Are Narrowboats getting uglier?

[Guest]

4 minutes ago, Tonka said:

That is the one

 

Nice looking boat.

[Tracy D'arth]

11 minutes ago, The Happy Nomad said:

 

Nice looking boat.

Except for the rivets.

[Tonka]

8 minutes ago, Tracy D'arth said:

Except for the rivets.

How do you know it's not riveted 

[Guest]

27 minutes ago, Tracy D'arth said:

Except for the rivets.

 

Tbh they dont bother me. As long as they have been welded on properly (assuming they are fake) so as to prevent water ingress underneath them.

[adam1uk]

2 hours ago, IanD said:

Tim Tyler. Here's the stern at the same early stage, note the long swim...

Aren’t you having a Finesse Boat?  I thought they had Jonathan build their shells.

[IanD]

2 minutes ago, adam1uk said:

Aren’t you having a Finesse Boat?  I thought they had Jonathan build their shells.

Yes it's Finesse, they use both Tyler Wilson yards for hulls -- Jonathan in Sheffield and Tim in Newcastle-under-Lyme -- depending on build slot availability.

[PD1964]

1 hour ago, IanD said:

Yes it's Finesse, they use both Tyler Wilson yards for hulls -- Jonathan in Sheffield and Tim in Newcastle-under-Lyme -- depending on build slot availability.

Jonathan no longer runs the Sheffield yard, he has handed it over to his son Louis. He still helps out there though, but spends most of his time at his yard at Thorne.

Edited June 15, 2022 by PD1964

[IanD]

8 minutes ago, PD1964 said:

Jonathan no longer runs the Sheffield yard he has handed it over to his son Louis, he still helps out there though, but spends most of his time at his yard at Thorne.

Tim also told me that Jonathan is now spending more time doing other stuff like fitouts as well as hull builds, which might explain the recent company changes. Tim's only interested in the bare metal, and from what I saw he and his team are *very* good at it... 😉

 

Ricky said Tim's also more interested in doing anything "non-standard", like the slow-speed-high-angle-optimised Schilling rudder I found the patent for and will be trying out...

 

Edited June 15, 2022 by IanD

[LadyG]

I wouldn't be ordering anything off them without finding out about customer service.

My boat is a Tyler Wilson, I have had occasion to phone twice about something, couldn't have been less helpful. I was not expecting them to do any work for me, I just wanted to know something, and on the first occasion indicated i'd bring the boat. The steel work on my boat is excellent, but I'd have to be sure the person I was dealing with was customer oriented.

I seem to remember being told they had been building boats for over a hundred years, or was it two hundred?

[PD1964]

4 hours ago, LadyG said:

I wouldn't be ordering anything off them without finding out about customer service.

My boat is a Tyler Wilson, I have had occasion to phone twice about something, couldn't have been less helpful. I was not expecting them to do any work for me, I just wanted to know something, and on the first occasion indicated i'd bring the boat. The steel work on my boat is excellent, but I'd have to be sure the person I was dealing with was customer oriented.

I seem to remember being told they had been building boats for over a hundred years, or was it two hundred?

 With what you’ve written on here about your experiences with tradesman, I doubt anyone would want your custom, especially when they don’t need it. I imagine your hard work to deal with on the telephone, with your lack of knowledge with boat fundamentals as shown with your descriptions with technical/mechanical problems you’ve described on your boat.

 Remember you bought an old secondhand boat, I hear they have built over a thousand plus hulls, do you expect a lifetime warranty with your hull?

 Jonathan Wilson is 57 years old, Tim I believe is younger, how could they have been building boats for a 100 or 200 years? There’s very few British manufacturers producing anything that have been going that long, never mind Narrowboat hull builders. 

Edited June 16, 2022 by PD1964

[PD1964]

6 hours ago, IanD said:

Tim also told me that Jonathan is now spending more time doing other stuff like fitouts as well as hull builds, which might explain the recent company changes. Tim's only interested in the bare metal, and from what I saw he and his team are *very* good at it... 😉

 

Ricky said Tim's also more interested in doing anything "non-standard", like the slow-speed-high-angle-optimised Schilling rudder I found the patent for and will be trying out...

 

I know of a Narrowboat with a Kitchen rudder fitted, it has not been a great success. Just wondering if there would be any benefits of having this rudder on the canals, especially if you have a bow thruster too.

  A bit like the Axiom props a few year ago. If they were that good why didn’t the builders fit them as standard?

[sarahavfc]

We're hanging in there, flying the flag for the trad hulls, this one is nearing completion at Glascote...

Edited June 16, 2022 by sarahavfc

[beerbeerbeerbeerbeer]

1 hour ago, sarahavfc said:

We're hanging in there, flying the flag for the trad hulls, this one is nearing completion at Glascote...

That looks well nice. 
All gentle curves and lines. 
 

I don’t know me terminology but where the steel meets the stem post (?) is lovely. 
The bow above in the thread will have a welded seam set back from the post all the way down and will look like separate parts together. 
Where this one looks all one together. 
 

And what’s the top bit called where you’d paint the pattern/name? 
There’s it’s natural ‘angle’ to it. 
I see them with an over stated  pitch or simply deeper than they need to be. 
 

(apart from the hole in the bottom 😃)looks ace. 
 

I see there’s a rubbing strake low down too, is that something you do as standard? Was that traditionally done?

[TheBiscuits]

10 minutes ago, Goliath said:

apart from the hole in the bottom

 

 

I think @Sea Dog has his torpedo tubes pointing forwards ...

[ditchcrawler]

13 minutes ago, Goliath said:

 

I see there’s a rubbing strake low down too, is that something you do as standard? Was that traditionally done?

That was something I specified on my hull as well. I see new boats today with no full length guard iron 

[David Mack]

 

And there you see the difference between a shell from a builder at the good end of the middle market, and one from the top end.

No rivets on either, but the second boat has hull plates bent round to lie against the side of the stem post, as was necessary with its riveted predecessors, so that it could all be riveted together.

[beerbeerbeerbeerbeer]

12 minutes ago, David Mack said:

 

And there you see the difference between a shell from a builder at the good end of the middle market, and one from the top end.

No rivets on either, but the second boat has hull plates bent round to lie against the side of the stem post, as was necessary with its riveted predecessors, so that it could all be riveted together.

The stem post also looks solid rather than made from strips of steel

[IanD]

9 hours ago, PD1964 said:

I know of a Narrowboat with a Kitchen rudder fitted, it has not been a great success. Just wondering if there would be any benefits of having this rudder on the canals, especially if you have a bow thruster too.

  A bit like the Axiom props a few year ago. If they were that good why didn’t the builders fit them as standard?

 

A typical narrowboat flat-plate rudder works badly at high angles, the flow separates from it and becomes turbulent and a lot of the lift (side thrust) disappears -- it's why pushing them hard over doesn't really work.

 

This particular Schilling rudder is designed to carry on giving lift all the way over to full deflection (75 degrees), at which point there is a strong side thrust but no forward thrust at all -- it acts like a stern thruster. It also means you can get more steering effect with a shorter (by about 200mm) rudder, so it doesn't stick out past the stern as far -- which is handy if you want to be able to take a 60' boat through short locks like on the C&H.

 

They're not used on narrowboats because (mostly) nobody cares about this, they just put up with a "normal" rudder because that's what narrowboats have -- and I suspect few people are willing to pay the increased construction costs for something they can't see, or see the reason for. The few people who have actually tried Schilling rudders (remember Dalslandia on this forum?) on non-narrowboats reported very positively on the result, and these were the earlier version designed for faster ships and lower rudder angles.

 

Just because something has always been done a particular way doesn't mean that improvements can't be made, and there are other examples of this that I'll be trying out -- you have to be willing to take some risk to try out anything new, and hybrid boats are one example of this... 😉

 

(also the Axiom prop was always a lousy idea, and Kitchen rudders never worked very well either...)

Edited June 16, 2022 by IanD

[beerbeerbeerbeerbeer]

30 minutes ago, David Mack said:

 

And there you see the difference between a shell from a builder at the good end of the middle market, and one from the top end.

No rivets on either, but the second boat has hull plates bent round to lie against the side of the stem post, as was necessary with its riveted predecessors, so that it could all be riveted together.

Like this;

 

 

[sarahavfc]

1 hour ago, Goliath said:

I see there’s a rubbing strake low down too, is that something you do as standard? Was that traditionally done?

 

Yes, it's something we do as standard. Also done traditionally as seen on my old Josher when we had her in the workshop...

 

[GUMPY]

1 hour ago, David Mack said:

 

And there you see the difference between a shell from a builder at the good end of the middle market, and one from the top end.

No rivets on either, but the second boat has hull plates bent round to lie against the side of the stem post, as was necessary with its riveted predecessors, so that it could all be riveted together.

In that top picture the boat has really been hit with the ugly stick. It absolutely shows how many modern builders just build with no finesse at all.

The lower picture is very like the hull of Loddon which was built by using separate pieces of steel for each part of the curve.

Boats with decent curves go through the water better and produce less wash😉

 

Edited June 16, 2022 by Loddon

[IanD]

15 minutes ago, Loddon said:

In that top picture the boat has really been hit with the ugly stick. It absolutely shows how many modern builders just build with no finesse at all.

The lower picture is very like the hull of Loddon which was built by using separate pieces of steel for each part of the curve.

Boats with decent curves go through the water better and produce less wash😉

 

 

If you don't like the boat at the top, don't buy one 😉

 

And if you think that design is poor hydrodynamically, you don't understand hydrodynamics -- bow wash is largely driven by how rapidly the submerged cross-sectional area increases along the hull, and I'd wager that both boats in the pictures are similar assuming the swims are similar length -- and in fact the TT hull looks to have longer swims (13' IIRC), though this may be due to photograph angles. One has a raised baseplate and steeply raked stem to smooth water entry and the other has a flat baseplate with a double-curved less-steeply-raked bow, the effect is very similar.

 

The middle boat that you're so fond of seems to have rather short swims too -- certainly several feet shorter than the TT one -- which suggest it will generate more wash not less, no matter how pretty you think it looks 😉

Edited June 16, 2022 by IanD

[GUMPY]

7 minutes ago, IanD said:

 

If you don't like the boat at the top, don't buy one 😉

 

And if you think that design is poor hydrodynamically, you don't understand hydrodynamics -- bow wash is largely driven by how rapidly the submerged cross-sectional area increases along the hull, and I'd wager that both boats in the pictures are similar assuming the swims are similar length -- and in fact the TT hull looks to have longer swims (13' IIRC), though this may be due to photograph angles. One has a raised baseplate and steeply raked stem to smooth water entry and the other has a flat baseplate with a double-curved less-steeply-raked bow, the effect is very similar.

 

The middle boat that you're so fond of seems to have rather short swims too -- certainly several feet shorter than the TT one -- which suggest it will generate more wash not less, no matter how pretty you think it looks 😉

It's Loddon I'm fond of hence it's the one I own. The swims front and rear are both long and the front one comes a long way into the cabin and that's after a 7ft well deck😉

 

[ditchcrawler]

1 hour ago, IanD said:

This particular Schilling rudder is designed to carry on giving lift all the way over to full deflection (75 degrees), at which point there is a strong side thrust but no forward thrust at all -- it acts like a stern thruster. It also means you can get more steering effect with a shorter (by about 200mm) rudder, so it doesn't stick out past the stern as far -- which is handy if you want to be able to take a 60' boat through short locks like on the C&H.

 

 

Didn't Dan make one?

[IanD]

2 minutes ago, Loddon said:

It's Loddon I'm fond of hence it's the one I own. The swims front and rear are both long and the front one comes a long way into the cabin and that's after a 7ft well deck😉

 

Like I said, long gentle swims at both ends are probably the most important factor for reducing wash and making a boat slip through the water smoothly. Both Loddon and the TT hull have these... 😉