Jump to content

teadaemon

Full Members
  • Posts

    277
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Everything posted by teadaemon

  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.
  16. It was a private transaction between the (then) owner and the buyers. The owner needed to sell quickly in order to pay his legal bills. They made him an offer, and really he had no choice but to accept. It's not nice, but it's a perfectly legal tactic.
  17. Just to put things into perspective, I can remember paying £3 to moor at Thurne dyke 20-30 years ago, when a pint of beer was £2 or less. How much is a pint now, £4? By that comparison, anything between £6-8 would seem to be a reasonable mooring fee.
  18. It would be an interesting case, and whether they paid out or not might depend on whether there were any signs of infestation that may have been visible during a reasonable maintenance schedule. In the event of a mast breaking due to woodworm, an owner might also find that the insurance company were prepared to cover the cost of any damage to other parts of the boat, other boats, or personal injury, but not the cost of a new mast. In practise though, for a lot of similar claims, it's actually far cheaper for the insurance company to pay out and accept the claim as a cost of doing business than it is for them to spend the money to fight a contested claim.
  19. Steward is a set text for most traditional wooden boatbuilding courses around the world (along with Boatbuilding by Howard Chappelle and Yacht Construction by K.H.C. Jurd), indeed it was for my surveying diploma too. For the kind of work you'll mostly be doing, I can strongly recommend Boat Joinery & Cabinet Making Simplified by Fred Bingham. Like most books on this subject on the market, it's American, but that's just a reflection of the much larger audience for a fairly specialist subject available on the other side of the Atlantic. If you haven't already found it, I can also recommend bookfinder.com . If you know what book you're looking for (Amazon is much better for browsing and reading reviews first), it will aggregate search results from pretty much all of the major (and quite a few of the minor) online booksellers, and easily show you the best deal for buying new or second hand.
  20. There are two things to consider from a BSS perspective: 1) The checks themselves, which do refer to portable appliances, but also to gas bottles (which in this case may be more relevant). It may be possible to store and use a gas barbeque such as is pictured in a way that passes all of the relevant checks. It may even be possible to do this by accident, without actually referring to the checks, if the person doing it is sensible and takes what I would consider ordinary precautions. I'm not going to comment on whether the picture shows a failure for any specific check, as to be honest, without actually being there it's difficult to say definitively one way or the other. 2) The advice from the BSS office to boat owners, which is unambiguous. It states that whilst it's ok to carry portable gas appliances on board if done so in a way that passes the relevant checks, it is recommended that they are only used on shore. With regard to whether the scene pictured shows an offence related to the RCD, I'd say it doesn't, as the RCD is consumer legislation that applies when a boat is first placed on the market within the EU. Having said that, were there to be an incident in a situation like this, the person who brought the gas bottle and barbeque on board and/or the person using them, may find themselves liable under both civil and potentially criminal law.
  21. Well we do have leaflets, and I'm happy to give one to anyone who wants one (I also give them out when appropriate whilst conducting examinations). Since we're online, the best source of information I can pass on is on the BSS website itself: https://www.boatsafetyscheme.org/stay-safe/carbon-monoxide-(co)/how-the-silent-killer-works!/
  22. So, at some point in time between you last looking at that side of the boat and when you discovered the damage (obviously minus all the time you were actually there to see what happened), the damage was sustained. What caused it? I really wouldn't like to say without inspecting it more closely. Yes it is consistent with a collision with a boat, but what sort of boat is impossible to tell. I do sympathise, but equally I don't think it's reasonable to blame any particular group of river users without more evidence.
  23. There's no specific age limit on regulators or hoses, both BSS examiners and Gas Safe engineers work on checking the condition. As a rough guide though, replacing hoses every five years and regulators every ten wouldn't be out of place.
  24. If your cooker has an appropriate burner for use with butane (which would appear to be the case), then (barring any specific advice in the owner's manual to the contrary, which would be unusual) I would suggest it should be fine with propane at the appropriate pressure. To be honest, unless you're calculating the cost of boiling the kettle to the exact penny, I doubt you'd see much difference in value for money between propane or butane. As others have suggested, as you cruise all year round, the cold weather performance of propane is likely to be the most obvious difference.
  25. Strictly speaking, what is sold as both propane and butane is a mixture of the two (not to mention a number of other gaseous hydrocarbons), and what varies is the ratio of that mixture. As far as I'm aware, cookers can generally be supplied with burners suitable for natural gas, (mostly methane) or LPG (either propane or butane), but burners designed for LPG will produce an acceptable flame pattern and be perfectly usable with either propane or butane, providing they're connected via the appropriate regulator. This is why bottle connections are different for the two gases, but getting around that can be done if you're irresponsible enough to try, either by using some sort of home-brew adaptor, or by refilling bottles with the wrong gas. Please do not take this statement as any kind of encouragement to try either though, as both have a large potential for danger to both the person carrying them out, and others who might be near them. As with many things in life, just because you can, doesn't mean that you should.
×
×
  • Create New...

Important Information

For details of our Guidelines, please take a look at the Terms of Use here.