealings a few years ago with another boat built in Morocco by a different builder.

 The steelwork looked great when it was new, but after a few years there were slabs of filler falling off the sides. The steelwork underneath was crap.

It might have been Couscous falling of the sides

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