I’ve still got my OM1 and FM2. I haven’t used them in years but I’ll never get rid of them.

I’m happy using a combination of sealskinz and marigolds to keep my feet dry but my shoes are currently getting soaked twice a day and starting to smell pretty bad!

I see in fresh goods someone else has entered the market for spd winter boots. Is it that manufacturers feel safer to enter an already well served market rather than identifying a new one.

I realise that there are plenty of normal shoes or boots you could use but if you like to ride with a grippy shoe in the summer are you going to be happy with a less grippy one once your feet and pedals are covered in water and mud?

I guess the reason they are not being made is that the manufactures don’t believe there is a sufficiently large market but it has struck me how many times people have posted recently regarding winter shoes for flats.

The Germans probably wish they’d prepared a bit better for Munich.

it could be just the end of a thorn, buried in your toe, slowly working it’s way into your body until it enters a large artery and get carried along in the flow until you feel a sharp pain in your head or your heart as the tiny piece buries itself into a vital organ. don’t worry, the pain won’t last for long

It could be worse than that, it could be carbon fibre from a previous crash in which case as above but quicker.

From the amount of pain, I’m expecting to find this in my sock later:

I might ask Santa for one of those in my stocking.

And Dave left the world with his final words recorded as:

because I’m not dying

I forget what this saddle is but its Ti railed, lite and very comfortable.

I didn’t realise this was a post a picture of your bike with a comfortable saddle whose identity is a mystery to you thread. 🙂

I’ve got the Ritchey WCS Marathon which I’ve done up to 10 hours on without any issues. It does need to be combined with padded shorts as well if you want to ride for any time but I guess that goes without saying.

I’ve got a Kindle and it’s one of the best things I’ve ever bought but that’s because I travel a lot for work and it’s small and light and easier to read when your sat alone in restaurant as you don’t need to employ spare cutlery to hold the book open while you eat. I also love the built in dictionary.

It is those primarily a device for reading fiction on where you always move through the book from beginning to end. It is nowhere near as good as a real book for reference works where you want to flick backwards and forwards.

However whereas I’m happy to have all my music and movies stored digitally and nothing on the shelves I will always want books on the shelves and I have no intention of getting rid of them and I will still buy real books as well as e books.

If I go from my hardtail 170 cranks to my rigid 165 cranks and haven’t ridden it for a while I notice the difference. The other way round I don’t. My previous bike had 175 cranks which I found fine off road but if I rode for a few miles on the road where I wasn’t moving around on the bike then my knees didn’t like it. Given the choice I’d probably stick with 165 as I prefer to spin rather than grind but the choices in 165 are limited.

Magnus Magnusson called me up at work once, asking to speak to me specifically, asked me a question about about something completely outside of my expertise or department but by fluke was able to talk about because I’d happened to have been looking at the objects he was enquiring about a few days earlier

I can’t believe you resisted the temptation to say pass.

I think Alain Ducasse at the Dorchester was probably the best

We used to do quite a few shows at the Dorchester and at lunchtime we’d still get the full silver service treatment at our crew table backset. The food was always good.

I tore down a hardboard and Artex ceiling in our old house to discover the original wooden ceiling from 1866.

One day in the future someone will be posting about their fantastic discovery of some original 1970’s Artex.

but in hindsight people will see he was a bit ordinary

OP I think you’ll always have him beaten in that department. 🙂

Winter = rigid bike with Rohloff. It gets ridden to and from work off road so no chance at all to keep it clean.

At what height above a country does that country no longer have jurisdiction over the airspace?

I was going to buy a matt black one and cut On-One decals from mirrored adhesive vinyl. I thought that would look pretty cool

A friend once had a matt black beetle with mirrored windows. We thought that was pretty cool but we were young then. I hope you have the same excuse. 🙂

Very tempted with one myself at the moment, If we weren’t spending all our money on building work I think It would be a certainty.

Unfortunately the trails are a bit too muddy at the mo’ and the water-bottles don’t taste so good through the layer of muck thats been splattered all over them.

Get some with covers – I use them all the time as I don’t want to stick shit in my mouth any time of year.
I also have A Wingnut 2.5 and find it much better than a standard pack.

Can people really tell the difference?

If I’ve been riding my bike with 170 cranks exclusively for a while then when I ride the bike with 165 cranks I can really feel the difference. If I go the other way I don’t notice it. I’ve also had 175 cranks and they were fine off road but my knees didn’t like them for riding on the road.

I’ve had a Fiat Doblo for 4 years – even uglier and like the others your looking at the kind of car no one wants and everyone needs.

“the owner of this vespa is an awful person”

Wow they must have been real mad.

I really can’t be arsed with it anymore! Especially the cleaning of bike and kit afterwards.

I’ve got a rigid bike with hub gears for the winter – it’s much more enjoyable when you know you won’t have to clean it when you get home. In fact I never clean it.

She reported it stolen din’t lose any money or owt though

Yes fortunately with a credit card those that use it for credit will take the hit.

No – I prefer dry summer days but today I went out for a bit and the sun was shining and the mud was at least semi frozen which is how I like it. I ride a rigid bike all winter and it gets a bit uncomfortable when the ground becomes really frozen solid.
commuting to work off road means I just have to ride whatever the weather and conditions are. I think it makes me appreciate the summer more though.

the piston mechanism and pad adjustment can cause problems because the parts tend to corrode too easily

I presume it’s the salt they don’t like as mine are on a third winter of off road commuting, are never cleaned and are fine.

Epicyclo – what teflon tubing do you use and where from please?

+1

Surely those don’t have 2 sets of flight controls?

Would you want to be sat in the back with no controls if your pilots wounded and can no longer fly? It would be like being on the back of TJ’s tandem as a branch takes of the top of his helmet-less head.

I may be misreading here but Bonin seemed susceptible to panic if he couldn’t understand a situation

The problem is that everyone is. The reason people in stressful life and death jobs train so much is to try to ensure they are never in a situation they haven’t encountered before in training. It appears that these pilots had trained for similar situations at low level i.e the go around but possibly had not been trained to cope with a similar situation at altitude. And perhaps the biggest problem is that they did not have a procedure where one took control of all the decisions supported by the other as would have happened if there had been a captain and first officer in the cockpit rather than 2 first officers.

Bonin may appear to come out of this badly but surely the other first officer with twice the flying hours should have taken control, especially as it seems obvious that Bonin was also a little spooked by some of the atmospheric conditions that preceded the incident.

It’s hard to read that without screaming at the crew to pull themselves together! But then we’ve all done things that have gone wrong and only afterwards looked back and realised what we should have done at the time. The lack of feedback from the controls is one thing I’m sure will be looked at. The second co pilot would probably have saved the plane if he could have felt what was going on. However all he had were the instruments to tell him and because they didn’t tally with what he thought the other pilot was doing he couldn’t understand the problem.

I prefer the fit of the DeWalt safety glasses. Whatever type suits you best the answer is definitely safety glasses though.

I’ve got one bike with a bb7 up front and a v brake at the back. In the dry they both work perfectly well but in the wet the bb7 is far better than the v brake it replaced and they are no more of a faff to set up and adjust than a cable rim brake. They may not have the power of hydros but they are in a different class to rim brakes in bad weather.

685 on my hardtail
600 on my rigid bike.

At some point I’ll upgrade the stem and bars on the hardtail and move them to the rigid.

I’m guessing as sheep-farming in the UK is massively subsidised that there’s somewhat of an under-demand for sheep / goat meat there too.

I guess that is right. The really stupid thing is that it’s sheep and goats we should be concentrating on in the UK because they can graze on land unsuitable for growing crops and on land that would be unsuitable for cattle and they require very little looking after. And we could be making use of pigs to eat all the massive amounts of non meat food waste we produce. Unfortunately the whole pig swill thing has come to a halt thanks to pigs being fed infected meat which led to foot and mouth outbreaks that stopped us all riding for a few months 10 years ago.

The problem with changing the model in Australia and Argentina and looking to be self sufficient on less land is that at present much of the rest of the world depends on the food produced there. The world wide shipping of food in mass quantities has allowed populations to grow in certain areas where otherwise they would not have. Obviously you can’t just stop exporting food to those areas and let people starve and the exporters are going to be pretty loath to give up the income.

Zokes you are quite right that the most efficient use of land and resources is not to rely just on plants but the areas you mention can’t produce meat in the quantities in which we are currently consuming it. To produce what we are currently consuming we are using land which could grow crops for human consumption either to graze animals or raise fodder crops.

The simple fact is that it takes far more land and resources to feed people on meat than on plants. We have to eat something so better that we eat mostly plants. Places may well be being destroyed by growing crops for human consumption but if you process those crops through an animal first to feed people then you will have to destroy even more land. Perhaps the real problem is population. With finite resources and if population continues to rise then at some point we have to arrive at the situation that Malthus predicted. We can only hope that the worlds population will become stable before we run out of resources.

Anyway the point I want to make about the Sea Shepherds is that they are not interested in trying to change the Japanese culture by trying to understand it and engage with them. They are angry people who need a cause which is high profile and makes them feel good to fight. If whaling were to end they would have to find something else to be angry about,it is the fight that drives them, to win would be a psychological disaster for them.

And don’t forget to put a few BOGOF’s in there as well.

have no issues with cattle, pigs, sheep, whatever, being bred in large numbers for food

My attitude reflects that of Native Americans; take from nature according to your need, but do so with respect and without waste or selfishness.

But the large scale production of meat is destroying the nature you respect. I understand you eat little meat and are therefore not part of the problem but you can’t really believe that mass production of meat is compatible with a respect for nature.

jonah tonto you’d do a lot better to start by looking closer to home and the practises that go on all around you in modern farming if you want to make a difference to our attitude to the planets natural resources. You don’t need to wait for the call from the Sea Shepherds you can start next time you go shopping.

I should point out that although I may appear to be supporting whaling I don’t. The point I’m trying to make is that there are cultural differences and as far as I’m aware “declaring war” on another group doesn’t often do anything but entrench their culture. I don’t know how many of you have been to Japan but I’ve travelled over much of the world and Japan is still the only place I’ve been to where I feel I’ve landed on another planet. They really think very differently to how we do and many of their values put us to shame, while other values we find shocking. I haven’t eaten any meat or fish for over 25 years and barely any dairy products in that time either partly because I feel that the way they are produced is unacceptable, just as unacceptable as what the Japanese whalers are doing.

So what are you doing cookeaa?
Being sarcastic – no
Being witty or amusing – no
Adding anything useful – no
I’m at a loss to wonder what you might think you’re doing.

This in the “Bikes” forum for “Yuppie AV shite”, “What roof bars for my Mini?” or “is there an iphone app to remind me to breath?” use the “Chat” area..

Which forum for piss poor sarcasm? 🙂

I’m now going to make sure I get on the next job we have in Hamburg.
I’ve been before but then all it had to offer were the Reeperbahn and a lot of pipe shops.