if you drive like a grandad and aren’t using the capabilities of a grippier tyre, there’s no reason to buy them.

If you’re buying them “just in case”, and you’re not buying a full set, then you have to consider what happens when you exceed the grip level of the pair of tyres that has less grip.

Lets say you swerve with no other inputs (ie not braking or accelerating) the front tyres will grip, and the rear tyres will grip less, putting you into a slide. this (during an emergency scenario) is probably the worst scenario you can be in

figured I’d rather be able to steer my self out of a head on collision and take a side impact in the worst case

a side impact is the worse kind of impact to take in a car short of possibly a roof impact (which is pretty unlikely to happen). You have absolutely no crumple zone in a side impact, and very little space for your body to move into before it hits something very hard.

you need one of these

also work on low power tvs – basically have a small battery inside to cope when the stick is drawing a bit more power.

or just whack a female ciggy socket in behind your screen, and put a half decent charger in there.

It probably depends where the discrepancy is. If it’s in your shin, I’d be stacking the pedal in some way to compensate, if it’s in the thigh you want different length cranks

I don’t think its as clearly good news as you make thing. Conservative + Reform share of vote is more than labour in this election, and it’ll likely swing further from labour (as the party in power often suffers some). If the right manages to unite, things could prove interesting come the next election

I think the head angle is slacker than that – its 65 deg on my ariel 30 with 130mm forks, so it should be around 64.5 on this. Which sounds really slack for a 140mm bike to me, but I might be behind the times.

anyway, I’ve had mine for over 2.5 years – it was an extremely good buy in feb 2021 as it was
available
cheap (£2200 for the base spec)

when everything else was
unavailable
stupidly expensive

some of that USP has gone now that discount bargins are around from other brands, but it still rides well.it also had really modern geo for the time – I’m on a large (>500mm reach) at 6’2 and there’s a size above.

kit has been good, frame reliable. Some wear on it now as you’d expect but still does everything I need.

am also surprised they have kept with such a tall seat tube.

the L is, by normal standards, an XL bike (505mm reach), the seat tube on that is 460mm, I run mine with a 230mm dropper with a bit of wiggle room to spare.

if you’ve got a big enough vise you could clamp the (now separate) spring in that and release the ratchet straps? or put the spring clamps over top-and-bottom to hold it down?

with much younger kids the highlights were laberynth kindermuseum (I think your 2 may be too old) and Spandau Citadel

you can do a driving tour of the city in a trabant I think?

If it’s mounted on the bike is it not compressing at all with your bodyweight on it? If it is, sit on it then ziptie up..

mazda have larger na engines instead of smaller turbod ones. so one of them?

a lot of hatchbacks have mounting points to properly get racks on – they bolt in near the rain gutters and are just as good as an estate.

some cars don’t have this available, so mount by clamping the roof curve, this doesn’t work quite as well. in my experianece the OEM roofbars (often cheap on ebay) work best, followed by thule, and everything else should be avoided if you’re particular about your car

seasuckers are another option if you don’t have lots of bikes or change cars often

You can whack an app on an old android smartphone to do this if you have one lying around in a drawer.

That said, I think lasting a week whilst you’re on hols is optimistic.

But the insurers are paid to act on her behalf.

No it’s not, it’s scaremongering. If they were “putting a rocket up her insurer” then they would be writing to the insurer rather than to her, wouldn’t they.

if the daughter’s insurance aren’t settling the claim after an entire year, the next step to forcing the matter is to take them the daughter to court. There is no other way to escalate it. You can’t take the insurance company to court, and if you take no-one to court the issue will remain unsolved for 6 years (from memory) at which point it times out, and there’s no way of recovering the losses the other party has. Taking the daughter to court is the only way to move things forwards, and whilst its worrying for her, the insurance company will sort it. The insurance company can (and have) ignore a letter, they can’t ignore a CCJ.

often these things get right to the doorway of the court before being settled – there’s lots of annecdotal evidence of witnesses having to show up on the day only to be told to go home (especially for AMC car hire fees). Hopefully for the OP it won’t get to that, but it might.

the reason we have a lot of glass is because the room is deep (8 meters in places) and the glass along one edge of it is the only natural light source – due to neighbours/other rooms at the side and above we can’t get light in any othe rway. We’ve been in a bunch of houses where the rear is gloomy all winter long, and don’t want that for our main living space.

There might have been another way to design light in earlier, but right now we have a 6 x 2.4m hole in our wall, so need some solution for glazing it

thanks for all the advice.

How much of a chunk in the grand scheme, rather than the cost of glass?

in terms of the extension, not much. What I’m trying to figure out is how much (in terms of temperatue) difference it will make, but I don’t know how to run the maths. If it only saves us 1C, probably not worth it, if it saves us 5C, now we’re talking.

I’ve 135m3 of air with an average of 3.5kw or 5.5kw of energy going into it for 5 hours. The exterior air temperature on these hot days is probably close enough that once insulation is taken into consideration, heat loss through the walls is minimal.

I think 1m3 of air weighs 1.29kg – so 135 is ~175kg of air that can be heated up.

this calculator suggests that to raise air from 25 to 35 degrees requires about 0.5kwh of heat, to raise it to 100C is 3.5kwh (ie 1 hour with the solar glass) so I’m obviously doing something wrong :)

Heat capacity calculator

I’ve no idea why Shimano haven’t bought out a wireless groupset

sram have a patent on it, so shimano need to do some clever work-around (like wiring front + rear mech together on the road side), to circumvent them

easy way to test would be to flip the fuse box switch after dark. If the light outside is still on, and your meters not going up, you’re not paying

?

can you ping the hub on the wired connection?

can your phone take an e-sim? in which case airalo normally have a good range of reasonably priced data sims

if its a private road (instead of adopted) I could see an option where it is wired in post-meter (every house powering the light nearest them to avoid needing a separate power supply to the street). seems unlikely though.

The total leccy bill for our street of 17 houses is £300 (including some sort of service charge I imagine) – I would estimate there’s a dozen or so lighting bollards, each running old school energy saving or led bulbs, turned off at 11pm or so

In fact I was surprised to see that my wifes VW takes the integration further by showing the speed limit, plus the car current speed on the google maps display.

tbf google maps does that by itself on a completely standalone phone, you just have to press the speed limit to see your current speed as well. Its using gps to figure out your speed

just been up to re-inspect the roof during a downpour (we had an inch last night, so a reasonable amount, but there was already some dampness coming through before then).

looking at the felt theres a few rips or almost-rips on it, which aren’t there on any of the unexposed felt – a lot of it seems to be close to where edges of wood are. My supicion is that as they stripped the roof/some of the existing batterns then had wind blowing into the void, the felt has been pushed hard against the remaining batterns due to a sail effect and caused it to rip at that point.

Interesting choice of words on ‘builder opted to not use a tin hat’. I presume if you were insistant you wanted it they could/should have quoted you the price for the job with the tin hat (at a good chunk more) and without? You are the client after all and define the spec they should be working to.

Unless the water damaged is significant, whilst being a pain in the ass, it is probably still cheaper to fix overall than to have erected a tin roof over the whole house.

we didn’t insist – we asked whether the scaffoding was going to encompass a roof, and they said no it wasn’t needed as we already had felt (and it seems from this thread like that was a reasonable approach to take). I work in IT so didn’t ask for them to change it. At this point, its likely not much slower to get the place tiled than it is to get some scaffs in to put a hat on it all anyway – the tilers were meant to start today (2 faces are ready to go for them).

Get them to resolve it now, can’t they cover it with tarpaulins? And I would get the dehumidifiers on straight away.

We’ve certainly asked them to do that, but given where we’ve got to at this point, we’re also pessimistic about what the outcomes are likely to be.

thanks all

At the moment we don’t know how soaked the various bits of the house are as access is tricky (all the floorboards are under carpet which is under all our furniture at the moment) – additionally we’re a long way from everything being weathertight, so the damp is likely to get (a lot) worse before it gets better. The builders have dehumidifiers we can borrow, but doesn’t seem much point until there isn’t water coming in any more.

It seems like the water is getting through the felt at the joists (as the joists are very wet), rather than randomly dripping through – I assume this will be where the batten has been nailed through to the joist – I don’t know if this is to be expected or not. I’ll head up there in the next heavy downpour to confirm

hunt are based (or certainly used to be) in the south downs and have an outlet section. I’d be giving them a bell to see what alu rimmed stuff they have ready to post today and see what they can do.

Did you tell the builders as soon as it was clear the felt wasn’t keeping water out?

yes, we’ve been extremely hot on sending them pictures of every new bit of damp thats coming through. Obviously this appears to us some time after its actually rained (as it takes a while to soak through)

Well they will expand, that’s for sure. Depending on how tight they were to start with and how securely fixed down they were they might pop up.

But once dry they should be fine, it won’t cause lasting damage.

good to know. The whole house is only 9 years old so I’m kinda assuming all the 1st floor flooring is T&G of some kind, just wanted to make sure it wasn’t permanently knackered after getting wet

As above most kids bikes have cranks for 1/2″ pedals whilst adult cranks have 9/16″.

You’ll struggle to get anything sensible in 1/2 so you might have to change the cranks or modify the pedals that are on it.

depends a lot on the bike. Most cheapo 1-piece cranks are like that, but if you’ve a bike from a half-decent brand it should be 1/2″. A lot of BMX pedals (anything for 1 piece cranks) are available in 1/2″ anyway, so there’s lots of options out there both ways – I agree its worth checking

as above, a lot of cars can just use the bluetooth connection to your phone to leech data. I’m surprised its using anything like 25gb though – wouldn’t it just be getting maps and things? I suspect 1gb is enough for that

Otherwise, giffgaff uses the o2 network and is generally cheap – £10 per month will get you what you need.

I chucked some normal size pedals on my kids bike, they didn’t seem to have any disadvantages over smaller pedals – possibly the opposite as when they did slip a little, he still had platform left to use. So my suggestion would be whatever pair of old pedals you want, they don’t need to be kid specific

the stem top cap is an interesting one. I agree with the theory of removing it after the pinch bolts are set, but in practice, in heavy use, the top cap is still in play..

On my DH bike I’d swapped the default cap for a oneup lite tool that I had spare from a trail bike. loosened all 3 sets of bolts, tightened the preload appropriately, tightened them all back up to the specced torque. All was fine for a run or 2, then there was knocking at the front end, head set it loose. Repeat the process, and the same thing happens. So I drive the star flanged nut out, replace with a new one and use my mates top cap (which is surprisingly tight on his dh bike), retighten everything, give the top cap back, and again after 2 runs its a little knocky. Did the same with a different mates top cap, which is also really tight on his bike (neither of the other bikes had any binding in the headset). Get the same results

End up nipping to a local shop and buying a standard top cap, set it once, tighten everything up the same as before and not a single knock for the rest of the 8 day trip.

Lesson learned – the top cap does make some small amount of difference to the overall systme in heavy use, and the oneup system (being plastic) is I guess not rigid enough to give the same affect. Oneup works fine on my trail bike, so I’ve got to assume its some combination of heavier loads (I’m a 90kg rider, we were riding double-black dh trails) that go beyond what the pinch bolts can withstand. Given how tight all the top caps I borrowed were, this seems like something thats not specific to my bike.

Is the mot history identical? It might just be that the DVLA are helpfully joining the dots for you.

Alternatively the owner of the car you’re looking at liked it so much he bought a new one almost exactly the same and transferred his plate over.

Otherwise private hire vehicles need mots every 6 months afaik

SRAM have had a automatic rear hub gear for a while and Shimano xt has auto shifting on e bikes. Not sure what is new here?

Re cruise control have you tried just plugging in the correct stalk? That works in a lot of cars, failing that it may need a switch changing via a usb lead

https://www.screwfix.com/p/pegler-straight-service-valve-15mm-x-1-2-/19933?tc=OA5&gad_source=1&gclid=CjwKCAjw0t63BhAUEiwA5xP54ef-QB2hEVni5DXAVnRQUsm7Sq8XzBMSrgANf49QGJoXkbxYoyW6URoChysQAvD_BwE&gclsrc=aw.ds

Search for tap isolation or service valve rather than just isolation valve

How would you charge MOT based pay per mile for new cars that don’t need an MOT for the first 3 years?

Charge it at the end of 3 years? If you’re buying something 2.5 years old the value drops accordingly, or it has to be motd every sale. Plenty of ways to make it work

if they think its wiring, I’ve used this chap a couple of times in crawley – he was able to repair wiring on my driveway twice (in hassocks – different cars) after tracing an issue.

https://www.autoelectrical-crawley.co.uk/contact.html

might be able to help you out. I think his min fee is around £130 – both times he fixed my cars within that time.

If you google “mileage correction service” you get a remarkable number of businesses for what should be a pretty rare need. A cynic might connect the number of companies and the boom in lease/pcp deals which apply hefty penalties if you go over the x miles per year.

they can often update the display but for most cars the true milage is a quick pull on the odbc port away. Sure thats a bit more work for the MOT chap, but any of these options would be.

Be interested to know how they’d bring in road pricing/pay by mile as I’m pretty sure odometers* are even more easily tricked than they used to be & to tax after the event would be tricky.

I think both could be wrapped into your MOT. Want to drive the car another year? Its £50 for the inspection and 2p per mile you’ve covered since the last check. Would raise broadly the same amount (assuming an average milage of 10k miles) as today.

sure, when the car gets binned you lose the last year’s income (as no MOT on being scrapped), and you could maybe clock the thing, but tbh there’s much more money to be made in improved residuals (which could be ~£10k more on a low milage car vs a high milage car at 5 years old), than there is in dodging £200/year in tax – I suspect anyone who wants to clock their cars is already doing it (and in the extreme minority, like red diesel users)

a rental place we had in whistler had a solid fuel open fire with a gas start – ie a bbq element shoved under the wood basket. You could just chuck some logs on, whack it up to full and enjoy the fire, no need to worry about draw, kindling, etc..

you could run pay-per-mile on EVs as part of the MOT procedure – I imagine most can’t be clocked these days. Be a bit of an eye opener if you bought one with 1 months MOT left which had been used as a taxi for the past year though :)

my diesel 7 seater is staying at £20. Interesting that most newer vehicles are paying 10x as much

it’ll be interesting to see if public charger prices settle down to a sensible range – similar to fuel prices which are normally within 10%