4mm overplating + epoxy. Insurance options?

[Mad Harold]

2 hours ago, MtB said:

 

You would like to think so wouldn't you? But I suspect professional marine welders don't often get involved in the gutty end of canal boat hull repairing, that being fixing up the old rusty ones, as they can earn far better money elsewhere do better quality work.

 

I'd also be amazed if all the over-plating on overplated boats really was hermetically sealed behind. How would the welder know and test? And why would he bother when he was selected to to the work because he was the cheapest quote and all the insurance co demands is an ultrasonic thickness test result of over 4mm?

 

I once spent a couple of hours closely looking at the overplating on a boat I really liked that was out on the hard standing. The standard of welding was horrifyingly bad. So was the standard of the cutting, shaping and fitting of each of the panels crassly welded on. I doubt it were anything like hermetically sealed behind the plating, so rough was the job. More likely full of water rather than air. I elected not to buy it. 

 

 

Wandering around a marina I visited, there was a boat on hardstanding in the process of being overplated.

I am not a welder, but I thought good welding was a neat rippled continuous line.

This boats welding was lots of blobs. I have heard of 'bird sh--- welding' but have never seen it untill now!

I doubt that would be watertight.

I think MtB is probably right, a properly skilled welder could earn much more in another industry.

[IanD]

9 minutes ago, Mad Harold said:

Wandering around a marina I visited, there was a boat on hardstanding in the process of being overplated.

I am not a welder, but I thought good welding was a neat rippled continuous line.

This boats welding was lots of blobs. I have heard of 'bird sh--- welding' but have never seen it untill now!

I doubt that would be watertight.

I think MtB is probably right, a properly skilled welder could earn much more in another industry.

 

They might have been using the blobs to tack-weld the plates into position and hold them in place, and then go over with a continuous weld bead afterwards. Leastways, you'd hope so...

 

When I was doing a couple of weeks of post-A level experience in an engineering training centre in the late 70s, the trainee welders there spent all day laying lines of weld up and down plates, which were then inspected and tested. They did this (followed by thick built-up multi-bead welds) for something like 6 months non-stop before being deemed qualified. A lot of them hoped to go on to well-paid jobs in industries like offshore rigs and nuclear reactors, so you'd hope they knew how to weld properly.

 

I wonder how many (less well-paid?) narrowboat welders are as well trained, or as careful?

Edited April 2, 2022 by IanD

[MtB]

7 minutes ago, IanD said:

 

They might have been using the blobs to tack-weld the plates into position and hold them in place, and then go over with a continuous weld bead afterwards. Leastways, you'd hope so...

 

When I was doing a couple of weeks of post-A level experience in an engineering training centre in the late 70s, the trainee welders there spent all day laying lines of weld up and down plates, which were then inspected and tested. They did this (followed by thick built-up multi-bead welds) for something like 6 months non-stop before being deemed qualified. A lot of them hoped to go on to well-paid jobs in industries like offshore rigs and nuclear reactors, so you'd hope they knew how to weld properly.

 

I wonder how many (less well-paid?) narrowboat welders are as well trained, or as careful?

 

 

I suspect a lot of narrowboat welders are self taught having just bought an inverter welder for £250 on ebay, like me! 

 

Even welding a vertical seam is a whole different ballpark skill-wise, from laying beads of weld on a horizontal workpiece. 

[Slow and Steady]

I doubt there are many coded welders over-plating narrowboats - as above they are going to be self taught like the rest of us. Pidgeon poo welding is usually lack of power/sub-standard gear and completely useless structurally - it's like the bods who shovel solder onto a joint - alarming!

[ditchcrawler]

4 hours ago, Alan de Enfield said:

 

 

I would buy a boat needing overplating as I could then control who did it and how it was done.

But would anyone buy it when you wanted to sell it?

[cuthound]

When I was a project manager in the critical power and coming industry, I witnessed many, many welded joints on chilled water pipes and large exhaust systems.

 

All were done by highly skilled (and paid) coded welders. There was a shortage of them as we always had to book them early to guarantee they were available when we wanted them 

 

All welds were tested, magnetic dye, x-ray etc depending on the clients requirements before the system was pressure tested and I only ever saw a handful that failed.

 

In contrast canal boat welders are "gifted amateurs" at best.

[Alan de Enfield]

2 hours ago, ditchcrawler said:

But would anyone buy it when you wanted to sell it?

 

Obviously - "100s" are already buying overplated boats, not knowing what they are buying.

[beerbeerbeerbeerbeer]

6 hours ago, MtB said:

 

 

I once spent a couple of hours closely looking at the overplating on a boat I really liked that was out on the hard standing. The standard of welding was horrifyingly bad. So was the standard of the cutting, shaping and fitting of each of the panels crassly welded on. I doubt it were anything like hermetically sealed behind the plating, so rough was the job. More likely full of water rather than air. I elected not to buy it. 

 

 

I’m guessing that could have been Goliath 😃

It does sum up the over plating.
I’ve cut it all off and have had new put on. 
 

It was originally 3mm and possibly 4mm, but had got below 2mm in some places, particularly where the steel meets base. 
This thinning towards the base will be down to water between the original iron (which had pieces missing) and the steel. 
You could hit the steel here with a hammer and see the metal dint and spread. I am sure rust wise it may well have lasted a few more years but the worry of perhaps hitting something in the canal and putting a hole in the hull was enough to want it changed. 

However ugly the welding was, and it was bad, it seems to have done the trick. I reckon it was original to when the boat was converted in 1985, so has lasted best part of 40 year. And there were no leaks. 

 

Over plating is a very cost effective way of keeping a narrow boat going. Hopefully I might have added yet another 40 years life to Goliath.
And this time the welding is the dog’s bollocks. 🐕 

[Captain Pegg]

@Njiruk I agree that the piece on the dangers of overplating isn't helpful but I don't in general agree with your reasonings as to why.

 

That document is written by a surveyor for other surveyors and in my experience professional folk who like to write papers and textbooks are usually those who like to compete for kudos with their peers rather than engage in pragmatic constructive thinking for the benefit of the customer. The problem therefore is that it simply lacks context of the sort that @Bee, @Goliath, and @MtB offer above. There's nothing theoretically wrong with what it says, there are risks with overplated craft compared to replated, but in reality the overplating versus replating debate is largely spurious and one that mostly only exists in the philosophical debates on social media and in historic narrowboat circles where there is a genuine choice. Economically, replating a leisure boat isn't practical because it requires the fit out to be stripped and at that point you're basically doing a complete rebuild on something that is never going to have a sufficiently high asking price to justify that level of work.

 

There are a couple of well regarded yards I know of that are experienced in overplating, and I'm sure there are others, so I don't buy that you can't get a decent job, but equally I don't dispute you can get a bad one.

 

I own one of the oldest welded steel hull leisure boats remaining on the network and it also has what must be one of the oldest surviving overplating jobs on any boat on the network. Naturally I've learnt a few things about overplating along the way. To help me decide to buy the boat I had a survey from a surveyor who explained what they were looking for an on overplated boat and verified the standard of work met those expectations, a fully documented history of the boat including confirmation that it was overplated by the original fabricator, the obvious good stewardship of it's previous owners who were all well known in Midlands canal circles, and to be honest probably a chunk of intuition and luck as I seem to have landed on my feet. That said you are always conscious that there is an element of the unknown but you aren't entirely free of that buying any boat. A lot of it is simply down to the the motivations, personal circumstances and appetite for risk of the buyer.

 

I genuinely didn't find the practice of using doubling plates on older craft to be anything surprising as I have long been familiar with the use of doubling plates on metallic bridges and if I can sleep at night being responsible for one of those simultaneously carrying 2000 tonnes of aviation fuel in one direction and 300 people at 100mph in the other I wasn't about to get too hung up about a narrowboat that at worst was going to sink in 3ft of water with ample warning.

 

It's probably also worth noting I bought the boat to go boating and approached the whole exercise from the point of view that I was writing off the purchase price for ever, for that reason I was working to a budget.

 

In my case I bought a boat that met my requirements for 25% to 50% less money than the other (non-overplated) boats I considered that were available at the time but were all to some degree less aligned with my requirements. Admittedly it wasn't originally my first choice as I had one sale fall through. In hindsight that worked out well although it didn't feel like that at the time.

 

Six and a half years on I don't think I've seen a boat I realistically would have bought in preference if I had have waited and I wouldn't get anything close to comparable for the same money today, even allowing for inflation.

 

There are at least three regular posters on this forum with overplated boats and I don't think any of them regrets buying the boat they have. Nor are first hand tales of woe regarding overplated boats a feature of this forum.