The on consignment thing is similar to what’s called Channel Stuffing in the IT hardware industry. If you’re a vendor or distributor and need to pump those numbers up, you send your stock to disties (if you’re a vendor) or resellers / other disties (if you’re a distributor) and mark it as sold. That gives your quarterly number a bit of a pump, and the receiving party either returns, sells or buys at a discount. A few scenarios I covered as a journo way back when:

A distributor used to send lorryloads of expensive hardware for long, long laps of the M25 once a quarter. Unfortunately one of the lorries was ripped off, causing all kinds of issues, as the kit it was carrying should have been in a warehouse or sold – but was neither.

A very, very large vendor’s sales teams used to oversell kit to customers. If you needed, say, 500 of something, they’d sell you 1,500 at a massive discount to hit their numbers. Often that spare thou would end up on the grey market – and at least one distributor was founded on buying grey market kit legitimately sold as a stuffing exercise, or by exploiting the Treaty of Rome and buying in kit sold cheaper in Greece or another EU country.

One very large server manufacturer that was absolutely slaughtered during the dotcom bust as they sold / loaned / traded for stock all kinds of kit at a discount to startups which then went bust, quickly followed by receivers and administrators selling that kit on to second hand dealers, sometimes still in its shipping containers.

The landfill rumour may or may not be fact – but equally it’s not necessarily the vendors who can’t shift it- it might be the contract manufacturers who are suddenly lumbered with thousands of really quite distinct frames they can’t shift and are obliged to scrap by contract. The vendor may have to pay a kill fee of some sort to stop them reselling as a white label, too.  So – bear in mind this may be more of a supply chain thing than a brand name thing.

If the bikes are alloy, it’s likely the frames have scrap value and can be recycled. Carbon not so much. I have to say I’ve seen loads of discounted kit from some of the brands named above on sale, so I doubt it’s them. Also bear in mind some stuff can be repainted for 2025, or pushed further down the model rank to the more basic models, something I think Cannondale did at one point. That’s often the case with big makers anyway, as they trickle building techniques, designs, specs or even overstock frames down a rung; that’s how and why you can pick up boost hardtail frames with through axles now when a few years back they were 135 or 142 qr.

I’d be looking for the large scale manufacturers whose bikes are not as easy to find on discount.

I’m going to have to be intentionally vague here, but this happened to me at the end of last year. I work / worked in tech stuff. The company cut about 10% of headcount twice in the course of the year, and I got lucky on the second occasion. Think low triple figures in terms of people going.

What I’m going to write is based on my own experience. I strongly suggest you take advantage of the solicitor payment thing to get frank advice from them on what is achievable. I got this from mine before the actual offer was made as part of the initial consultation. You should also use the links people have shared above and ACAS, and, if you have it (sounds like you don’t) a Union rep.

A Compromise Agreement in this context is basically intended to dispose of headcount as efficiently as possible. As a result, the settlement agreement is priced around about what your lawyer might suggest is around the rate of a successful claim for constructive or unfair dismissal, unless you have specific grounds. Obviously, if you choose to go down that route then it’s often more stressful and prolonged than taking the offer.

The reason the company will pay for your solicitor is so there is no comeback that you were hoodwinked into a settlement.

I would use your time now to work out what extra bells and whistles you may be able to ask for. My offer was PILON plus a settlement amount tax free. I worked mostly from home post-pandemic, so had a nice office chair that I got to keep. Everyone got to keep their company smartphones. My C2W loan was written off and I kept the bike I’d bought in August through the scheme for a tiny fraction of its value.

Last bit of advice: heed Charlie’s First Law. I ultimately went freelance and am now back doing work for my former employer and also working for a lot of former co-workers who were laid off and then got new jobs very promptly after.

It’s not so much the laying, it’s bringing the level of the garden up to where it needs to be that could be the issue.

My parents are on a fairly steep hillside in Dartmouth in the new house, and the decking that was there when they moved in had rotted. It’s built up on pilings off the hillside – up to about 12ft in some places. My dad did a very thorough job redecking it with wood on the existing (well-built) wooden pilings and framework. Their neighbours did the same with composite, and for whatever reason have now redone it *twice*. The educated guess is their pilings weren’t up to snuff, or that the extra weight of the composite was a problem.

Possibly a dumb question, but could you stick a new retaining wall in, use the old patio as foundation and stick new stuff in on top? It very much depends on how stable what you already have in is, of course.

We’re going through the same type 3 fun at the moment too. Moved into a place ten years ago and the wood deck  (about 25 square metres in all) looked super dodgy then, but kept getting moved down the job list until it and the garden are the only thing left for us to fix.

By last December it was definitely about to go, so I ripped it out before someone broke a leg or worse. The vast majority was so rotten, and the screws so corroded, that it was easier just to tear it off in chunks. It was a full mid-sized skip worth.

Several people said the timber available now wouldn’t last as long as it’s younger growth stuff.

Composite is quite expensive for stuff that doesn’t look sh*t and the underpinnings need to be composite and much more hefty to take the extra weight

The delta between full composite and porcelain slabs is narrow, especially if you take on a bunch of the groundwork yourself. There’s also the issue that it’s at least partly plastic, which ain’t good for environmental reasons and for if you want to run some sort of fiery cooking or manly fire-poking-bucket stuff on it.

FWIW, we’d decided to go with fairly cheap and cheerful porcelain; it’s not much more, it’s easier (hopefully) to maintain, and it’ll last a lot longer. Decking seems to have been a bit of a fad that’s starting to pass, maintenance is an issue for wood outdoors however you look at it, and as we’re hoping to sell at some point having something a bit more robust definitely appeals.

A blue and white Buffalo kangaroo top and later, for the Round Britain and Ireland race as a pimply 17 year old, the midlayer salopettes. I remember being vaguely impressed when sailing with someone from Signals in the early ’00s and seeing his green one – I’d always assumed they were just outdoors and sailing things, and never twigged the military connection.
I think the salopettes are my longest-serving bit of sailing kit – it just goes in the bag (or on) every time it’s 12 degrees or lower. The top was and is super-toasty all the time – possibly too warm for sustained exercise. But at 3am, beating at 7kts from Lerwick back down to the mainland in the pitchy dark, it was (and is) perfect. I supplemented it with a Gill knockoff about ten years ago, but it didn’t quite do the same, even though it lost the rustle Hannah mentions.

That crush fracture in the top tube looks nicely placed to fail, fold the frame in half and shoot jagged shards of carbon into your crotch area.

But we don’t kink shame here, wukfit – whatever floats your boat.

I’ve bought three bikes on C2W over the years:

1) A Brompton that saved me the cost of a Tube season ticket as I was able to get out at Wimbledon and ride to Hammersmith – I think that paid for itself in about three months and saved me thousands of quid over the four years I used it *just for that job*. I seem to remember it cost me a bit less than £700 retail, so was before Brompflation. It seriously saved our bacon as parents of two small children in a HCL area when my wife stopped working to look after the children.

2) A Gravel bike that I used to commute over the North Downs Way to my next job – less of a saving as it was pretty grotty in the winter, but I used the train and the Brompton if it was too muddy or wet

3) Last one was last August, and there was no way I could ride it from the Surrey Hills to Helsinki in time for work each morning. It was a seriously discounted Fuel EX from Balfe’s, as it happens, simply because they could take Evans vouchers and that was what my company offered.

I could have bought the Brompton with cash, but it would have been a big old dent in our savings or income at the time – we’d just moved house and were doing a lot of quite urgent stuff to make it habitable for small shouty people, and my job paid better than trade journalism but not much more and happened to be on site in London. It was – and is – an excellent tool for the job.

I also think of all the bikehire companies that went bust and what happened to all their stock. If I was looking for a cheap, low hassle bike for riding four or five miles or nipping into the local town for shopping, I don’t think I could find a better bike for the money. I’m surprised no-one bought the stock, resprayed it and flooded the market with cheap bikes, Holland-stylee. There are probably many, many reasons why not.

Pfft. Back in the day when it were all fields you bought a kit that had a dinky rim strip in it with a valve on, and some stuff that looks very similar to PVA glue with a bit of loosener (likely antifreeze) and glitter or chopped glass strands in it. You then applied it to your existing, completely bog standard, 26″ rims and tyres.

I’d skip the daft gluing of inner tube nonsense and just try a bit of Stan’s tape (or go on ebay and find it as Tesa 4289), some valves and the sealant of your choice. Any decent volume tyre (2″ and up) will be fine.

TL:DR: put a mark on your rim and a mark on your tyre and see if the tyre is rotating on the rim. If it is, and you don’t have a ton of talc, then it will drag the tube with it and decapitate the valve just like in the picture. 

There are other reasons why it might happen that are explained above, but this way you can either prove or discount this particular cause and move on to the next.

Mrs Udder’s infrequently used bike as this same issue, as does one of the Udderlet’s 24″ wheels. I swapped Mrs Udder to a set of tubeless 26″ wheels we have spare, but can’t do that with the 24″ wheels, which use drilled trials rims. I found more air pressure helped there – I’d purposely been running those soft on account of him not weighing very much.

I also had this years ago with Panaracer Fire XCs. It seems like the beads stretched slightly (Surrey Hills singetrack back then wasn’t very hard on tyre treads, so they tended to last a long time). The tyre would start to rotate on the rim under hard braking, pulling the tube with it. Lots of talc between tyre and tube had some effect, replacing the tyres outright completely solved it. At the time I was running my other bike tubeless with the early Swiss and Stans stuff, and the bike with the valve issues quickly followed it.

Lidl do pizza stones for £8 or £10 from time to time – we’ve got one of those in the oven and some of the thin metal trays, too. The stone does help with getting the bottom crispy, and with the trays we can cook three or four at once, although the oven struggles a bit, even at full whack. I’ve also got a breadmaker that must be 20 years old now that I chuck dough into and it makes it really easy. I’ve had to dick about with how much water I put in a little (if you want to go down a middle aged man – sized rabbit hole, then ‘dough hydration’ are the magical words) so it’s not sticky.

In the summer we use the ooni that we got for cheap a few years back, otherwise the oven is just fine. The ooni’s good for all being outside and making food outside, and I think it makes slightly better pizza than the oven *when I get all the different factors of using a wood fired oven spot on*, but oven pizza with fresh ingredients and dough you’ve made from scratch is still far better than most shop-bought oven ready efforts, and often quite a few restaurants.

The other thing is that it costs absolutely peanuts to make compared to buying a ready made one or going out to a restaurant. We covered the cost of the ooni and a bit more by not going to Pizza Express four times with our family. Ingredients for four pizzas and two garlic breads (ie pizza dough rolled out to half size of a pizza) rarely comes to more than a tenner. 

As above: if you’ve got kids, involve them in the process, too. It’s good fun, and if they don’t want to do it, you can do it all yourself with a beer or wine to hand.

I’ve had great service from SMG, but I’ve also returned kit to Endura, Henri Lloyd and Musto in the past for factory repairs, mostly zips and seams, and every time the job has been done well, done fast and done for less than going to a repair specialist.

Musto was a waterproof main zip on a goretex jacket, Endura has replaced the zip on a roubaix top and fixed the worn stitching in the crotch of a pair of ancient baggies. HL replaced all the seals on a sailing drysuit.

If you can, email Endura’s repair service with a description of the repair and a photo of the damage – I’ve found they give clear assessments of whether it’s fixable and are great to deal with. I think I’ve had to wait a bit in the past for a response, but it’s far better to get it repaired for a relatively small cost than it is to go out and buy something brand new and chuck the old kit.

Definitely hand over to the insurer.

Also check the ‘solicitor’ actually is one – because if they are, they’re super shady. And if they aren’t, well, that would be quite naughty.

Bike fitness and running fitness are different; as you’ve said, your heart and lungs can write cheques your legs may not be able to cash; that’s certainly what I found out when I started running properly a few years back. Take it nice and easy, and when you get sore legs after a run, take it as a sign to stop or seriously ease off for a bit until your body’s used to it.

I used an incredibly dull year at an employer a few years back to train for a half marathon in my lunchtimes – I had a couple of 5k off road routes to tap out, and then I’d try and do increasingly longer runs at weekends until I accidentally ran a half without thinking about it, a month or so before the actual event.

Trail running is a lot more interesting than road – I trained off road, ran on the road and was pretty bored by the experience, aside from the fact I was running around the route (Reigate Half) with loads of people.

Perhaps start one of the half marathon training programmes here: https://www.runnersworld.com/uk/training/half-marathon/a764179/half-marathon-training-plans/

Last but one place had a Head of Organised Crime.

Currently my internal Slack profile lists me as: Sneaked into the shallow end of the typing pool while the lifeguard wasn’t looking.

Quite snappy, that.

@zinger – check up-thread, but I think the answer is ‘nope’ – different seal and chamfer arrangement. Standard DT stuff will fit in a 370, but not the other way ’round, by the looks of it.

I was expecting three pawls and an eventual upgrade to star ratchet at a later date, but seem to have got lucky.

The pair of M1900s I ordered from chiggle just turned up, along with the ratchet LN HG freehub. The freehub was a straight replacement, and it looks like there’s a star ratchet in there rather than the old pawl system, too. It’s slightly mind boggling that these came in at the same price as a pair of 28h rims I was shopping for to re-rim my existing Hope / Pacenti wheels. I’ll still be on the lookout for rims, since there seem to be a fair few bargains out there.

Well, I’m thoroughly confused now :D

The M1900 I’ve bought has a three pawl conventional ratchet. It can be upgraded to the star ratchet job, apparently – if you buy a full kit (or have the bits) per @Pjay ‘s post. I’ve bought what I thought / think is a three pawl HG freehub.

Is that right? If not, no biggie as far as I’m concerned as I can always upgrade to star ratchet at another time, and I’ll just have to figure out what to do with that rear wheel with the microspline freehub instead of HG…

I’ve got one of these arriving tomorrow with an M1900 wheelset I picked up the other day when it was heavily reduced. Not quite sure what I’m getting, but I wanted an HG freehub for Reasons.

My assumption is that it will be the 370 three pawl freehub, happy coincidence if it’s a star ratchet.

This is what the LN upgrade looks like: https://www.wheelworks.co.nz/dt-swiss-ln-upgrade/

I think you’re limited to a 135 mm QR rear axle on a Marlin. So rear wheel life expectancy isn’t great with the 29er version.

Eh?

Many ‘classic’ nursery rhymes are pretty messed up, though getting to a reliable explanation can be challenging.

Ring-a-ring-a-roses is about the plague – the ring of roses is the rash that developed on the skin of victims.

I borrowed from the CIA’s media handbook and neither confirmed nor denied the existence of Santa and the Tooth Fairy when presented with allegations. On the plus side, the next logical step once they do realise is that they understand the presents come from us. Both figured it out before secondary school and asked; it’s a real blow when they do, as you realised it’s the end of quite a wonderful period of childhood and parenthood.

That said: the Tooth Fairy used to write in some pretty painful cursive which took absolutely hours to do, often late at night. Whoever was responsible for that had clearly read Tolkein’s Father Christmas Letters for inspiration as a child.

The neighbour’s kid also revealed she got £2 a tooth when ours only received £1 – Questions Were Asked.

Some other friends’ kid also wrote to the Tooth Fairy, didn’t get a response, hard cash *or* tooth collection, and wrote an absolutely livid green biro letter to the Fairy explaining that this level of service was utterly unacceptable. There were clear and instructive parallels to the Daily Mail Online comments section.

A lovely one yesterday at Holmbury. Quad bike came through CP1 and went off to the summit up the bridleway. To do some sort of photo shoot for the local hunt. Couldn’t make it up.

A variation on Spooky’s pallet rack for adapting to bigger bikes as your children grow is to use 2″ pipe for the verticals. By the way – putting the rack vertically definitely works better, and if you need to empty out the space for something else temporarily, it takes up a lot less space.

I had a load of old 2″ plastic pipe kicking around when we moved into our house, and ended up cutting it into 18″ or 2 ft lengths (can’t remember which) with a diagonal at each end using a saw box. I then drilled a hole in each end and screwed them to two horizontal 2x4s with enough space for the back tyre of the bikes to fit in. You can loosen the screws a little to make it easier to pull the bike out, or reposition the pipes as the bikes change – one thing I planned for was the boys’ bikes to get bigger tyres as they grew and rode more stuff. I hung my bikes from the ceiling and the rest of the bikes fitted underneath and could be removed and stored easily without too much hassle.

I seem to remember I built the horizontals into a freestanding rack, but equally you could just screw two 2x4s to the wall. If you need to angle them, a single length of Arris rail could be cut down to give one pipe the standoff.

I was going to suggest a Tylaska snap shackle – they’re used on Spinnaker and A sail sheets and guys and are really strong for the weight, and we ran T8s or 10s on most of the boats I raced. Then I googled them. Might be cheaper to stick with the dog lead things (which as said above are super-cheap construction and almost designed to fail) and get a new dog each time instead…
Only issue with the Proboat swivel suggested above is the split ring release, which could get stuck in your dog’s coat. How about something like a Nab shackle?

[edit – the laid and spliced leads from all things rope are really clean looking – most decent chandlery can knock something up like that really easily for you, or you can DIY it with a bit of patience and a Bic biro: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ym1-rI0SdaA]

Yep, it seems pretty good to me so far once I had it set up OK, but I was curious as to whether the DPX made a noticeable difference in your opinion.

I’m in the Surrey Hills, so not a million miles away – that’s very kind of you to offer. But let me get a few more miles on this one first, though. I’ve borrowed a Shockwiz from a friend so will be using that a bit.

I’m currently getting used to a similar Fuel EX with a Fox Re:activ shock, so I’ll be interested in your comparisons if you swap out the DPX for the stock unit for Science; some way down the line I may upgrade to the DPX, although the original shock seems more than right enough; it initially felt a bit bogged down until I corrected both the shock and tyre pressures, and it now feels quite perky.

The thing is, Canyon’s web site seems to suggest 172cm is the top of the height range for a size Small. If you’re coming from an old school 26″ wheeled bike, that might work. But nowadays it’s more in the Medium size than Small. I’m shorter than OP and ride exclusively size M frames these days. One of the risks of buying direct without being able to test ride – but it’s also about coming to newer designs and geos from older kit, which it sounds like OP is already factoring in.

Early doors out to Pitch and Holmbury from Dorking with the Dad ride. The first pic doesn’t do justice to the view over the Weald, and neither does it show my excessive mincing on some of the steeper stuff off to the right shortly after this shot. Shameful.

Udderlet Major had a sporting commitment, so I hustled back over Holmbury and the Roughs to make it an even 36km and take Udderlet Minor off to Dorking West jump spot for a bit of practice. It’s horribly neglected and overgrown, so he suggested Summer Lightning. Are you sure? Well, he was sure, and a lot of grumbling, climbing, jelly babies and a mint choc chip ice cream at the Plough in Coldharbour, we’d done it. Grand total of 59km for the day, 23 with one of my favourite people.
Someone on this forum may recognise the bike – which is still going strong on its second nipper, running 24″ wheels at the mo.

I think it’s accentuated by the pedals. By George, they follow you round the room don’t they?

I had a bastardised Specialized Tricross singlespeed that had a similar hub geared, child trailer-towing, child-seat-using, mudguard-equipped life, followed by a brief burst of glory under my porky frame at the SSCX uh worlds I think it was in Brighton one year.

Anyway: nice bike. I sort of see what you mean about that pic being a low point, but it’s still pretty cool.

I’m aware of the change in riding style, probably that which caused me to lose the front.

1.72m and a size small bike. (Cotic and Canyon)

I think you’re on the right track. You have to shift your weight a bit further forward with the new bikes and trust your forks and front tyre a bit more than might have been the case in the past. The Hardtail Party chap did a video that is well worth a look if you haven’t already seen it (sounds like you might’ve): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0E4ZuwbNb8

I’m shorter than you (165ish) and very happy on a Medium these days. Udderlet 1 is currently on a 16″ Orange 5 with 26″ wheels, which is what I used to ride, and it feels really off – short, squirrelly and not very stable while also being a bit of a chore to steer.

looking at Canyon’s pages, you are on the cusp of Small and Medium – see below.

I’d consider trying out a size M of the same bike if you can. Although I also think sticking a bit longer with your existing choice (which is a nice bike, BTW) could well be worth it. Tinker with the shock pressure – try less sag and more spacers to see f it perks up the bike a little.

It entirely depends on what sort of offroad riding you’re doing, and for how long. if weight and chonk isn’t an issue, I’d get the biggest you can get your mitts on, as you can always use the menu options to cut the Lumen output and get more use out of a single charge if you’re riding a lot of semi- or non technical stuff. 

Ikea bags are not waterproof. They’re perfect for carrying dinghy sailing kit into the changing rooms, but the bags leak like proverbial sieves when you’re carrying all that wet kit back home. I see a lot of people using flexi plastic trugs as mentioned above from DIY shops like this £5.90 one: https://www.wickes.co.uk/Proplas-Extra-Strong-Flexi-Tub—42L/p/190998
Added benefit is you can then use them to rinse out everything to get rid of salt water once you’re home; same applies for rinsing out mud for MTB.

Bluetooth earbuds are a bit of a swizz; if you want better performance than bog standard supermarket checkout earbuds but don’t want to break the bank and have a phone with a 3.5mm jack, then have a look at In Ear Monitors. About £20 will get you something good.

Here’s a standard chonky Lezyne that’s about 20cm long – the lower bolt for the water bottle cage goes into a brass insert and a longer bolt could go all the way through and make a decent threaded anchor point. The right and / top end is covered by a panel that protects the latch mechanism that can be removed – which is how I got the strap in. This all fits through the door in the frame with minimal jiggling, by the way.

If the geometry is like your full-sus then you don’t need to change much/anything else.

Yes and no. The head angle steepens as the fork compresses on a hardtail, but with a full suss bike, both ends go squish. This means that an already long TT on a modern hardtail (if it’s doing the long, low, slack thing) will get *longer*.

I went from a Stache with slightly old school geo (but not that old school) to a Fuse M4 which has the same ETT as my full suss bike; I pretty much just swapped everything over. It wasn’t a bad change at all – the Fuse just feels a lot more stable on the steep bits and a bit less fun on twisty bits. I like twisty bits, btw.

One other thing is that the forks I swapped over have the ‘old’ 52mm offset, and the Fuse uses 44mm offsets, so if anything the handling should be faster with the forks I was using.

The thing is: it’s a bike you can ride offroad, and it’s a bit harder to ride really smoothly on it than if you have a foot of travel at each end, which irons out lots of little mistakes. I remember going from a Mountain Cycles San Andreas that had sort of become my default bike back to my DeKerf about 20 years ago and having my hat absolutely handed to me by that bike on a fairly pedestrian trail, simply because I’d got a bit lazy.

Long and short, it might take a bit of getting used to, but a change is most definitely as good as a rest.

Both of ours had the bog standard 27.2 Brand X posts from about 25kg on; you can take a bit of air out of the cartridge, and once they have the technique down it’s plain sailing. A heck of a lot less faff than dropping the post for them with a QR every time. Thinking back, I think I’d probably fit one of these before any other stealth parent upgrade – and our Orbea MX 20s ended up with disc brakes, narrow wide chainrings and chopped Fox Forx by the time they’d grown out of them.

I’ll see your Giant and raise you this sweet, sweet Scott: https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/185597608804

I’ve been on the hiring side of things a bit and a gap is not a massive deal, certainly for my line of work. I’m more interested in how they talk about themselves and their experience.

The headteacher at our local secondary put it really well while showing a bunch of us parents round a while back: everyone, with very few exceptions, has bad months or years in their lives. Sometimes they coincide with school years. The same applies through life.

I’d be a little bit suspicious of someone with a rather squeaky-clean CV with no gaps or ‘mistakes’ after a decade at work.

Before splashing out on another set, have you tried rotating them forward or back a bit to see if that helps? It might well not work, but it’s worth a try.

Nukeproof Horizon Enduro saddle is low.

Yeah – I tried one of those when trying to get a magic combination once. I’ve ridden a lot of saddles, and the Horizon is the single least comfortable saddle I’ve ever used by a very wide margin.

Looking at the pics on the Vitus site, the saddle seems very tall. I’m about to head to my shed, and will see if there’s a scuffed Islabikes saddle in my bits box still. If there is, I’ll stick it in the post to you.

The only other thing I’d suggest is a dropper – which you can shim down or leave dropped.
Brand X does an external 27.2 dropper that we used for both our boys’ bikes when they were riding with 27.2 seat tubes. They’re (relatively) cheap, completely bombproof and resale is healthy on account of the small diameter – if I were doing it all again, that would be what I’d add to every bike before anything like disc brakes or suspension forks.

One other thing – you mentioned she’s five OP; is this bike too big for her. The recommended rider heigh is 120-136cm, inside leg 52-61cm. While you can really drop the saddle and post combo and use shorter cranks (which is an excellent suggestion, by the way) sorting out reach might be critical as well. Spec says a 50mm stem, so you could probably find something that cut at least 15mm off the reach as well.

I hear you. Battery replacement via Exposure is / was £80 last time I checked. I’d bought the Moon because it takes 18650s – of which I have an absolute ton lying around. This would let me use it for quite long rides with multiple battery swaps. Unfortunately, it’s a proprietary battery the same size  as an 18650 – the poles are both at the same end. Quite annoying.

The Exposure has plenty of life left in it, so I have a bar mount shoe so I can run it on my bikes when I’m just going from A to B without incinerating oncoming traffic’s eyeballs.

Oooh – excellent call, @P20. There is a very chonky discount via the Member Reward section – if I get a Diablo, the discount is more than my annual membership.