Assuming you’re using 3D CAD there are quite a few bits and pieces up on places like grabcad that should be of use. Some look very nicely detailed but if you are going to turn them in to a real world piece of hardware it may still be worth verifying their dimensions are correct before going too far with them.

MTB @ GrabCAD

We had one general surveyor, one specialist independent damp inspector/structural engineer and two local builders specialising in damp treatment round before we bought our place. There was no denying that we had plenty of damp in a few of our walls but they all offered different reasons for it being there (apart from the initial surveyor who would say anything other than that we needed to get it check out further by a specialist). After having lived here for a couple of years and sorting out most of the obvious issues I can now say that none of them knew what they were looking at and they were all blaming the wrong things for our problems. Non of the things they recommended would have actually fixed the issues (one of which was a very obviously leaking piece of guttering that was almost impossible to miss if you just looked up when you were stood next to the wall with the “rising” damp problem).

If/when we move on I won’t be bothering with any surveys behinds the bare minimum as I don’t think they are worth the time or effort. If your mortgage lenders happy, and you’re happy/pro paired, I’d just walk away from Connells and be glad that I didn’t have to talk to them any more.

Ive just bought a kids sleeping bag from decathlon for littleginge’s first camping trip.

QUECHUA FORCLAZ 0/5°

So far he’s only been in it on the living room floor but it seems to be pretty well made (at least as nice as my older vango) and isn’t quite so much bag for his little body to heat up as a full size one. We should get to see how well it works in the field tonight, I’ll report back if it turns out to be anything other than uneventful.

Can anyone give any guidance on what might be roughly equivalent to a nobby nick or one of the new Hans dampfs?

The coloured line has worn off mine (Nobby Nic in speed grip) fairly quickly and isn’t that obvious now. Probably gone at the same rate as the little hairy things that you get on your new tyres.

Thanks for all the replies; I think that’s more than enough positive feedback to give it a try.

Now to work out just how much other stuff to buy to go with it. I’ve not really tried using a car to carry all my camping gear before so have to try not to get too excited.

Choppy, choppy.

Fiskars XA23

I’ve got the older, shorter handle version and it’s pretty good fun at chopping stuff.

Fair enough I guess.

I’ve had a creaky “seat-post” that I’ve failed to silence since I built my bike up last year. Perhaps I’ll try oiling my (fabric) saddle’s rails to see if I too have a squeaky one. I certainly have the arse for it (in the context of this thread, at least)

Part of me really hopes I do have a squeaky saddle as it’s been driving mad trying to shut that nose up.

Well, if I get the time this weekend I guess I’ll be stripping the lowers and having a look inside the negative air chamber.

If I can’t find anything in that lot then I guess I’ve got a set of 140mm forks rather than 150mm ones. Unless simply putting them them back together with the right amount of grease and oil fixes the issue.

I’d put money on there being too much grease in there.

Where do you think the excess might be? I’ve read tales of the negative spring being pretty much solid with grease but can’t see how this would limit the travel. Is it common for these to ship with a load tucked away somewhere else in the fork?

And yes, I did get out the ruler to check this one. It almost seems odd that the maximum travel was pretty much bang on 140mm. Was wondering if this might mean something of the wrong size has been built into the fork but couldn’t think of anything that would reduce the travel but leave the extra stanchion showing (unless they do extra long damper assemblies).

Mine are still in there and haven’t caused me any damage yet. Don’t think I’ll be taking them off unless I get a new frame to stick them on.

I did find one thing that was contributing to me not hitting full travel with these; turns out the lower legs had become fairly well pressurised and were acting as an extra spring. Using a zip tie, poked down through the fork seals, to burp them means I’m now getting much closer to the claimed travel (though, annoyingly, still not all of it).

Would cable trunking work?

Screwfix

Ouch.

I can give a thumbs up for the chameleon in this context. Strava says it’s pretty fast round my local trails and with 29×2.35 nobby nics on it is a comfy place to spend a good few hours.

We’ve got a dieter kid comfort 2 and have been very happy with it. It copped well with little ginge number one; until he was too heavy to carry for any significant distance. It was easily adjusted to fit me (at 6’ 2”) or the missus (at 5’ 7” in a tall day, apparently) and came with serviceable sun shade and rain covers to keep us going through all the weathers. I’ll be looking forward to being able to take little ginge number two out in it when she is big enough.

I’ve just left them for now, turns out I had plenty to do else where I’m the bike. I guess I’d rather be certain of having a working bike for tomorrow morning than take the risk possibly get a small improvement from cleaning out the negative spring grease.

I’ll probably get some in before I start doing the work on this, just in case I need them.

Just checked and the XL chameleon has a 490mm seatpost length and a reach of 487mm. So that should give a useful advantage over the intense XL sizing.

I also share your height and inseam measurements and have found that I just fit an XL Santa Cruz chameleon with a 150mm dropper. When I was looking around for a new hardtail I chose this one as it was likely the longest bike I could find that I could get a 150 mm dropper in. I am now running 170mm cranks and fairly fat (by modern standards) DMR V12 pedals but this allows me to be a whole 3mm off slamming my brand x post into the top of the seat tube. A one up dropper and/or a shallower saddle (mines is a fabric radius scoop I think) would likely increase this further if you wanted a little extra piece of mind/adjustability .

After all that fad, this is the first bike I’ve owned where I haven’t had to run a massive stem or push the saddle right back on its rails. It’s a nice feeling

I’ve demoed an XL high tower with a 150mm dropper and just got away with that too. Pretty sure it shares similar geometry numbers to the chameleon so is near the top of the list for the next bike purchase.

PS. It is a very walkable town, I managed to get out into the suburbs/countryside in less than an hour but did miss the park up in a hill that I was aiming for. I imagine there would be some nice views to be had if you had some better navigation than I’ve managed. May try again in the morning.

Well, I’ve mostly been wandering about (quite lost most of the time due to my phone battery going flat) and eating/drinking. In all very pleasant, though I’ve not managed to make it to any of the “proper” tourist attractions.

Dinner was at Gessetto Ristorante and was rather pleasant; particularly liked the semifraddo. Ended up in a nice little wines shop nearby after, not sure what the name was but the proprietor and his dog were very friendly and the wine was rather nice too.

May need to sleep now. It’s hard drinking wine by the bottle when there is only one of you.

Well, one coffee down and starting to wonder if beer might not be more appropriate.

Also realised that I didn’t pack my plug adapter so will need to go on the hunt for one of those soon or I may have to do without the the collective wisdom of the forum.

I had to sniff our three years old’s cuddly giraffe to see if it smelled of piss. It did.

Having a better look about at the push mowers after looking at the Husqvarna 64 mentioned above I’m starting to think this is the way I’ll be going.

Currently trying to decide between the Husqvarna and two Webb models; the WEH30 and WEH18.

Has anyone tried any of the above? If not any comment on the preferred width of a push mower (30 up to 45 cm) or their cutting type (scissor or non-contract)?

Honda izy looks very nice but the smallest one is about twice the size of what I’m after.

The goat idea is very tempting, and I’m pretty sure littleginge would be very happy with a pet, it I think the garden/lawn would leave it hungry.

Almost tempted by a hand pushed model if I can’t find any decent motorised ones.

The grease is inside of the air chamber of the fork, so you can only see it when you take the top cap off the air spring (which I did when they arrived to see how many volume spacers were in there).

It was all at the bottom of the air chamber on top of the thing labelled transfer port in the image below (assuming I can actually get an image to work)

So, I’ve pushed the adjustable dropouts back to their farthest setting now (previously chainstay length was 415mm, now should closer to 430mm) and left the fork as it was at the end of the last ride (less pressure than recommended by fox for my weight by about 10%, compression damping set fully open).

The bike feels much more balanced on the flats now, probably not much between the current setup and how it felt with the (much softer) 130mm forks and short chainstays. So I think I’ll stick with this for a while until I have the fork setup sorted for me and my riding.

On that front I’m still not getting more than 130mm travel out of the fork. My current plan is to just keep dropping the pressure until I get to the point of using full travel at least once per ride. If anyone can offer any advice on what else I may be able to look at I’d be happy to give it a try.

If anyone can tell me if it is good/normal for there to be a fairly large amount of grease at the bottom of the air chamber that would be rather helpful. I may otherwise start thinking about taking the forks apart for a service sooner rather than later.

So it looks like this might be thing that people have found a solution to for orienteering types.

GEONAUTE REINFORCED LONG AND DURABLE ORIENTEERING SOCKS

Anyone tried them?

CountZero, last time I tried that I was left very much disappointed with the one size fits all claim on the packaging.

Knee high socks whilst on a bike are never cool.

How about normal socks and leg warmers then? Just ones that don’t make your legs warm.

No, I don’t.

Well I’ve now got a very cheap (£13) 50mm stem on order from China. Should give me plenty of time to experiment with other things before it turns up, then I can try that swap after getting everything else set up as well as I can manage.

Good point about the relative waiting of the fork between the two setups.

I might try using the adjusters on the rear drop outs to lengthen the chainstays to compensate for a first try as the only spare stems I have lying about are for different bar sizes.

So, after a couple of false starts (who knew you could buy star nuts for one inch steerer tubes off the shelf in Halfords?) I finally managed to get the forks on the bike and head out for a couple of hours yesterday.

The two main things that I learnt were that the recommended air pressures on the back of the fork are too high for me and my local riding, or my shock pump gauge is a fair bit off. The second is that when you are “testing” a new fork on a hardtail you should remember that your back wheel might not be too happy about it.

In the end I don’t think I actually managed to use any more than 130mm travel according to the o-ring marker on the forks so their ride actually felt fimer than I was used to on my old forks. I think I may have been running the old forks a little soft, and bottoming our more often than I should, which exaggerates thesis change in feeling. This also meant that the front of the bike did feel a bit higher than normal (despite me loosing about 10mm of spacers from under my stem) and was probably slackening out the head angle more than I would have had if I’d gotten the new fork set up properly.

Given all the above, I can say that with the new fork the bike definitely felt more alive when I was out of the saddle, in a weight forward attacking position, but it wasn’t really any better when seated or for climbing.

I think that at this point I probably need to spend some more time fettling things before I can say which I prefer to ride with but if I had to pick now I may currently be leaning towards preferring the shorter fork. This may be biased by the fact that my local trails (Thetford, booo) are a little on the flat side.

Well, turns out I’m going to have to wait to try this out as I rather foolishly forgot to order a new star nut when got the forks. Doh!

I’ll have to see if I can pick one up on my way out to the shops later to have a chance of sorting it for a ride tomorrow instead.

I ended up with the performance elite one with the FIT4 damper as I was too slow to get one of the 140mm performance models.

I guess I’ll just have to give it a try and see what happens. If you don’t hear anything back it may be best to assume that it is indeed a bad idea.

At 6 foot 2 (with a diddy little 32 inch inseam) I’ve been very much enjoying my XL chameleon. I can even (just) get away with a full 150mm dropper which I wasn’t expecting to be able to do when I started looking for a new bike.

I’m running 27+ and 29+, well front 29×3.0 and rear 29×2.6.

Chris, can I ask what 2.6 tyre and rim combination you’re running on the rear of you bike, and what the clearance is like when they are in there? I’ve been thinking about trying this myself for a while now but haven’t been brave enough to test it out with my own money so far.

Well, I think the two Yakima ones look very promising. Should be quite happy to take something like a Bronson or Nomad if I manage to save up enough for next years sales and there isn’t as much to mess about with as the wheel off carriers.

Has anyone else tried any of these and had use of the Thule uprider? The uprider looks a little less secure to me but I can’t decide if that’s just me being daft or not.

Invention by Design

If you’re still at home thinking about this, I’ve just been out for a short ride round the Limburner trail (from Brandon Country park rather than high lodge) and the forest is fine to be in.

There are quite a few small branch’s about but only one small (rotten) treee has fallen over the trail; some kind (cough) soul has already shifted that though. For the most part I didn’t notice the wind apart from the noise and a small bit of one of the open sections which seemed to catch it a bit.