Cor blimey, it's getting a bit chilly now. Just taking Molly for a walk. Talking
about being cold, I was going out to see a friend the other Saturday for lunch
and I stepped out onto the bow, I had a bag of rubbish in my right hand.
Luckily for some reason, I turned and locked the door and put my phone on the
roof. Good job really because I turned round, slipped, put my arm out, nothing
there and I went straight into the canal, head first. The temperature outside was
about five degrees celsius and boy the water was cold. It was deep enough
I couldn't stand on the floor in the middle, so I sort of swam over, rather
quickly I must add and climbed up onto the bank. Meanwhile Molly was sitting
there watching me, thinking, oh what are you doing, that's a bit silly, it's a
bit chilly. No help from her! But I leapt out, quickly went inside, luckily I had a
couple of minutes earlier, got out of a nice hot shower, lots of hot water. So I
just went straight in the shower fully clothed, got the shower going and then
sort of stripped off and put all the stuff in the washing machine and warmed up a
bit. But it goes to say - it goes to show, you know, if I had hit my head or
something, who knows what would have happened because no one was around.
Thankfully in a good way really because it was rather embarrassing, but if I had
hit my head or if I was right out in the middle of nowhere, all sorts could have happen.
So, anyway, I've done it, I think most people that live on a boat, fall in at
some point,
[laugh] and last Saturday was mine.
Stay, no, no, you don't need to lie down. Sit - oh no, don't roll over. Up you get, come
on, sit. Right, stay. I've been doing this sit and stay business with Molly for
quite a while now. As you know I did it on the narrowboat whilst going on
the Coventry Canal and hopefully she just stays in the same place. I haven't, I
can't see you at the moment but hopefully in the background you can see
that she's still sat there and I walk further and further away, sometimes
completely out of sight and she's still sat there - fingers crossed. She quite
enjoys it to be fair, I'm not just teasing her. She loves it when I yell and
she comes running down the towpath. Alright that'll do, that'll do, let's see.
Right, so she's right up there, I don't know if you can see and then I whistle. [Whistle]
Here she comes.
Sit Molly, sit, sit, sit, good girl. You're a good girl aren't you? Hey, you're a good
girl, good girl, yes. Okay! In my last episode the observant
viewers may have spotted a white tank on the stern of Alice. It's a new 450 litre
water tank and is baffled to stop any sudden sloshing about. I'll be placing it
under my bed and it'll drastically reduce the need for quite so many water
trips. It came with a one-inch outlet connection but I needed to drill the
inner plastic seal.
The screw thread was a BSP type and I vacuumed any tiny bits of plastic from
the socket. I used a brass one-inch to 22mm
reducer and then reduced it down again, using a plastic Speedfit
22 to 15mm reducer. I used liquid PTFE tape to form a
constant seal around the reducer and screwed it to the tank.
I had previously removed some of the ballast to compensate for the additional full tanks, 450 Kg
of weight. I also added wooden struts under the tank, for additional
support. I then, after flushing and cleaning the
tank, connected it to the main water system and secured the tank in place.
So I'm up at the bow of the boat now. This is the area that I started first and I have
added battens above the gunnel. This is quite unusual but I did it for three key
reasons really. I have got a batten already fixed in place, that's sitting on
top of the gunnel and I've also got another batten at the top, which is up
against the roof line and the wall line. Now those two are fixed. There are
sporadic battens, like there's one here, but there, some of them are skew if,
they're not at set distances and I'm planning to put sheet MDF on here,
9mm sheet. I'll seal it on the back before I put it on and then I will
be probably painting the front with a roller, to give a lovely smooth surface.
Having sporadic battens all over the place, won't help me fixing that and you
know that the the end of the sheet will end where there's no batten and then
I'll be wasting lots of wood so, I've put these in. They are at 40cm centres
and they are exactly that way right the way down the entire length of
the boat. Another one of the reasons why I'm using these battens is the foam
insulation. I've explained in a previous episode how
the foam has been applied and in some areas it bulges out quite a lot so,
giving the wall an extra bit of depth has allowed me to leave the majority of
the foam in place and just chop the ends off. This will keep the thermal value of
the boat, because obviously every bit of foam I take off, will make the boat
colder. I've got this bit of wood and I've just gone down the batten and where
it hits the foam, I've known that's where I need to chop it off and I've gone like
that like the way down the entire boat. That will also allow me to not have to
chop as much off, because it's a real pain taking it off but I've been
able to do it in channels. The final reason why I've added these battens are
all to do with routing cables. Now normally you would have cables running
down the boat either at ceiling and roof height, or under the gunnel. Any
lower than the gunnel, you're sort of running into lots and lots of rules and
regs because you're below the waterline, they've got to be trunked correctly and
all sorts of things, so, each batten is 12cm longer than they need to be.
I've marked it off because I know the piece of wood that's sitting on the
gunnel is actually accurate and so I've lined my mark
to the bottom of that piece of wood, right the way down the boat so every
single batten is 12cm longer, and that has allowed me to build a cable
tray, to run all my cabling. Now out of the side of that cable tray, I can then
come up in conduit behind the sheet of wood that will be here, along the gaps
and I'll be able to have switches and sockets and cables going up to lights
and things, but this extra depth has allowed me to do that.
Wo ho ho, she nearly went in then!
In my previous video Mandy Smith commented how intrigued she was with my
secret nailing! When installing tongue and groove I wanted to avoid a row of
nails showing. So on the tongue of each panel, I angle a nail at 45 degrees. I
hammered it in with a panel pin hammer until the end of the nail was just about
flush with the wood. I then used a nail punch to push the head of the nail, that
little bit further. The groove of the next panel hides the nail, hence the term,
secret nailing. For both the 240 volt electric sockets and the 12 volt
lighting, I've decided to use these brushed steel sockets and switches.
Because they're made for normal solid core twin and earth cable in a house,
they have screw terminals. However the cables on my boat are multi stranded, so
I'll be terminating their ends with bootlace ferrules to form a secure
connection. I'll bring the cables through split corrugated conduit to these 35mm
deep dry lining boxes. I've seen dry lining boxes before and didn't
like the fact that the edge of the lining box could be seen behind the
fitted sockets. These sockets and switches however, are that little bit
wider, and completely cover the back boxes edge. Please do leave a comment
below, as I do read every one of them and if you like this video, please give it a
thumbs up. Until next time, see you later.
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