Oddfellow

Rigidity in GRP layup is derived from many things and there are formulas for how strong things will be in flex under convex and concave pressure. Consideration has to be given to weight also as Polyester resin is not light stuff. A roof structure with large areas designed to take the weight of the crew will be made up of laminated fibreglass and core materials. Typically, end-grain balsa wood is used as it is very light, very strong and will allow impregnation by the resin. There are other materials too that are stronger and lighter. The outter layers will be probably 8-10oz of GRP, 1/2 inch or 3/4 inch of core and then sandwiched with 6-10oz of grp on the inside. The Balsa adds a huge amount of rigidity but very little weight. Internal bulkheads within the vessel bond the roof section with the floor or hull section to create a very strong shape.

There is no such requirement for retro-fitting such a thing to boats. It might be part of an RCD directive for new designs. but certainly nothing for existing boats that I know of. If your doors have an aluminium frame, the frame will need to be removed and reversed which I suspect will not be at all easy using the same frame. A new frame and door made to fit would not be cheap. Speak to Andy at Broadland Marine Windows for advice. 01603 781740

The engine cooling circuit should be pumped by the engine circulation pump. The impellor would, in most circumstances, have nothing to do with this. Keel cooled engines would generally only require raw water to cool the exhaust, assuming it's a water-cooled exhaust.

Absolutely. My point being that you don't have much room for complaint when in today's information age, details of temporary closure, menu changes, service changes and other such things can be disseminated very quickly and cheaply by a business though things like FaceBook and Twitter if you choose not to use FaceBook or Twitter. When will people who choose not to use Twitter and Facebook realise that the onus is not on a pub to desperately try and contact every possible potential customer with a bit of information that may not be of interest to them? If you want to go to a pub, cafe, shop etc during the pingdemic, it's prudent to make sure they're open and serving what you want to consume before making your plans.

How else do you think a business can get it's temporary messages out to potential customers? A full page in the daily press? Town Criers? Cold calling?

I never saw the RCD as being a particular barrier to building. COST was the barrier to building, but we did build one boat and got part-way though its sister ship. It is probably harder to do a build from design up-ward, but most yards used Aquafibre or Alpha mouldings anyway.

I feel significantly less "freedom" now than I have for months. It only takes a few selfish idiots to spread this. Today, it is reported that there is a 162% weekly rise in infections in the Yarmouth area with Winterton, Scratby, Sommerton and Hemsby all getting PCR testing sites rushed in with the aim of mass-testing the occupants of these villages. As a resident of Martham, this is horribly close. I absolutely will not be going into any crowded space (inside or outside) regardless of mask wearing or not for a long time to come.

I have been here twice in the last few days. Weaver's Way to the south of Hickling Broad is so overgrown that the ferns are taller than me in places. The mozzies in the woods are very hungry too. Be prepared. If anyone finds a blue hair scrunchie, my good lady would like it back please.

Take a look at my Off The Beaten Track videos. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLxn5w9x-lcs87gJCfEzADmLGBFwUKbof4

Why? Obviously, there are many, many reasons. BUT, the main reason is simple. Money. Running a hire fleet is an expensive and not very profitable business until you get into large numbers of boats. Around 10 is the only starting point that it becomes remotely viable in most cases and at that, it's sodding hard work as there's not enough cashflow to pay enough people to do the work to allow any time for oneself. Boats are not cheap things to buy. Even if you had 10 £10k boats, that's £100k of investment in something that gets beaten up each week and requires a lot of maintenance and repair. But they're not £10k; a decent boat that people would want to hire starts at at least £20k and runs to £250k for a new-build. Then there's the need for operational tooling. A new pump-out machine will cost a fortune that could be measured in whole numbers as a percentage of the value of a boat, you need heavy lifting equipment, maybe a crane, you need infrastructure, waterside property (incredibly expensive) and so much more. You need experienced engineers, boat-builders, cleaners, office staff. Many of the smaller yards realised the value of the land and that was that. Those that grew in the earlier years are the ones that have been able to survive and they survive on volume and/or multiple income streams. Very few small yards remain and whilst I see investment from Richard and Fiona at Pacific as well as the Bedwells at Bridgecraft, there's only Whispering Reeds and Martham Boats left beyond the end of this year with Sandersons closing at the end of the season. Sure, there's Silverline, but that's not a small operation and it has multiple income streams. It's VERY hard work. Over 14 years, it wore me down. Sure, it kept a roof over out heads, but so would a job - infact, I used to earn vast amounts more when I ran the Intranet systems for Dow Jones. Freedom cost me a decent family life: we had just 5 family holidays in those 14 years: Freedom was a prison for me. Add to this the fact that we rented a boatyard from someone that I would politely describe as "challenging" and the enjoyment factor that was once the main driver was depleted annually. Had the money been good, I might have been prepared to continue, but it wasn't good enough for the investment of our money and time and this is the main reason that there are so few yards left: It's a way of life and not a get-rich business. Covid lockdowns and related issues would have caused every broads hire business to have a serious look at how it operated. For me, I was the perfect time to bail and go and do something else.

My pal, Simon, bought that boat from Richardson's and renamed it to Happily Everafter. It was moored 100 yards from the Freedom boatyard until he decided to sell through NYA and purchased a narrow-beam Sapphire 37. I believe this was the last one Richardsons had in hire. There are none in hire on the Broads now. I have one that I had refitted but never completed that was going into hire, but we closed the business before finishing her.

This should come with a big caveat... The cabling circuit will have a rating that is protected by a fuse (the sole purpose of which is to protect the cabling from overheating and causing a fire). It may not be safe to assume that the fuse that's in the circuit not is the correctly rated fuse as often, people with no idea of the purpose of a fuse will replace with ones of a larger capacity......

It does like to flood there too.....

There is a lot to be said for this. My latest laptop as a whopping 230W power supply. Are there any such DC-DC devices that will cope with this at a reasonable cost?

Approximately the same. It is the load ON the inverter that dictates the load on the batteries, not the max watt output of the inverter.

This is true, but by using a relay such as the Lucas 33A, the batteries are COMBINED during the charging phase. There are downsides of this, especially if you have mismatched battery banks. By using a splitting diode, they remain separate and thus charge separately BUT at a lower voltage as the diode will eat some millivolts and whilst a millivolt or two doesn't sound like much, it's enough to increase charging time and also ensure that the alternator cannot fully charge batteries as there's never enough voltage at the battery terminals to achieve this. The best way to charge batteries in the Domestic / Starter bank environment from the engine is to use an intelligent charging system that properly separates the battery banks and monitors each, ensuring that they both get the full charge they need.

I assume your kit contains a solar charge controller? If it doesn't, get one. Don't connect a solar panel directly to the batteries. Other than that, what Vaughan said.

I wouldn't recommend anything from Sterling. Thrown away way too many Sterling inverters to want to go down that route again. Different inverters have different idle power draws. There's no easy answer to this one. However, your inverter max power rating will have little or no difference to the power drawn from the batteries with just a phone charger. However, this is a remarkably inefficient way of charging a phone which requires a 5v DC supply. What you're doing is multiplying your 12v DV supply by 20 time and creating an alternating frequency on it which takes power to achieve and immediately dropping that to 5V dc with the phone charger which is 7v DC less than you started with. This makes zero sense. Install USB charging ports and have done with that.

But, sadly, we're also seeing reports of local restaurants having to close because staff have been contacted by the Test & Trace app and they can't operate. I can only see this being an incredibly trying year for the tourism industry. There's lots of people and with lots of people come 32,000 plus cases a day and Norwich is reported now to have an R rate of around 2 I heard yesterday. I know of at least two households in my village isolating and my social contact list can fit on a pin head. Whether people get sick in the third wave or not, the economy will still suffer hugely due to isolation requirements. This isn't over by a long way. Please, stay safe and keep others safe. Social Distancing and masks should not have been relaxed IMHO.

Omni-directional aerials such as that stubby mag-mount are less than ideal in areas of good TV signal. I wouldn't bank on that tiny thing picking up anything other than dust on the Broads. A directional aerial has high as you can get it is what you need for the best signal

I am surprised at the Lodges.... Sorry. HOUSEBOATS. Slowly, slowly, catchy monkey.

It's such a shame that the mill remains broken; must be three years now. Anyway, we're in Herringfleet this week. 12 photos from the woods and at the mill. Couple of crackers in there.

Thank you, Maurice.

The portable polishing systems you can buy tend to just cycle it through the tank. It will take a LONG time.

It just takes a bit of effort! Sand back, get a good key, use a good undercoat and use that to obliterate the orange and then a couple of top coats.