I have a SWB 2015 Trafic DCi 140 Sport and I have had it from new and done about 100K miles in it. They are great vans and its my daily diver. I would love a LWB for the extra space but its just that little bit bigger for an everyday drive.

It’s my second one I had the previous model before a 2013 model, that seemed a more solid build but didn’t drive as nicely, though it was not terrible at all, just the 1.6 is a bit more refined.

I really wanted a Transit Custom but my local dealer always gave me a cracking deal and the equivalent transit worked out about £8K more.

In 100K miles its been reliable I have just now have a sticking EGR valve that will probably need replacing.

I was motorcycle touring in the area in July and it was great, for me driving a motorhome on some of the smaller roads would not be my idea of a holiday.

It was also not nose to tail campers as people would lead you to believe. Biggest issue was with covid restrictions still limiting the number of people restaurants and pubs could seat, finding somewhere to eat was the biggest problem.

However if the Scotts don’t want my business I can always go back to touring Spain where people are happy to see you.

Two 2mins/100m breastroke is pretty good for someone who is not a swimmer and just does it for a bit of exercise. So I would not beat yourself up about not being able to hit that first time back.

Its quite interesting that on a site for mountain bikers which in its self is a risky pastime/sport there seem to be a lot of extremely risk adverse people when it comes to covid. Not a criticism more of an observation.

I am off to see New Order in Manchester in a fortnight, I am double vaccinated and they are checking covid status on entrance. I also suspect the audience won’t be skewed towards the young. I am excited :-0)

The 100MHz version of that Tektronix scope was my goto everyday scope at work for about 10years :-)

I could have used more complex kit but it was so simple for most jobs it was perfect.

I have had a Kickr for about 5 years and I have caned it through out that time, including 3 years for Tri/Ironman training where it probably did 8-10hrs a week during winter.

Its been brilliant, stiff enough to sprint on and everything else.

You should not take your jacket off before the groom and you should also ask permission from the ladies on your table to remove your jacket :-) Though be prepared for the ladies to think you are mad :-) Thats the modern world for you, no class :-D

Yep green lanes (BOAT’s and UCR’s) are classed as roads, so you need to be taxed and tested same as on the road (which they are)

Most of the people I know who go green laning play by the rules and you still get people shaking their head at you. Sometimes I feel like saying to walkers “You can literally walk anywhere, I am limited to about 0.00000001% of the tracks and trails around here, so stop bloody shaking your head”

Its crazy situation because due to the limited places people can ride, you get people riding trails that really are not sustainable being ridden in the wet and winter because they have no alternative. Where there is a another trail near by that would be able to sustain the traffic.

To be honest most mountain bikers are fine as they generally know how to read a map and know where they should or should not be.

I hope the OP has never ridden a cheeky footpath or he could be a victim of a serious head shaking himself :-)

It was hard to watch before the crash, the ridge line was terrifying.

I suspect for him though it was way less technical than stuff he has ridden in the past, just the consequences of getting it wrong were high.

Met him in the GLC in Whistler once, right after he had just beaten Sam Hill in the Garbanzo Downhill. Seemed like a really nice guy, so hopefully he mends quickly.

I would say its cost the main reason not used in pretty much any engine these days.

OHC engines are cheaper to build now, would be my guess.

Cougar you are a genius that works on the cinnamon desktop too :-)

I said good not better. Good by virtue of the missing top end…. If they were all mega bucks race engines with exotic internals and could have a full rev range then the statement would be …. Good range

But there were also a lot of race escort engines running big valves and aggressive cams with lots of overlap that don’t have a great bottom end too.

Basically there is nothing about a push rod engine that intrinsically ensures a good bottom end. In fact if you take most push rod engines that were main stream in the UK they didn’t have power anywhere :-)

I am not trying to give you a hard time, just trying to make sure people understand and don’t perpetuate myths.

Still no answer as to why push rod engines intrinsically have better bottom end power @trail_rat

There are/were plenty of 2 valve OHC engines as anyone who drove an early 90s Sierra or Escort would attest.

Obviously there are some cam profile and rpm limits to push rod engines without spending a lot of money on them so at a disadvantage over OHC. If you wanted a fatter bottom end on an OHC engine there is nothing stopping you having smaller valves and less overlap to get this (you could do this with pushrod too). You can also have bigger valves with more overlap and use higher revs, harder to do with a push rod engine.

Force on the pushrod will go up with engine speed and how steep the opening profile of the cam lobe is. You effectively have a small (on a car engine) tube in compression so its not an ideal engineering solution if you want aggressive cams and lots of revs.

@trail_rat

Push rods give good low end but lack at high end /lack revs also

Why would a push rod engine give better low end? you could have any cam profile you could have with a push rod engine in an over head cam engine. I would agree you might not be able to rev a pushrod engine as high as an OHC engine without some very expensive parts and mitigation’s. but I can’t see why a push rod engine would have more bottom end by being a push rod engine.

This is the first mass shooting by a legally held gun owner in 10 years. Do people not think the system is actually working reasonably well?

I don’t shoot and I have no interest in guns but we really do have to get a grip on the knee jerks.

Its a very sad situation for those involved including the family of the gunman, but its so rare in this country I think we really need to put it in perspective.

15K would get you a pretty trick Enduro motorbike.

9.5K for say a new KTM 350EXC-F or a Husky FE350

Then £5.5K for a pipe, remap/ECU and some really nice suspension. Might even have enough for some fancy wheels.

What a bizarre thing to say. Utter twaddle. The results are made up finger in the air judgements made by individual schools with a clear agenda to give their own pupils maximum scores in the certain knowledge that all other schools are doing the same.

I think they realised that, maybe they should have added the #sarcasm to it :-)

Please don’t conflate the current grades with the knowledge these kids have acquired. They have reached the end of this phase of their education – ready to go on to uni or (with next weeks grades) A levels. We ‘need’ to somehow grade or differentiate between them so they get onto the right courses. But…….they have not been taught all the same material as usual. Schools have been allowed, nay encouraged, to reduce the content of the courses they have taken. An A grade this year should mean the student has A grade standard competency in that subject but crucially has not been taught or had to demonstrate the range of knowledge pre 2019 pupils had to. If the missed material is pertinent to the next stage of their education (e.g. aspects of the A level chemistry syllabus for someone taking chemistry at uni, but not the missed geography material the same pupil missed that is irrelevant to that chemistry degree course) they will need to catch it up and degree courses (and A level courses) are going to have to build that into their course structures.

This is a nuance I’m not sure the general public or indeed the specific pupils involved have really understood.

Surely if the net level the grades were all lower to reflect the amount they have learnt, then uni’s would reduce requirements and still get the best students. There would then be no confusion when comparing say 2019 results to this years.

That however would not be politically acceptable as parents would see it as their children being let down.

Realistically unless degrees are dumbed down they are going to have to do a lot of catch up in year one. Especially in the more technical subjects, if you are going to study engineering and you maths is not at the right level its going to be an uphill march for a bit. Doable though with the right attitude and work ethic.

Well done to everyone who got what they needed, exciting times ahead at Uni.

To those who didn’t tell your kids its not the end of the world and they can still do well. I left school with bugger all and went on to get a 1st and I have done pretty well.

We ought to consider keeping all the covid disruption as we have had the best A level results in history 45% of A’s So its obviously an effective way of learning :-)

I bought a Levo Comp this afternoon, I really wanted a Bosch powered bike but I tried a Whyte, Orbea and the Specialized. The Levo just felt like home, I rode the others again back to back to try and convince myself it was marginal but the Levo just felt like the way forward.

I do think its going to be a lot of fun :-D

Its charging now :-)

Cheers for all the feedback guys.

At the moment the Levo and the Wild look like candidates.

Levo appeals with the 3 year warranty, Wild looks better value.

Both look great.

Yeah there is a difference manhandling a 30Kg bike out of somewhere to trying to get a 100KG enduro bike stuck up to its axles in mud :-) Also if you are not Graham Jarvis even getting it turned around somewhere narrow can be tricky.

I don’t plan on stopping running and riding normal bikes just fancy getting further afield than I can get on a normal bike to check out new byways, so hopefully won’t end up being the e-bike stereo type :-)

I do also fancy riding an E-Bike for fun the Enduro is great and I love it but its very different to a pedal bike and there are more limits to where you can ride it than there are with an E-Bike.

I am very close to clicking on buy on an M1 Mac mini mainly for use with Logic Pro. I have a 2015 i7 Macbook pro thats creaking with some of the projects. Only thing holding me back is that fact that not all plugins etc seem to work on M1/Big Sur yet.

I have a monster spec PC laptop I use for work but I still like using the mac for some stuff.

But why not save £5000 and just check trails out on your enduro bike?

Mainly because quite often I don’t have someone else to ride with. I am not keen to go out on the Enduro bike on my own for a few reasons. Its good to have someone to help pull the bike out if you get stuck somewhere, If you find yourself somewhere difficult its easier to pick up a push bike and walk it out. If you injur yourself its easier to get assistance and someone to take a push bike home than it is an Enduro bike.

Also a push bike is allowed to ride places an Enduro bike or a Trials bike isn’t so can take a more direct route to places and avoid road links a bit easier.

I do also think it would be fun and I do have friends I used to mountain bike with I could get out with.

But I do think 5K is a lot when a new Husqvarna FE350 only costs about £9.5K :-) An S-Works E-bike is 13k :-D

Might be slightly small for me at 6ft I would think but post the link, be nice to have a look :-)

Cheers, I am not in any hurry and if I don’t need to Spend 5K I am happy to spend less :-)

@brads I am lucky I have loads of lanes around here I can ride on the FE350. I am off to Wales at the weekend and me and a group of lads have a guide :-)

I would probably keep the 350 I just like the idea of doing a bit of TET (Trans European trail) stuff and I think the 701 could be good at that, though I know a lot of people use 500s as they are a fair chunk lighter.

Welcome to the club, I am a self confessed motorbike nut and have had so much fun over the years on bikes and met so many great people.

I have just got back from a 2500mile trip to Scotland with my mate, I had excitement, great views and not to mention some nice food and a couple beers. This is biking for me and its what I love doing on a bike. So for me touring is one of the best things you can do on a bike. My other thing is Euro trackdays I love going off with my mates for a few days in Spain or Portugal etc setting up the bikes, not worrying about noise testing.

So my advice is to think about what you want to do on the bike rather than worry what it looks like (unless its going to the cafe and looking at it and thats OK too) I spent years on bike I thought were sexy but did not fit in with the type of riding I liked doing.

That said like others have mentioned you will probably change bikes so as long as you get something that inspires confidence and you like riding all will be good. There are some really good bikes out there now. Especially in the middle weight category, years ago the middle sized bikes tended to be a bit budget, thats not always the case now.

I am going to agree with TJ here (not something I often do :-) ) A slow bike “can” make you a faster rider, but a slow bike is not necessarily easier to ride or even saver than a faster one. You might not even want to become a faster rider either and you can be a very safe rider that is competent without really pushing the boundaries. But if you are trying to learn to ride fast a slow bike can help, I improved massively my technique on track going from a 180BHP RSV4 to a 82BHP European Junior cup bike.

Just have fun, don’t get sucked into getting pulled too far out of your comfort zone on rides and meet some amazing people and have some great biking adventures :-)

As for bike I always recommend a Triumph Street triple, either a 675 or a 765. They are light, not sill power and well equipped to go around corners and stop really well.

PS @anagallis_arvensis I really fancy a Husqvarna FE701 Enduro Single so I agree :-) Though not sure I would want it to be my only bike :-) I have a FE350 single at the moment and it rocks :-)

’m torn between a Helix and something like a Strymon Iridium with a couple of new pedals. I have mixed feelings about going full modelling – I’ve had a few multi-FX over the years* and I’d always been underwhelmed (probably an unfair comparisons since the Korg AX-1000G/ Zoom multiFX/POD 2.0 I’m thinking of are all > 20 years old, but I have been more recently underwhelmed using an iRig HD + BIAS FX). I think the million amp/cab/IR permutations of the Helix is honestly a turn off, but I like the various FX pedal options (by all accounts the modelled delays/reverbs/pitch shift etc are very good on Helix).

I have a Helix floor and I have have to say I have still not really got to grips with getting the tones I like out of it. Some of that might be down to the cheap Headrush FRFR I use with it. However I also find when recording I often use the dry signal through Guitar rig 6 to get the tones I want for recording. Sounds like I am a big Line 6 fan but I also have a spider 240 with 2 x 12s and I often find myself using that instead for just noodling around. That and because its got built in wireless I can just plug the transmitter in and not worry about cables.

I am sure if I played with the Helix more I could get want I want out of it. Or even if I just bough some better presets. I was going to get the Fractal FM3 but at the time it was such a long wait to get one I bought the Helix.

@Cougar That said I am not saying you should spend loads of money on Ethernet cables :-)

Unless you have two-way communication then as soon as digital audio starts erroring beyond any ECC it’s game over.

Nope again you are wrong in a lot of systems it will interpolate between the last samples it got. This reduces the quality as the interpolated value won’t be 100% accurate.

This is why high quality CD transports can sound better/different to cheaper ones. The “Its all 1s and 0s” is not as simple its there its perfect if its not its not.

There are also lots of other sources of electrical noise outside of a factory or industrial environment.

Ethernet is a standard of various categories which are either met or not. It’s not like the old analogue hifi world. What goes in == what comes out, or it’s faulty.

Not entirely true @Cougar I have tested various network cables in electrically noisy environments. When the bit error rate increases so does the number of retries etc. It would not be impossible for this to cause audible jitter on a digital audio signal. I have to admit these were quite extreme tests but its not as simple as saying digital is either there or not when you have timing involved.

@seosamh77 Cheers for the info.

I just ordered a fully pimped out Dell XPS 17 with an 11th gen i9, RTX3060 GPU etc for work. Apple don’t even do an 11th gen intel macbook as I guess they are transitioning to ARM. So I can’t buy a macbook in the spec I wan’t anymore.

@seosamh77

So are you running X86 Linux under parallels on an M1 Mac?

Good news if you are.

No chance. There’s 2 types of people in this world; those who buy Macs, and those who regret not buying a Mac,and therefore need to spend their time telling everyone how much better Windows/PCs are in a futile attempt to justify their own existence and pretend their lives are not a complete failure. 😉

Not really there are people who buy what does the particular task they need it to do best.

I have a macbook pro I use to make music, pretty much the only thing I use it for. I used linux for work and pretty much any general tasks that need doing. I use windows when I can’t do what I want on the other two. I am not anti windows, just not as familiar with it as I used to be. It does seem like MS have really worked hard to make it a viable option for more techy people now. Hyper V and WSL are quite exciting developments.

I was thinking of getting one so I could check out lanes to ride my Enduro bike on. I don’t like riding my Enduro bike on my own as If I hurt myself its a lot harder to get the bike sorted and put somewhere safe etc.

I could do it on the normal mountain bike but that limits the range a bit.

Swimming wetsuits really do want to be tried on. If its not the right fit then it won’t be ideal.

Might be worth finding you local Triathlon shop and paying them a visit. They will also know the right fit and show you how to put it on properly.

Apologies if this is teaching grandma how to suck eggs :0

Which bean to cup machines are people recommending?

The S1000 engine is buzzer than one of those murder hornets. I’d avoid. As much as I loved my XR it was uncomfortable to cruise on at 75ish mph.

Heavy bar ends and a few miles on the engine and its fine. I have done 30K miles on mine, use it for European tours. Its not as relaxing as say a GS but a lot more relaxing than some of the other bikes I have had and still have :-)

I think the whole XR vibrations thing is a bit over stated, that or some of them are far worse than mine. The fact little things go wrong is more annoying. I had no dash when I turned on the key in Wales the other weekend. Started and ran, no dash. Dash runs indicators too :-) So no indicators. Everything else was fine though :-)

Just saw your budget is 10K brand new MT-09

Or if you want something exciting and in the get what I have tradition, a second hand BMW S1000XR, though you did say reliable so maybe not :-)