Owt wrong with touring rims? Not wide enough…?

I use Mavic A319s and they're just dandy.

The 'Swinley Conditions' thread makes for disturbing reading – what implications might it have for this ride…?

Go Junkyard!!

Very pleasant to find a fellow vegan on here. :D

I was brought up as vegetarian and became vegan about 4.5 years ago, despite my parents' insistence that milk was the fricking be all and end all of a healthy diet (an idea they have from an Indian-origined religion, coincidently).

I find I've plenty of 'grrrrrrr' in me for getting up those hills and switchbacks and, should I need an extra helping of 'GRRRRR!!!' I simply ponder upon the shear mindlessness, selfishness and unsustainablity of consuming animal products.

Hmmmm…. maybe it's the non-meat-eaters who are the ones that're always angry…? :wink:

(And I must hang my head and confess my addiction to bourbon biscuits – I share your friend's need…)

The STW Singletons' ride at Swinley next month is bit short of female attendees and rather over-subscribed with desperate enthusiastic males.

So, could you ask your new housemate if she's single?

I'm with you, Tracker.

You know the way some 'people' have loads of front lights, rally lights, fog lights, blinding-every-other-poor-sod-on-the-road lights?

Well, I wanted that here, but with reversing lights :cry:

am moving onto harder stuff every week

Do try and kick the habit before you get as far as smack.

Crapola, can't finish watching it. It's very interesting and certainly eye-opening and thought-provoking but Kevin McCloud, who I previously quite respected, in this is just a mincing fool.

"Eeeeew! There's a poo!"
"Eeeeugh, a dead rat!"
"OMG, I have to sit cross-legged!!!??"

He needs to MTFU or GTF out.

(Seriously though, is it worth persevering with?)

Yowza, Jedi! Yer on fire tonight :lol:

Careful though, someone will be along in a minute with their story of how their RF Isis BB has lasted fifteen years and is still going strong.

On that note, can we vote Isis out of the BB house…?

Bottom Bracket, yetiguy.

Sheesh :roll:

Woo hoo, that's a bling almost-completely-new-bike you've got there, C-G, but the snowman could use some work… :wink:

Thanks for the update on the conditions – I might have to give taking some newbies over there a miss this weekend then :(

The different-sized spacers put in the wrong way round would be my bet.

Been there, done that…

The curtains for your sliding door need taking up a bit.

A while back there was a thread about Royal Mail delivery times or postal strikes or something and someone posted up a link to videos of posties arsing around in their sorting offices. The comments on Youtube and here were all of the variety that these people should be working rather than playing about.

In light of this thread I'll just repeat what I wrote back then:

I've not had a job yet that didn't involve a bit of dicking around when the oppourtuninty arose. Everyone does it, in all sorts of jobs. It's natural and healthy to have a release once in a while.

You could use a thumb shifter and you may well get lucky with the indexing.

If not, set it to friction shift (Maybe tightening it down a bit, if need be, to keep it from slipping) and limit the lever throw with a bit o' bodging.

I use an ANCIENT black box Rock Shox pop-loc-type thing as a front shifter (two rings) and it works perfectly, so I'm sure it'll (probably…) work the other way around.

Definitely doable. Good luck!

Yowza, there's some bones to chew on. Thanks for your input, chaps.

Ok, may as well spill the beans: a friend and I work for 'the man' as bicycle mechanics and have often talked, half-seriously, about setting up some sort of bike shop doing mainly repairs and renovations.

The thread about that business for sale in Edinburgh has provoked much conversation about actually doing it, exclamations of "let's do it!", high-fives and all the rest of it.

Nope,. we won't become millionaires, but surely we won't do much worse than we're doing now…?

I've been very sorry to hear and read about your troubles, oldgit, I hope you can pickup the bits.

Partners can get on fine but the areas you haven't been into together could throw up some surprises.

… made me chuckle.

Thanks, North! I'm hoping not to wind it up before it's started…

Accountant, you say? Hmmm, interesting.

Say you've a premsises with two people working there. Do you need insurance of some sort other than 'contents'?

Anybody recommend entering into a partnership?

Got a link, Jerome?

Seriously though, can anyone see a reason not to go for this?

I'm VERY tempted…

They do some very nice bottle openers…!

You know you want to.

Classic thread. :lol:

Yet another vote for the astonishing value of 520s – they just work. The difference over the older 505s and 515s was a true pedalling revelation.

Get 540s if you want 'the look' of a bling pedal axle (top priority for some people…) but certainly no need to go higher than that.

Surely The Karate Kid for the incomparable Mr. Miyagi!

Can't believe the thread has got this far and no one's called anyone a fat biffer yet… :wink:

Wahey, PP, the stage is set for another Shimano Vs Hope Vs the rest of the world hub debate! :wink:

Hubs on my bikes (F/R):
XT/XT
XT/XT
SLX/XT
Shimano dynamo/Rohloff
Brompton/Sturmey

…and a pair of these on my hack, just to impress the ladies:

not actually containing any tiger

Ah, but do you know that for a fact…?

Ooh, riding in West London! Count me in, if there's not too many people already :-)

You might have to remove the CD player first, and the wiring can be tricky.

Don't worry, kwakimatt, I'm not frustrated with you, just with the same people that come out of the woodwork with their "shitmano" comments everytime this comes around.

They forget/don't realise/choose to ignore that Hope hubs can suffer the same problem, as can Chris King hubs, as can multiple freewheels, singlespeed freewheels, and pretty much anything going.

With a bit of care over how you wash your bike and decent maintenance, the problem can be lessened and people using hubs from different manufacturers can all learn to get along.

kwakimatt – pretty much, yep.

The rest of you – oh fug, here we go again… :roll:

Well done, aracer, you've missed nowt.

Takisawa, wash your mouth out with soap, you cynic! That highly realistic explosion/collapse/whatever-the-hell-it-was-that-happened must have cost tens of pounds to put together.

What I don't understand is how it actually got screened. Surely they show this stuff to a focus group composed of the target audience first, right? How did it get past them that it was boring and directionless???

Funnily enough I've just noticed some squirrel tracks left in the snow in the garden over the course of today amongst last night's fox prints. Squirrels don't hibernate – that's why they do all that burying of food: for the winter.

(This is based on urban squirrels though – sly little barstewards.)

Putting a good site blocker on your computer to prevent you from accessing left-handed websites may well reduce the symptoms.

I'm all for this kind of that kind of thing – natural selection hard at work.

I lived in Peacehaven for a time and regularly commuted to Brighton and did my shopping in Newhaven. I've nothing to add to all the helpful advice above other than a warning:

If on my mountain bike I'd come home on the clifftop path from Brighton. One time I was pootling along in the dark and my lights illuminated a bloke having a cr@p by the side of the path. He pulled his trousers up sharpish (with unknown results…), I offered a hasty "Sorry mate!" and sped on.

The road or the cliffbottom path might be safer…

So with a hypothetically unbreakable container completely filled with pure water, devoid of dissolved gases, etc. and taken to below freezing, the water would remain liquid, right…?

Wow.

Sod F1 cars, the pansy little runabouts, :wink: what about the new bunch of airliners that have a massive "carbon fibre" content? If it's strong enough to make wings that hold up the body of the plane, 300 fat Yanks and all their tatty souvenirs then these forks'll be fine.

But seriously, it's the rear end that does most of the 'being held' so there's not a huge amount of lateral force going through the forks, certainly no more than, as hugh said, when sprinting.

Padded shorts of the normal cycling variety seem to do the trick nicely. On the occasions I've commuted in regular undies in the winter I have suffered exactly the same problem a you: I understand your pain!

A number one when you get to work brings double the relief though :D

HTFU :wink:

And, pray tell, where does one fit one's barends on the Huffy Wheel…?

String it between two swallows.

I guess in this case, as it's to the continent, European swallows would suffice.