Wednesday, December 22, 2010

Grrrr! Brrrr! Oooh er!

Grrr!  Today I read a forum post entitled Don't say I didn't warn you from Phil Speight advising everyone to get the snow off the tops of their boats so as to avoid the formation of micro blisters in the paint.  I wish he had posted it two days earlier because I was out at Herbie then and could have done it.  However I feel I can't ignore it after all the work we did this year to paint it so  I'll have to drive back out tomorrow and brush off the snow if I can.  It was about four or five inches deep the other day and freezing cold.

Brrr!  It's going to be cold, but worse than that , slippery.  I don't have the luxury of being able to do it from the bank, so I might have to climb on the roof to do it.  Either that or from the gunwales.   I have a nasty feeling that there will be a crusty layer of ice under the snow too.  I don't ant to scratch the paint by too much scraping.  I could  use hot water, although that would re freeze straight away I suppose.  Hmm perhaps not a good idea.  I certainly don't want to do it chemically because that would probably do more harm than good.  The more I think about it the scarier it gets.

Although we have had snow here and it has been quite cold, we don't seem to have had the extremes of cold that people up north have.  The canal was frozen quite thickly the other day but there was water between Herbie and Humbug our neighbour, presumably thanks to Glyn being resident on Humbug and losing some of her heat through the hull.

5 comments:

James said...

Just don't do what I did, and step on an icy block on the gunwale and fall in...

The water's very cold at this time of year!

Andy Tidy said...

Neil
Better a micro blister than a broken leg. One has to weigh the risks and rewards.
Andy

Rick said...

Never mind the blisters. We will just have to paint the roof yet again in the spring!

Rusty said...

Just wondering - and thinking about how they de-ice aircraft. How about a very dilute solution of ethelene glycol? (aka windsheid washing fluid here in north america for winter use). Don't keep it around where animals can get at it. They love its sweetness - but it's VERY TOXIC.

Perhaps a plastic scraper would work better and be soft enough so as to not scratch the paint.

Neil Corbett said...

Apparently aircraft de-icer is very bad for narrowboat paint. Phil Speight tells the tale of a customer's boat suffering very bad paint degradation over a winter, and the fault turned out to be aircraft de -icer from planes taking off overhead!