I’ve also retired my prophet frame and am considering selling (although not sure I really want to). I don’t think it’s about how hard the trails I ride are, but how fast they are. A lot of what we ride is relatively slow and steep, so the suspension felt not very useful. On faster, rocky open stuff it’s great (although the HT with a 2.4 advantage on the back is pretty damn fun too), but I don’t ride that stuff as often and it’s hard to justify a whole bike for a handful of rides a year when the HT actually isn’t that much of a compromise on those trails anyway.

Our friend Julia Hobson is doing LEJOG off road next month following the death of her husband Gareth last year in a climbing accident. She’ll be staying with friends en-route mostly so not really unsupported, but still a great undertaking on your own. I heard she might even be the first woman to ride it?

For similar damage limitation to the Five, but with more zing and pop the new Cotic Rocket is getting very favourable initial feedback. Or get a burlier hardtail?

Snowdon last year

Lakes last year

and Spain a couple of years ago

Vittoria randonneur here too. Bought them as they were lighter and cheaper than Marathons and reviews suggested they were just as tough. Early days, but happy so far.

I run my pipedream with revs dropped to 130mm. The weight difference over rebas is pretty much non-existent and it was much easier to find cheap revs.

exactly as honourablegeorge. Crests occasionally need a bit of a tweek for almost exactly the same riding you describe with nice fat tyres at low pressures. A couple of big dings now, but no actual loss of performance after 18 months of pretty hard use.

I would get revelations and space them down. There doesn’t seem to be a weight penalty for having the extra travel and there are also loads of cheap ones about. Other than that damping’s the same, but you have the option of fitting to a frame that takes longer forks in the future.

I think b r has it. It might add perceived value to a select few, so not to most potential buyers, but will be seen as an added bonus which should make your house more appealing and quicker to sell.

The mag easily beats any of the others I’ve read in the past or still read and I’m not from Hebden. Have you actually read it recently?

Ed, any chance you can put your loan repayments into the context of how much you currently earn?

I finished 5 years at uni in 2004 and started paying some of my loan back when I was earning £15,000 a year and some £24,000 a year (two different loan types over that period). At one point when I was earning £24,000 I was paying back around £300 a month. It wasn’t that bad, I still managed to save additional money. I paid off my loans (which was a large sum to find) when the interest jumped in line with high inflation a couple of years back.

I think the new loans system just needs to be viewed by most as a graduate tax. Very few students will ever pay the whole figure off in 30 years so the headline figure is meaningless. You would never need to find a lump sum to pay off the loan when interest leaps up as the total cost will never be paid off anyway, so it matters little how fast or slow it’s accruing interest. The repayments are a small fraction (relatively) of what you earn and, as such, are very manageable. If people ignore the headline figure, the current system is, IMHO, better for most.

Matthew H (the other 18bikes Matt) to the forum.. He recently changed from a SC Nomad as his main trail bike to a carbon Tallboy. Should be able to give a good idea of the pros and cons of the swap.

I have crests and tyres don’t seem to be any more or less difficult than on any other rim. Certainly no issues with trail side puncture repairs. They’re very light, stiff enough, and only have a couple of dings after 18 months of use.

it seams to have dropped weight and price since we bought ours too. Galaxy

We used a Saunders Galaxy for touring. It’s not the lightest at around 3kg, but can fit a bike and panniers (at a squeeze) in each porch, and definitely has enough room for four panniers+ each end. Easy to pitch and survived some pretty hard abuse. Needs new zips now, but we’ve slept in it over 300 nights with a lot of very sandy desert use.

I toured 9000Km on a Kona Smoke, commuter bike with better wheels and my choice of contact points. Rode really well, even loaded up fully and handled all types of road surface with 1.95 slicks.

Based on that, I’d say any bike that fits you well would probably be OK, but a good quality tourer would be very nice, I’m sure.

@PTArchitecture architecture / construction / sustainability, bikes and general guff.

no more 10% of at 18 (STW still get this wrong in the mag); specific deals instead. Free tubeless kit installed on the hoops is a good deal if you ask me, and some of the best service around.

“Yeah, there were horses, and a man on fire, and I killed a guy with a trident.”

today

http://twitpic.com/87lqdk

http://twitpic.com/87lpkw

and yesterday

http://twitpic.com/87bczn

sorry, couldn’t be bothered to put on flickr

2 of us in a 2.5 bed terrace about £80 a month, I think.

No mention I could see of 18bikes yet. Definitely a contender for best bike shop. Knowledgeable, passionate staff; great service; great, realistic prices on service work (and not bad on lots of other stuff as well); happy for you to come in muddy, mid ride for a natter. Nothing bad to say about them really.

pretty much anywhere will work with a HT. May be a bit more knackering, and some trails may be off limits, but most destinations would still be fine. I quite fancy Basque MTB in N. spain, or Les Arcs.

Just done as honourablegeorge. Got a handy mate to help me out with adding 20mm of spacers for my pipedream, but it wasn’t very difficult if done methodically.

more control and stability, less easy to fit through trees.

at 4.4lbs, a soul frame isn’t much heavier than most aly frames (but more expensive than your budget). I ride a mk1 pipedream sirius, and with 800g tyres on, 150mm fork (reduced to 130mm) and 1×9 it comes in at 26.7lbs and could be under 26lbs with lighter tyres. Not exactly heavy by any stretch.

If not steel then On-one ScandAl, whippet un-decaled, 456c un-decaled all come in your budget and will be light enough and able to take the longer fork.

Could you not put a 120mm fork on the boardman? Would save a chunk of money.

BTW, I’m pretty sure you could run your racing ralphs with just sealant anyway. It’s not guaranteed to work straight off, but shouldn’t be too big a problem.

Should be fine with tubes and just yellow tape (although probably not as robust as normal rim tape) and won’t affect tubeless-ability later. I’m running tubes on my rear crest rim with yellow tape only at the moment. Will be tubelessed shortly and not expecting the tube to have caused any issues.

Have been very happy with the Worx stuff I have. Batteries on my drill are pretty much borked now, but that’s over 5 years of heavy use.
Very good kit for the money.

I’m just getting back into riding the HT after stripping down the prophet. I reckon the 2.4″ advantage (at about 25 psi tubeless) I’ve got on the back makes it fantastically comfy amd controlled. It’s a mk 1 pipedream sirius, which is pretty comfy anyway, but I think more of it’s the tyres than anything else.

Standard Schwalbe Marathons, Specialized Nimbus Armadillo 1.5″, vittoria randonneur 1.5″ or maybe some Panaracer paselas. All good; I’d definitely go for decent puncture protection over out and out weight saving.

monstermarrow, luckily the guy who guides the Sudanese leg of the tour d’afrique gave me his rear wheel – we were actually only a couple of hundred kms away from Khartoum on our way to the Ethiopian border. Cost more in postage for a new wheel for him than the wheel did to buy!

mustard, I don’t think spares would be easy to come by anywhere in that part of the world. Certainly, everywhere we looked bike bits were completely incompatible with modern technology. We just carried a full set of spare pads each (plus cables, chain links and a few other bits and bobs).

back on topic, I still don’t think that the Kaff can be beaten for value.

I agree that rim brakes are better for proper touring with heavy loads over long distances. You do need to choose rims very carefully, though. I used F519s on an MTB tourer I used to ride from London to Ethiopia a few years ago. The rim popped from excessive brake wear in the middle of the Sudanese desert. Not the best place for it to go. So proper touring rims with a wear indicator for me next time.

Coogan, I think he’s saying that he uses the alps riding to bed lots of sets of pads in for the rest of the year…

TBH we did a similar thing when we road from England to Ethiopia a few years ago. We had two fundraising streams that were very clear and well defined. One to pay for us to do the trip (mainly car boot sales, selling bike kit, saving money whilst working, help from a few family members, equipment sponsors etc) and the other was to raise money for our chosen charity (the school at which our ride ended). We raised £12K for the charity before the proliferation of give now websites / blogs / facebook etc which we were pretty proud of. I have no issues with what we did – we’d have done the ride anyway (and sought money to do it), we just raised an extra chunk for a charity.

Ian, enjoy the ride. Say hello to Midhat in Sudan from Paul and Kate (if he’s still guiding that leg). He gave me his rear wheel after mine popped 100k out of Khartoum. It cost more to post the replacement to him than it did to buy itin the UK! I think the 400K offroad through the desert from Wadi Halfa was one of the hardest / best experiences I’ve ever had. Unsupported, it was very tough, though.

Just in the process of building a Kaffenback for just this purpose. There are a good few great looking frames out there for a similar purpose, but the Kaff was just such good value. It’s looking good so far – just waiting for cranks to arrive.

We happily fitted tubus racks to project II forks for a 7 month tour. We needed their mid fork blade fitting kit as they don’t have mid mounts, but other than that, were great.

I think the numbers quoted here are quite low for proper Architect’s services. You haven’t really set out exactly what services you do require (you may not yet know). If you want pre-application planning advice, planning application, detailed design drawings, outline spec and building regulations, then a good Architect will probably be worth it. There are plenty of good sole traders out there who will give a solid service and be able to recommend an engineer. They could charge anything between £200 and £600 a day depending on how much they want the work and I would expect anything from 3 to 10 days work depending on how complex things are, how much you actually want them to do etc. They’ll probably do this as a fixed fee based on their perception of how long it will take. Any Architect should be ARB registered and therefore have sufficient professional indemnity insurance for the work they undertake.

Having said all that… if you really just want the drawings doing then a draughtsman will be able to do what you want. Although if you’re a bit unsure on the process then i would suggest this would be a false economy.

Architect Your Home[/url] is a great place to start.

Baldy-minisquirt is due the same time as yours. No sign of waters breaking or labour yet. Good luck and congratulations.

£1K/m2 is always the figure I’d start off with.