Choosing the right engine for a traditional narrowboat is not an easy task ... there are so many things to take into account when deciding, and also you have to look at availability of viable engines in the first instance as there are fewer and fewer good examples. You need to decide on the amount of power that you would like from your engine, remembering that the horse power from vintage engines are designed to be delivered at much lower revs than a modern engine. We knew that we wanted a vintage engine, which we wanted to sound good and which would also command pride of place in the engine room, and which was able to be maintained fairly easily as I'm certainly no engineer.
After a lot of thought and reading ... particularly on the fabulous Canalworld forum [http://www.canalworld.net/forums] which has loads of information and opinion ... we decided that a Kelvin would be a fabulous engine for the boat, or perhaps a Gardner.
After much consideration, and with some fortune with a suitable engine becoming available (they appear for sale very infrequently), we settled on a Kelvin J3, pictured above on the day we bought it, number 23423. It's a full petrol hand-start engine with electric start also. Whilst the Gardner 2LW is a lovely engine, and there are lots of other lovely choices, we think that the Kelvins have such a lot of history and character. There are much larger Kelvin engines in narrowboats., notably the massive K3s fitted in many of the RW Davis and Son boats named 'Northwich Traders', the Kelvin J3 delivers 33hp at 1,000 rpm which we believe is ideal for the 60 or so feet boat which we plan, and the Kelvin company ... and indeed this particular engine ... have got lots of history (more of which to follow). We bought the engine in good working order, albeit it required an overhaul of the key components, which we will detail and record on these pages.
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