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Shieldhall’s boiler cleaning continues – now it’s getting intimate. Here’s one of the engineering team inside the furnace – the bit that’s an inferno of burning fuel oil when the ship is under way. To enter it, the heroic cleaners have to lie on their backs (like a car mechanic on his under-the-car trolley) and slide in through an opening about the size of an ordinary kitchen oven door. Then it’s clean by hand again, in a space not much wider than your shoulders. (Anyone with the slightest tendency to claustrophobia need not apply.) There’s a twist, too: the inside of the boiler has a corrugated surface, just right for all the soot and muck to collect in. So, being one of the volunteers looking after Shieldhall’s boilers means taking the term “enthusiast” to a whole new level… and they do…