Watch the boat: George Clarke's Amazing Spaces on 4OD: http://bit.ly/TsKcDR
Once upon a time, in the latter parts of the 2007 Formula 1 season - whilst I was working for Bridgestone Motorsport in Langley, Slough - I bought a narrowboat to be my abode for the rare occasions that I wasn’t at races or tests. Or sleeping in hedges.
· Cheaper than a renting / buying a house/flat
· Kinda cool
· Interesting project
I made the final decision to buy the boat whilst in São Paulo, fueled by the national drink of caipirinha and egged on by my Bridgestone chums. Thanks Sam.
c) Away from motor sport, I was also attempting to create ‘World of Sheds’ in the garden of my house – consuming time and money.
d) I didn’t want to spend much money on the project (see above point c).
In the next post, read how I painted myself into a corner, nearly flooded the boat, and how it all came together to be broadacast on Channel 4...
Once upon a time, in the latter parts of the 2007 Formula 1 season - whilst I was working for Bridgestone Motorsport in Langley, Slough - I bought a narrowboat to be my abode for the rare occasions that I wasn’t at races or tests. Or sleeping in hedges.
I had no previous experience of canals or real
experience of boating save for the Dover-Calais ferry or playing with small sailing
boats when I was 15.
The purchase of a narrowboat was justified thus:
· Cheaper than a renting / buying a house/flat
· Kinda cool
· Interesting project
I made the final decision to buy the boat whilst in São Paulo, fueled by the national drink of caipirinha and egged on by my Bridgestone chums. Thanks Sam.
I bought the boat from the
world’s most popular outlet for alcohol-induced purchases – ebay. It was described as 80% complete.
Called Nemesis, inside was a 'part-finished’, outside
was battleship grey primer, painted over the previous paint job. And the engine
didn’t work.
Brass
Monkey
I took ownership of the boat in December 2007
and my first night on the boat was in -7°C. A metal vessel in a frozen canal is
not a warm place to be.
As I preserved with the project on which I’d
blown my life’s savings, it became clear that it wasn’t – in its then state at
least – a viable abode. This came into focus one night when it was so cold I
determined that it was actually warmer (in relative terms…) to sleep under the
bed to take advantage of a mattress-worth of insulation above me. This
was fine until I woke in the middle of the night, tried to sit upright and
knocked myself out on the wooden underframe of the boat, waking up some
time later with a black eye.
In fact, in the cold light of day I concluded
that the more realistic ratio of completedness was rather: 20% finished / 80% unfinished. Work clearly needed
to be done.
A lack of additional cash to spend on the boat
allied to the emergence of a girlfriend on the scene (with a mostly warm house)
meant that the boat went on the back-burner for a while. Then a little longer.
Over the course of the first season of ownership
I largely determined that everything previously ‘completed’ on the boat needed starting
again, so I set about ripping out some of the interior. Glass fibre ‘wool’ type
insulation and cheap ply-wood was replaced with Kingspan insulation board. Then
I got distracted.
Lewis Hamilton won the Drivers’ World
Championship. Then Jenson Button did too. The Sebastian Vettel won two. Somewhere
amidst that the world’s economy fell apart too. And Bridgestone left
Formula 1 – meaning that the concept of having a convenient crash pad minutes
from their office was left rather redundant.
2012
and beyond
And then part way through Seb progressing
through to his third title, a good friend of mine got in touch: ‘Wouldn’t it be
a good idea to get the boat finished? And there’s a TV programme interested
too.’
Not being one to miss out on an opportunity for
a comedy TV appearance (F1 drivers usually get in the way of most of mine), I
jumped at the chance.
This was something of a daft idea as:
a)
It was the middle of the F1
season and I was kinda busy.
b)
I was also at that point
attending MotoGP and Le Mans events.c) Away from motor sport, I was also attempting to create ‘World of Sheds’ in the garden of my house – consuming time and money.
d) I didn’t want to spend much money on the project (see above point c).
No matter, James Dixon – legend of times of old
in what became the British Universities Karting Championship – www.bukc.co.uk – and co-composer of I Got
The No Poo Blues (a song which acknowledges the physiological impact of
staying on a canal boat shorn of toiletry facilities) persuaded me that a
design project on the boat would be a dead cool idea, and in addition he’d
assist with his fine CAD skills.
To actually build the designs, friend of even
longer standing and former www.waitrose.com
weekend colleague Jules Clapham of www.claphamjoinery.co.uk
jumped at the idea to become involved in the ambitious project.
And so, the three amigos concocted plans in a
warm ale dispensing beverage house.
Disaster!
The original plan was to have a full CAD inside
and outside of the boat to be able to play with ideas and concepts, then with
reflective methodology the parts would be finely crafted by Jules back at the
workshop and on the boat itself.
Unfortunately, James became otherwise occupied
with life so the CAD methodology went by the wayside, to be replaced by me and
Jules sketching on beer mats at www.thestapletonarms.com
to come up with the concepts, with Jules’ father Andy adding enormous wisdom and
insight – particularly in the latter stages.
Talking
Heads
It soon became evident that me and Jules are
particularly good at talking and coming up with what we agreed were good ideas.
Then talking some more. Then replacing the ideas with other ideas. Jules even
talked so much that one mobile phone supplier cut off his mobile to free up
network space for other users.
Time waits for no man and the time to actually
get hands dirty, but before we could do any work on the inside, we needed the
boat to be a moveable entity as it was booked in to be painted.
Motorhead
Two parts of the build this year were completed
by www.high-line.co.uk – the fine
boatyard where Nemesis is moored, whose personnel put up with my weird and
wonderful ideas. Fixing a replacement engine was the first task as I supplied
various ebay-sourced replacements from which a working replacement was fashioned.
Then
disaster struck as the Aqua-drive coupling – the clever bit which takes
the drive from the engine to the propeller, whilst dampening and accommodating a
different angle of approach – decided it was time to cease to work.
Nemesis was originally built in 1989 it had been
sat with a non-functioning engine for quite some time before I bought it, so it
was no surprise really that a part which had lay dormant, unmoved by the suck,
squeeze, bang, push from three cylinders of Mitsubishi’s finest, so the rude
awakening of a functioning engine was sufficient to render it inoperable.
Unfortunately, the particular flavour of
Aqua-drive fitted to Nemesis was – of course – a non-standard size. And that
non-standard size was no longer made. Two options were available – change everything
to fit a standard size, or find a replacement of the twenty-year obsolete size
which fitted. Miraculously, after some serious searching boatyards and brokers the
correct one was found and fitted.
This all took time, and the boat was only just
ready for the next part of the build – painting the outside.
Painting
By Numbers
You can paint narrowboats yourself, but that
takes a lot of time and no small measure of skill to complete a reasonable job.
I had neither time nor skill, so www.high-line.co.uk
were once more employed. All they needed was me to decide on which colours…
Now, when we were planning the CAD modelling of
the boat, we would have had a nice 3D model to play with colours. We didn’t
have this so the choice was made at the very last minute over the phone, which
is always a good way to spend a lot of money.
Let
the work begin!
Boat painted and with a working engine, it was
time to complete the strip-out started some four years prior, so hammers and
pry bars were employed. When ironmongery was insufficient, as in the case of
the gravity defying stove - so angle grinders were used.In the next post, read how I painted myself into a corner, nearly flooded the boat, and how it all came together to be broadacast on Channel 4...
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