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teadaemon

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  1. A variety of things. UV light (and normally to a much lesser extent, background radiation) degrades polyester and other plastics. Hydrolysis of the chemical bonds does happen, very slowly in most circumstances (although I did hear of one case where acid catalysis of this reaction lead to a hole the size of a couple of dinner plates appearing in the bottom of a large motor cruiser, fortunately while it was out of the water for maintenance and inspection). Also, even if not subjected to major impact damage, over time the flexing of a GRP hull will break the adhesion between the resin and the glass fibres, progressively weakening it. All of these processes take a very long time in most circumstances, but it's not possible to prevent them happening, and over a long enough period of time the damage will add up to the point where it becomes significant. We're now at the stage where the oldest GRP boats are around 75, and a great many are over 50. Now a really well built GRP hull may have a lifespan of a century or more, we don't really know exactly, but I think it's safe to say that there are a lot of GRP hulls that are more than half way through their useful life. Of course there's very few GRP hulls that don't have other materials (end grain balsa core, wooden engine bearers, plywood or even chipboard deck cores) included within them. These often degrade faster than the GRP, but replacing them can be difficult or impossible, and certainly not cost effective. There was a story I saw back in March, than in normal circumstances would have attracted a lot more attention. A group of researchers had developed a genetically engineered bacterium that was capable of depolymerising one of the common plastics used for bottles (I can't remember if it was polyethylene or polypropylene, or even both). The plastic was ground up, added to a fermentation vessel with water and the bacterium, and the end product was the unpolymerised chemical used to create the plastic. This is important as it could be separated and used to create new plastics of equal quality to those made with new feedstocks, rather than the lower grade plastics normally created by recycling the polymer using heat and pressure. I think that long term this will probably be the way forward for most if not all plastic recycling.
  2. This is a very good point. I did see somewhere that for a particular year (I think 2016, but can't remember exactly) Oyster Yachts had revenues of over £40 million, but a net profit of only ~£100k, giving a profit margin of ~0.25%.
  3. Q: What's the best way to make a small fortune building boats? A: Start with a large fortune. Seriously, boats are large, expensive, luxury items that people don't actually need. As such (and as I've discovered), building, servicing, or maintaining them is an industry that's very sensitive to how affluent people feel, and how they think the economy is doing or will be doing in the short to mid term. Personally, as much as I enjoy working with boats, being a self-employed professional in this business is no longer viable. I'm moving into education, 'cos the chances of people stopping reproducing are close to zero (not to mention that if I do have to change area, it might as well be into something that's useful and rewarding).
  4. Well, looks like it's not just me that's decided there's no money (or at least not enough money) in the boat industry.
  5. As I've discovered, building a business based around people buying large, expensive things that they don't need can be a somewhat risky proposition.
  6. My explanation is general, because that's how the BSS checks are written. They don't prescribe a specific way of achieving compliance (although certain things may be specifically prohibited), they state what standard needs to be achieved, then leave it up to the boat owner (or the designer/builder) to work out how they want to do that. No, I don't fancy being an MP, local politics is much more rewarding (I'm a town councillor). :)
  7. Well I'm not planning to be a BSS examiner for much longer (I'm not renewing my registration at the end of March). I know of no situation in which the BSS would require a downgrade in safety in order to pass. Where there is a requirement to meet a certain standard, then in general the checks are written in such a way that there is a minimum specification that must be met (and must be verifiable), and any solution that meets or exceeds that specification is acceptable.
  8. Asking people to rate their pain for 1 to 10 is about the best method available - there's no way to objectively measure pain, and two people can experience vastly different perceptions of pain from similar conditions. Given that it was dark, and the weather conditions were such that the boat was towed to Oulton Broad rather than the Waveney River Centre due to the wind and water conditions, calling 999 doesn't seem that unreasonable to me.
  9. My first baby tooth to fall out, aged about 5 or 6. Moored up on the left hand bank (looking upstream), just upstream of Ludham Bridge. It came out while I was eating an apple on the foredeck of Luna from Hunter's Yard, and I dropped it whilst walking along the side deck to show my Mum. It bounced once on the deck and went straight over the side. Not only was that distressing, but apparently in situations like that the Tooth Fairy doesn't pay out. :(
  10. It's not a new requirement, or certainly it's been part of the checks since at least the 2013 version were introduced (which were the ones I trained on). As Grendel said, it's one way to achieve compliance, the others are to have either a drip tray large enough to contain all of the oil in the engine under the engine or to have the area under the engine isolated from the rest of the bilges, and not have a bilge pump in that area.
  11. Good luck. Many, many years ago I played bass in a punk band, but really bad tennis elbow put paid to that, although I do occasionally strum a guitar. If you are having trouble, you might want to investigate open tunings like a lot of the old blues guys (and Keith Richards) used. I've got a 3-string cigar-box guitar that's normally tuned DGD, and I usually play with a bottleneck. It can (when better musicians than me are playing it) sound pretty good, especially with just a bit of overdrive.
  12. As others have said, volunteers are trained by the police, and I would presume that training would include properly calibrating the equipment to an appropriate standard. I should probably have mentioned, I'm a councillor on Costessey Town Council. My fellow councillors and I spend a fair amount of our time on speeding and other highways issues, because they're one of the most common things for our constituents to contact us about, and our job is to represent our constituents to the best of our abilities. We don't have volunteers with speed guns, but we do have a small camera system that can be moved around and attached to items of street furniture to log the speed of all vehicles passing. For data collection that has the advantage of not needing a person to operate it, and it has produced some particularly scary figures. If it makes you feel better, we also get plenty of complaints about bad parking around schools, and we try to do our best to deal with those too.
  13. Whilst it's true that community speed checks don't create evidence to prosecute an individual driver, they do create data. That data can then be provided to relevant bodies (police, safety camera partnership, county council highways dept, etc), as evidence that there is a problem with cars speeding on a particular stretch of road. That can be used by police to aid in targeting potential locations for mobile speed cameras, to the safety camera partnership for getting permanent speed cameras, or the highways dept for getting other traffic calming measures or changes to the speed limit. Also, there's plenty of evidence that the presence of somebody in a hi-viz jacket pointing something that looks like a speed camera at traffic causes drivers to slow down, whether or not that person is a police officer.
  14. Whilst I can't speak on behalf of the BSS, as a BSS examiner I would point out that for private boats, the BSS exists to mitigate third party risks - i.e. that no matter how safe your boat, the boat moored next to it shouldn't blow up, catch fire, or pollute the waterways. The checks are evidence-based, and are designed to be the bare minimum standard to be allowed on to whichever waterway or port authority wishes to use them. Having surveyed and examined boats for the last five years, I have found that in the absence of something like the BSS, a number of boat owners have been prepared to take some quite scary risks with the safety of themselves and those around them. In a lot of cases, this is because they don't understand exactly what those risks are, or the problem in question is not immediately obvious (let's face it, I suspect there are a fair number of boat owners on here who have not actually looked at large parts of their boat's systems, or at least not done so for a number of years). If I were to make a conclusion, it's that in my opinion, the BSS works pretty well (maybe not perfectly, but then few things do), and is a lot better than simply trusting people to do the right thing, when they may not know what the right thing is.
  15. Prices vary a lot from area to area, and each BSS examiner sets their own policy on whether they charge for a retest and what they charge. I could tell you what I'd charge to do a BSS on the Broads, but it could be very different to what you'll be charged in your area.
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