grendel

that will probably be where i end up Griff, if its too high i can always add ballast, but losing weight will always be a tricky option. how many inches did you raise your boot topping Griff, to get the line i will measure at the bow and stern (and compare to the photographs) to get a front and rear position, then its just a matter of using a laser level to transfer the line straight along the hull.

gahh shopping is over, what an ordeal, lidls straight in no queue, round the shop most of what i wanted was there, 1 person in front at the tills, great, Asda, the queue went up and down the car park in 7 lines, it took me nearly 45 minutes to get in the doors, then there were the people going against the flow designated by the arrows, meaning they had to pass less than 2m as they crossed, then some of the stuff i wanted wasnt in stock, no queues at the till. off to the post office in the pharmacy in the village a mile out of town - well i needed to post stuff, and when i got there i just had to wait while the person at the counter concluded their transaction, got in, and the person behind me was the postie coming to pick up the bags for sorting - result. sainsburys was the last stop, the queue was 10 minutes and they had all the bits missing from the other shops, then home, 3 hours to do a shop that used to take 90 minutes, and leaving me so worn out i have had to have a long sit down and some cream buns with a coffee. just about getting to the point of deciding what to do with the rest of the day.

Day 17, Saturday, Shopping this morning, this will take most of the morning unless i am really lucky.

sad to hear this, he was always an interesting person to chat to at the wooden boat meets.

I have a davinci, its slow.

Actually, not only has this paint dried quickly, there looks to be no reaction to the white, which is great news.

so continuing applications of paint, the hull is probably 0.5mm thicker now through paint, about a week ago i carefully sprayed up a board, this was specifically to test paint that would be going over the white, this will just be applied with a brush, so what do we have, well on the real boat there is antifoul in red and a blue boot topping, getting the exact colours wont be easy, i had throught to try a red oxide primer, that had reacted badly to the white paint, modelling acrylics are a possibility, however the red oxide primer i had tried was acrylic. Actually these paints were my backup option, so after a lot of shaking to get the pigments mixed back into the paints, i got the two pots of paint that Charlie had supplied me last year out and ready for testing. these are exactly the correct colours as they are from the tins that were used the last time Broad Ambition came out of the water, it is actual antifoul and actual boot topping, so these have been painted on the paint that was sprayed onto the test board, to ensure there are no adverse reactions. how soon these are applied to the model is unknown at the moment, i will need to ascertain the water level to work out where the boot topping will need to be, but i may be able to work out the top line of the antifoul before that and get that applied.

whatever you do dont use anything abrasive, the anodising is only a few microns thick, and once you go through that the aluminium will corrode faster.

business travel is another good point, I think one thing this pandemic has taught us is that business meetings are still possible when travel isnt via the internet, I believe a lot of companies will now question the cost of business travel, when the alternative has been proven to work, quite well. much as the fact that I believe a large number of people will want to continue working from home in future now that that has been proven possible. If you think this is bad, imagine just how much more difficult things would have been without global internet, even 30 years ago, the chaos would have been unimaginable.

it is my belief that foreign holidays will no longer be cheap compared to uk ones.

yes i ordered mine just before it was announced i was being furloughed, the good news is that some of those who were in the first batch to be furloughed were called back in to work this week, as a lot of the big construction firms are slowly restarting working now they have determined how to with appropriate social distancing. our main business dropped to 10% of its normal demand, the part i work for dropped down to about 40% of normal workloads as construction slowed down, but by all reports we are slowly building back up.

Well ok for some it may be hard work and dedication to a target to purchase a boat, maybe fortunate would have been a better word than lucky. it will be a different matter for those that have lived on credit all their lives so far. Yes I agree for those in the industry its their livelihood, yet they are providing a service that is a luxury item, which puts them at the mercy of the economy in general. I still stand by the fact that it is my belief that foreign holidays will become less easy and this might well work to the benefit of the uk holiday industry if it can but weather this initial period, and that the support of the regular Broads holiday makers will be critical for that to happen.

I think its time we all remembered that a holiday is a luxury, not a necessity, or a right. if we can afford a holiday we are lucky, and if we can afford to own a boat, luckier still. in recent times I think people have seen their holidays as a right, not a luxury, well I have the feeling we are going to see that change, if you think internal uk holidays are badly hit, foreign holidays will be worse, as countries decide to shut their borders to visitors. This Pandemic has already shown that the speed of international travel is one of the main causes of the spread of these epidemics, people can travel before they even know they are sick, I have a feeling that world travel is going to be a lot more difficult in the future as countries crack down upon health issues before allowing visitors in. in a way this will benefit the home holiday industry, as all those people denied their cheap foreign holidays will want to try new experiences. in the short term of course, those companies have to survive to be able to give those new experiences. which is where we - the regular broads users come in, as long as we dont all panic and demand our monies back, and accept a credit for a future holiday, these companies stand a chance of surviving, and then we will be amongst the first to be able to get back out there, on the broads we all love.

Day 16, Friday, I thought half of today would be spent cleaning the hot end of my printer, but then the old noggin engaged, and I had a thought, this plastic melts at a specific temperature, the hot end contains a heating element, all I had to do was apply the correct voltage and current to the heating element to get the plastic to melt, ok, on to the power supply, I started at 5V, nothing, it was barely getting warm, so I slowly ramped it up to 12v, now its pulling nearly 3 amps and yes the plastic is starting to smoke, out with a metal pointy thing and the stubborn plastic just peels off, all it needed was 200 ish degrees heat to solve the problem, printer is now reassembled and running its first test print.

I bought the 5 litre container for about £36 on ebay, the 1litre bottles seem to be about £16 to be honest i just went for about the cheapest i could find, shipping from the uk with free postage.

well I have a job to do tomorrow, after trying to print something as a favour for a friend I left the printer too long and the print broke free, and I ended up with a huge clog of filament around the hot end., that will be a fair while tomorrow to clear that off without affecting the temperature sensor wiring.

https://www.edp24.co.uk/business/historic-norfolk-boatbuilder-windboat-marine-looking-for-new-buyer-1-6631234

https://www.edp24.co.uk/business/historic-norfolk-boatbuilder-windboat-marine-looking-for-new-buyer-1-6631234

From what the edp say they are trying to find someone to buy out the business and no redundacies have happened yet, so there is still some hope.

die cleanup continued, after the wire brushing it was on to the important bits that cut threads, drills were pushed by hand through the holes to clean them up, then out came the grinder with the sanding belt to clean up the outsides, i guess somewhere in the region of 90% of the dies have been saved. some of these are sizes i dont have elsewhere so they cover a gap, as i acquire better ones they will get replaced.

slowly getting back there with the white paint, to try and avoid runs i am trying to get it near horizontal when spraying, another couple of light coats

this morning so far , bits have been removed from evaporust and cleaned up, wire brushing on the rusty dies has revealed they are heavily pitted, and i have spent an hour on a skype call 'training' this was hilarious as half the people couldn't see the presentation, and the other half couldn't hear it. i started off not being able to see it, then transitioned to not being able to hear it and finally got round to being both able to see and hear it. after a whole hour i had learned nothing new.

I am sure you are practically perfect in every way.

You see, this has always been my philosophy, that things can generally be fixed, and the older they are the better designed when it comes to repairs, and 9 times out of 10 the fault is something simple, like stuck brushes. For anyone with even a little engineering or mechanical skill repairs are always an option.

Day 15 Thursday. today will be interesting, as training is still allowed during furlough, my company is taking advantage of the fact, today I have a 1 hour skype training session, next week we have 2 6 hour training sessions lined up, it will be interesting to see how they will work that one, considering they want us to access our work PC's for parts of it, while still remaining on skype, I can do that, but it will mean I cant see the skype while I am accessing the work PC, i will have to point that out to the trainer, as most people will have the skype and work on the same screen as they have work laptops, for me once I log into work, that takes over my screen and I have to shut it down again to get back to my pc screen. well we are certainly experiencing that ancient chinese curse, and living in interesting times.