Month: February 2025

Here in Spiceball Park

Banbury. Right behind the bakery, behind a shed where they load the lorries with bread before they go off delivering around the country. It is actually Warburtons bread. It’s called the ‘fine lady’ bakery.

Can’t hear a peep from it… The new windows are assisting in this. The only thing I can really make out is the birds. Late night, the industrial lighting keeps them awake and they do a kind of premature dawn chorus. That can be a bit noisy. You get used to it. I think they realise after a bit, it’s not real dawn and shut up. Otherwise, you wouldn’t know you were right in the centre of Banbury. It’s pretty quite.

As well as looking pretty snazzy, the double glasing tint has the additional effect of not allowing the little beasties that frequent the towpath from being able to see in.

Fitting LifePo batteries to the narrowboat

Now that the trees are gone, (leaves), I can get some good solar. Whilst I’m out at work, my batteries are charging. By the time I get back, they’ve added one to two percent which I can see on the app.

Fogstar drift app

My old lead acid AGM batteries bit the dust. The winter weather tends to kill them off. A culling of the weak as it were. Over the last cold period, I was having to start the boat every other day to keep them topped up.

When it’s not the holiday period, that’s simply not practical. I’m not going to be there to run engines. I work until late, and when I get back it maybe 9 or 10pm.

So I got rid of the AGM’s and got some what’s called Lifepo4, which is a chemical acronym. Lithium Iron phosphate.

Fogstar

https://www.fogstar.co.uk

Are a company from the UK based in Redditch.

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Moved from Cropredy

So, after months of repair work, I’ve finally moved from Cropredy.

Water-pump

Waterpump
Waterpump

I seem to remember doing a post about this not so long ago. My engines’ water-pump had definitely failed and needed replacing. The waterpump I bought before Christmas and I hadn’t got round to fitting didn’t fit and the man I bought it from at ukboatyard.co.uk wasn’t prepared to give me a refund.

I hadn’t used it but the pulley-wheel wouldn’t fit on the pump because the screw-holes didn’t align. This meant. It wasn’t possible to drill out accurately because the pump housing in the way.

I was told to ‘drill the pulley wheel out’ by the guy at ukboatyard. Very useful. Now I have a new and useless waterpump, pictured above.

New, new water pump

That’s right. 1 for sorrow, 2 for joy. Except not really joy in this case. This one didn’t fit either!

This time it wouldn’t fit in the engine casing. The pulley-wheel did, however, fit on fine. After 2 or more hours loosening screws, wobbling round and trying to figure out what was stopping it. I came to the conclusion that it was developing some abrasions on the edge. These were being caused by me trying to force it, and it making contact with the engine casing which was preventing.

I took out the old waterpump, put it on some notepaper and drew a trace around the edge of it with a pencil.

I then took the new water pump and traced that also. That gave me some idea of where the shapes were not matching exactly.

Rather than send it back for a replacement, (no guarantee that that would fit either!), I decided to use brute force. A very useful tool in challenging engineering situations. I took the angle grinder out, put the pump on the bench and ground 3 mm off the edge of it, which turned out to be the wrong edge! Ground some more of the other correct side. Took about 4 minutes of grinding in total

This seemed to have the right effect. Snapped in like a charm.

From then on in, it was all downhill. Fit the fanbelt, tighten it up. Put some new coolant in. Start the engine. Run the engine a bit. Put some more coolant in. Tighten the fan belt a bit more.

Job done!

Took months to do it though.

Continue reading “Moved from Cropredy”