Nobody mentioned chainline, just the chainrings on 2x and 3x are the same distance apart, hence you can use the same shifters.

For all of us using a bashring instead of an outer, then the bike shop is right – my ‘outer’ is just the middle on a triple. The granny being in a different position sounds a bit flakey.

You can always swap the spacers about on your bb to play with chainline a touch, but yes, welcome to the world of hype and the next emperors clothes that require sane men and women to ditch perfectly good drivetrains in search of some new ‘nivarna’…

Holy cow, pretty sure that rear brake uses the tyre and not the rim as a means of braking.

And not sure you can call it a 16 speed bike when its got no shifters…

I don’t think Mavic do an equivalent Speecity anymore, so if you want matching front and rear I’d go for the CRC one.

To be honest with a lot of 29er wheels about now they probably don’t have much call for that kinda spec anymore.

If you’re struggling, something like an XT hub (or insert own preferred hub here) and a Mavic Open Sport (or Pro) rim would be a decent replacement.

Most of the decent builders (JRA, Rowland etc.) will do you Ambrosio Zeniths on Mavic Open Pro rims. I had a pair done by Harry Rowland. Would defintely buy them again.

Nothing ‘special’ on them – if you snap a spoke it’s a standard one, rims are easily replaceable etc. etc.

The insurance benefit is worth something to me

I wouldn’t worry too much about the insurance ‘benefit’. Fitting ours saved a princely £11 pounds from my annual premium…

You probably won’t beat the price ,but you can’t beat havinga bike thats specced out exactly how you want it as opposed to the manufacturer

But to be fair, if you’re building to such a low price you might not have the luxury of speccing what you want, it’s just the cheapest bars/post/stem etc. you can find (though you can pick risers over flat bars for example possibly). Or if you do (in my experience) you suddenly start ‘treating’ yourself to things over your budget and your cheap bike gradually creeps up in price.

At top end of your budget, I’ve had some Block Leopards for a couple of years now, I’d buy them again. They’ve got 3 lenses too.

Think you’d have to rely on eBay to pick up new/nearly new stuff to get like for like. Often it’s the bitty things like a set of bars, stem etc. that might be a tenner each in the shops that you can get bargains for.

JRA built me some wheels with Hope hubs (and swapped the standard Shimano freehub for the Campag freehub as a no cost option).

In terms of other hub options, it gets fairly expensive – DT 350 or 240 if feeling rich, or Chris King new ones.

Ban by law the ability of the central organising party ( left or right) to impose candidates on local organising committees ( of which ever party) so the the locals get to chose their own candidates. Then at the very least you’d have a locally based candidate.

I’d go further, mandatory to be local to your constituency.

Do we want this party to go down the Swiss (or Austrian maybe?) way of having a referendum on any big decisions? Nuclear, immigration, benefits etc?

Online voting every week on one big topic!

Unfortunately for Lotus nearly everyone will drive the base-spec Porsche and decide it offers nearly all of the performance in a much better package.

That’s their problem – you can’t drive any car at their full potential around the roads (well, maybe a Smart 2-seater..) so it’s often the badge name rather than spec people buy. 50k to spend on a fancy car? Probably middle aged, overweight, midlife crisis so go directly to Porsche.

Similar to Nissan Skyline – yes corners at 5.2g, 0-60 in a second, etc. etc. but a Nissan badge on the key fob as you chuck them into the bowl at the swingers party…

I’ll find out this weekend hopefully as I’ve got a lot of bits hidden in the garage that should miraculously turn into a Campag equipped disk road bike by Sunday night….

Hold on fellas, you do realise we’re having a sensible reasoned argument here with no name calling? 😯

I vote we get this thread closed down immediately…

Tricky one. Some of the best changes I’ve seen at work have been when people have come in with no experience of the company and said “why are you doing it like this?”, which is normally replied to with “because we’ve done this for the last x years (and I don’t want to change because I’m comfortable doing it this way)”. Sometimes you need a shake up

I was thinking of an upper house that’s elected by department/expertise. So there’d be a certain number of seats per department and you’d vote for indviduals by department rather than for party representatives by voting districts.

Sadly, it’d still boil down to voting for the ‘Labour fella’ in the Transport department. The Police elections were ‘meant’ to be party neutral but fell into the political parties pretty quickly and probably reflected the incumbent MPs on that area fairly closely I think.

Local elections, Police Commissioners etc. have shockingly low turnouts. Hardly a eye is raised at the figures. The powers that be will never say “Hey, lets sort this out”, it needs to come from somewhere further down the foodchain.

I would love to see a “none of the above” option on ballot papers. And it would be required if voting became mandatory I’d say.

i don’t think that its as far fetched as it seems. many people are already leaning to the left but don’t actually know it – many many people support re-nationalisation of the utilities, most people are anti foreign wars, most people support the nhs, most people will be against benefit cuts once the tories target pensions (only a matter of time)lots of people are against a federal europe.

If you could get a party off the ground with most of that that manifesto I’d think it’d get a fair few votes.

Have to disagree with the Tories targetting pensions – Mr Brown got there first a couple of years ago and did a pretty good hatchet job on them himself.

Problem is most people just vote for a party, not it’s policies. Certainly up here in the North – generations of Labour voters told to vote Lab by their fathers. And judging by the ones I’ve met handling elections, a fair few don’t share the Labour (well, what STW see as left wing) mentalities, some would shame the BNP in their views.

Nah, it’ll be fit and forget. It’ll just be like not using the last couple of cogs on the 36t cassette – the rear mech will have capacity, yes, it won’t be 100% ‘perfect’ chainlength etc. etc. but you’ll never notice or indeed have to worry about it.

If the current cassette/chain are fairly old you might want to consider buying a new chain maybe for use on both cassettes.

My M530s are good at clipping into – that extra bit at the front really seems to get pedal in the right place for me to stomp into it.

In terms of support, I’d say no real difference to 520s to be honest. Certainly wouldn’t like to do some techie stuff unclipped but using it as a platform pedal a la my M424s.

I suspect they’re similar to the Shimano version, i.e. just disposable and supposedly not repairable but there are probably ways and means to put new bearings in, though I suspect it’ll cost as much as just getting a new one.

IIRC the FSA alloy megaexo are Shimano compatible. The carbon fibre crank ones aren’t.

Our first was a major intervention, sucked out with the hoover in hospital.

Same here. We called ours conehead for quite a while after she was born.

My only use was to
a) provide water (top tip – bendy straws highly recommended, by the way)
b) put my face in the way of the gas and air mouthpiece whilst it was being flung around (that was painful…)

Though my missus must be nails. Waters broke then the conversation went
Her -“Can’t go to hospital yet. AARGH. We have to wait until the contractions are at least 30 sec AAAARGH onds apart”
Me – “Erm, that’s about 5 seconds apart, maybe we should go now.”

Suffice to say we didn’t have need for the fancy birthing pools or mood rooms etc. Though the look on the antenatal group having a tour of the maternity section was a treat as we ploughed through…

To the OP – I’d be tempted to sack in the meeting, get a cheeky ride in and then pop over with flowers later…

Do some people not really understand the potential dangers of having measles?

There’s potential dangers in letting your kids play outside, cycling on their bikes, playing conkers etc. etc. etc. I ended up on hospital for three days after playing hide-and-seek (long story!). There’s a risk in anything.

I think the government handled it badly (possibly after string of untruths before that people just started not believing them for anything), but once someone says something is bad it’s tremendously hard to convince even intelligent people that it’s not.

I’d have an early start. Sitting at the end of the bus-only lane on our high street during morning rush hour just to pick up the business men who are too ‘important’ to drive slowly along the normal lane, and the yummy mummies who are late dropping Timmy off at school (so the rules don’t apply to them).

Spot of elevenses, then probably cruise the A1 for a while annoying the reps by driving at 69.9mph so they can’t sneak past.

One of the US targets was Austin, Texas. The residents wonder why, exactly:
Austin on North Korea’s Hit List

Doesn’t LA have a house there? Maybe the North Koreans had put a hefty bet on him winning the 2013 TdF? Nowt like the threat of a nuclear butt kicking to focus a cyclist on the job in hand. It’s a fair chance they don’t know he’s banned yet…

As b r says, make sure you don’t have to get regular services done at the mainstream BMW garage or something. That could easily wipe out any benefit.

It’s a lovely 26″ frame…

I imagine you’d be pushing clearances. Tyres and wheels flex alterally and you probably don’t want them rubbing on the frame. You’d be lifting the bb 1.5″ higher up too.

And the Conservatives still trusted to manage the economy better than Labour in a recent poll. That tells you a lot…

Have a look on eBay. A lot of people are getting rid of their Hope qr adaptors as they go for the ‘better’ 15mm/20mm maxle options. I think mine were £2 posted in the end.

What frame is it on? If its a big fat alloy one, then go for the 113. The front mech might not be able to swing back enough to drop it into the granny gear if not.

Can you not just stick a really really big cork in both ends of the pipe you want to decommision?

Internal flights are pretty cheap too. Nothing stopping you hopping on a shuttle to miss a bit of boring highway driving.

What about flying into LA, then a couple of days later flying up to Vegas? A night here and a car trip to Grand Canyon if you like walking etc. – would deffo recommend planning ahead for that one though.

I don’t want to go any faster. It hurts enough as it is when I have an off….

Seriously though, how extreme are some of the trails going to be soon? And is that too much for 99% of the non-awesome riders (I appreciate 100% of riders on STW are awesome.. 😛 ). Or will there be 29er only black trails?

Think we used Avis without any problems in Capetown. The usual stuff you have to do with any car rental – just make sure your read the small print – returning it with full tank etc. etc.

Had no problems driving around, never got my hands chopped off or anything.

But yes, as someone mentioned, when you park up somewhere like the beach front you’ll probably find a guy beckons you to a car parking space if you’re on his ‘patch’. Depends how you feel about tipping for essentially pointing at a gap in the parked cars but I was on my hols, I can afford a couple of pennies for a smile if nothing else.

Taxis however. My god! Not sure if some we used were even road legal. And make sure you ask how much a fare will be before you set off…

Maybe the other (online?) shop you bought the frame from should have faced it?

Careful what you wish for – what other ‘activities’ can we ban, MTBing?

Nah, just put a minimum 45p per tyre tax on, erm, tyres. That’ll show those good-for-nothing mountain bikers….

and they played some really dirty tricks in the campaign against Virgin Atlantic.

Don’t think beardie-Branson is whiter than white in that little exchange either.

Terminal 5 is a nice place to wander around for a while. Someone told me some fairly impressive stats about it, can remember many of them!

Just to upset the anti-snobs, anyone know what Clarkson had on last night, it looked lovely, black leather strap and simple face?

Not seen the programme yet, but it might be an Omega Railmaster. Do remember him going on about them a while ago in an article.

I’m assuming your moutain bike with some slicks (or 700c wheels) wouldn’t cut the mustard?