Month: June 2021

Things I’ve seen around Oxfordshire 🧐😲😍

Biology in and around Banbury – feeling the diversity from the perspective of a steel machine marine dweller.

Yeah bouy.

There’s so much to live for around here, at least that’s what the animals believe, as there seems to be rather a lot of them. Flying insects and birds…… birds on the water, animals that crawl and creep, hop and swim. There are a great diversity of the critters here. There is no doubt….

What I’d put this down to I don’t know. I can only guess that the local wild spaces by way of the country park and the Cotswold AONB has let some of those that would otherwise have perished, survive.

Time spent – time wasted

Seeing as I have so much time on my hands at the moment, I’ve taken some and committed it to a little fishing.

I’ve been a few times, 4 to be exact, with varying results. 2 times I caught these.

Bream from Cropredy Marina
Bream from Cropredy Marina
A 2lb roach from Oxford Canal
A 2lb roach from Oxford Canal

They are biggies….. especially the second one.

The other 2 times I caught nothing, or very little, just sat in the sunshine drank and listened to Youtube music streaming on my bluetooth speaker until it got dark, or I got bored. Whichever came first.

These two grand specimens more than make up for it.

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Painting a narrowboat water-tank – The third coming…..

** Update 23 April, 2025.**

Now nearly 4 years since I painted it last. Just an update, what I did that time previously I didn’t was left it to cure for 7 days. That is after the VACTAN was applied, it had 7 days to dry before I put the water back in.

Here’s what it currently looks like.

The inside of a water-tank

As you can see. There’s not a lot of rust. The water seems clear. If you wanted it potable from the tank, you’d have to do more, maybe get rid of the rust by giving it a few more coats every couple of years.

** Update 5th June, 2021.**

Corroded watertank
Corroded watertank

How long does Vactan last?

I’d say the last coat, (of Vactan), stopped working around 12 months ago. That’s around the summer of 2020, so it lasted around 2 years.

The symptoms of it stopping working were; flaking into the watertank, sinking to the bottom, and after some time, maybe a year, going into and clogging the waterpump filter.

That is: the very thin coating that is Vactan eventually flaked off, sometimes taking a coat of the Rylards beneath it, sometimes not, coming free from the sides of the tank and falling to the bottom…

Dirty narrowboat watertank
Dirty narrowboat watertank

This is what the watertank looked like as I started work on it.

It’s a combination of the paints that I’ve talked about lower down in this post. As you can see, some of it has been flaked off, either by me going around with my

Triangular headed scraper
Triangular headed scraper

or come away over the course of time.

There isn’t much bare metal, nor is there a lot of the original iron oxide that I put on there to start with.

It took from the 27th July 2018 to get fully to this point. So 3 years.

Prep for a brighter better future (for your watertank)

In my case, the prepping is already done…

The majority of the paint remains intact on the layers beneath. To prep in this case, I need to remove the flaking paint. Then make sure the surface is good to receive another 2 coats of Vactan.

Doesn’t take long. Maybe an hour to get it all off.

Continue reading “Painting a narrowboat water-tank – The third coming…..”