Every winter the Canal & River Trust shut parts of the network down for a time in order to do maintenance which often includes taking out broken or old lock gates and replacing them. New lock gates are not something you can just order in from Amazon however, so the CRT have to make their own and in this video I visited their Birmingham workshop to see how the process works.
The third and final part (for the moment) in this mini-series about unusual, rare and vintage narrowboat engines. Here we meet Keith Lodge who had a replica working boat built to his specification including a two-cylinder National DA2 engine from 1949.
This is Part 2 of a three part mini-series about classic / vintage narrowboat engines as often heard chugging past on the canal. In this episode, I talked to Rob Goodman about his 1940s-era Kelvin K2 and its unusual starting procedure!
This is Part 1 of a three part mini-series about classic / vintage narrowboat engines as often heard chugging past on the canal. In this episode, I talked to Chris Wenham aboard NB Herbert about his Russell Newbury engine.
This vlog picks up immediately where the last one left off, as I head from Hillmorton Wharf to Yelvertoft marina where I had the boat taken out of the water and into their shiny new boat shed for blacking.
In October last year I headed along the North Oxford canal to Hillmorton Marina where they have a little dockside crane, suitable to lift an engine out of a boat. Over the course of the next week I scrubbed out a load of muck and rust from the engine bilge, treated it with Vactan and then primed and painted it before getting the engine put back in.
When taking the narrowboat to a marina for work on the bilge and also to get the hull blacked, I noticed that the batteries didn’t seem to be holding a charge and also that the alternator was disturbingly warm. The result was that I bought a new alternator and fitted it. This is the (almost “real-time”) recording of my hamfisted work, including several things you shouldn’t do when changing an alternator.
How is a narrowboat built? That’s what this vlog aims to answer, looking at the construction process from the very first pieces of steelwork forming the baseplate, via an awful lot of welding up to a finished shell which can then be insulated and fitted out.
Over the summer I noticed that in heavy rain there was a slight trickly of water coming down the stove flue. It appeared to be getting in underneath the chimney collar so I had to take it off, clean everything up, de-rust and re-seal. This video shows how I did it and how it was a bigger job than expected.
A bit of DIY and a product review in this video as I think back to when I was moored over the summer and took the cratch cover off, firstly to kill off the algae growing on it, secondly to clean it, and thirdly to re-waterproof the canvas.
