I think the answer is pretty much probably not enough difference to warrent changing mechs and shifters from one brand to the other. Get the SRAM one of you’re a SRAM bois and stick with Shimano if you’re running that.

Possibly Shimano a touch longer lasting IMHO….

Nah, I’d say they were pretty much spot on, spec wise.

Its quite rife with iPods/phones and their dodgy batteries – get a working one, swap your duff battery out and claim it’s not working.

Difficult to say. As said, things do break in the post.

Though if he’s got one that works it does beg the question why he bought another one (though there are plenty of plausible answers to that).

Try the serial number bluff.

If not, then it’s a case of accepting the scam really and move on. eBay will probably side with the buyer, as usual.

There is a narrower version, two actually that might be better suited to road bikes – the ‘Hybrid’ and the ‘Extra’.

CRC linky

The TRK is too wide for road use. I’ve got it on my commuter and anything over 20 miles starts getting a touch uncomfy just due to the bulk.

The Extra is a lot narrower and quite squidgy.

The ‘proper’ leather ones are actually a lot harder (and I actually found a bit painful). which was a bit depressing as I’d just lashed out £150 to find that out….

Slight hijack, but has anyone tried those Fluxient rear lights with ‘laser beams’?

Laser beam light

it has started to give an error message now and again

and

it is working prefectly at the moment

can’t be both true.

But, back to the question – the boiler guy I know well told me not to bother with cover – the price of the one-off repair was prob cheaper than cover. So I agree with HolmwoodDave!

Fair enough, you’ve got me there, but 80th in the tour, then 34th in the giro, then two years off, 2nd in the Vuelta and 2nd in the tour…

Don’t forget in the recent races he was there to cover Wiggins so he’s not really had to do the domestiques role. In previous years he would have been going back to the car for bottles, lashing himself to chase down breakaways etc. – really easy to bury yourself for 100kms and roll in 10 minutes down after being spent 20kms from the finish. Add that up a couple of times and suddenly you’re 80th instead of 2nd.

Maybe the rest has been good for him – got some solid training in instead of doing races everywhere for the team. I dunno.

How many Spanish riders have won the Vuelta against the number of Italians in the Giro? Now they really make sure the Italian is going to win on home ground!

If you’re on the road MTFU and do it in a day

Done it in a day 8) but a few buddies have never done anything like it so it’s going to be a ‘sociable’ couple of days!

And should I be looking at something like 20 litre panniers? Not expecting to tour the world, something I can lug to work and give me a few days kit is all I’m planning really.

Anyone?

Cassette sprockets are just closer together on the 10sp, not necessarily thinner by a massive amount.

can you borrow some 29er wheels with slicks?

+1 for that idea (assuming you’ve got disks on the mtb).

And you’ll feel smug too when you use the mountainbike gears to climb up all those steep climbs whilst the ‘men’ get off and push because they listened to poeple who told them a road bike should not have less then 39t front chainring and a 11-25 cassette…..

Hamstrings are the killer – typical problem for cyclists. Get ’em stretched.

They never showed any pictures after the ‘stag do’. The sensory garden could have been 100 empty cans of Special Brew, the elastic off a strippers knickers and a strange pile of semi liquid goo in the corner!

Great idea though! Like a kinda DIY Rescue stylee.

Next STW thread – “What good cause to do whilst on stag do to Prague?”

That is a class comment. I might use that myself when reviewing stuff at work.

Wonder if the people bidding on eBay for a set of DX Jawbones realise they’re not worth the £60 its already up to. It does say ‘Jawbone style’ so someones going to disappointed…

Seriously, on past experience I’d suggest if your wife wants out then she leaves the house. Seen it happen a couple of times. Man moves in with mate. ‘Try’ to sell house, takes 12 months to sell, man feels guilty about putting on mate so rents flat and ends up skint paying for rent and mortgage. Suddenly wife doesn’t want to sell house and a man starts answering the door as your keys don’t fit anymore.

If she wants some space then let her have it. Stay put if you can.

And this will sound terrible, but make her feel guilty. It’s not your fault. You’re potentially both going to lose a house, can you do a deal with an endowment or somethng for her in exchange for the deeds?

But best of luck. Still young, curse you. I met my best friend after getting divorced an we have a beautiful daughter/house/life together.

One issue in 7 years ain’t a massive reason for categorically saying you’re off eBay for good, tht’s not bad going.

Buy It Nows? Well, I think there is an option you can set to either force people to pay straight away or it stays up for sale. I think with no seller feedback now it’s easy to ‘buy’ something to ‘reserve’ it and have a look around for any better deals and not bother paying.

I just put them on a barred list so they can’t buy anything from me again. And then just move on. To be honest most stuff (even junk) sells fairly well so it just takes another few days to shift.

No, that was Enduro rider Jerome Clementz, the Olympic riders didn’t have one. We also don’t know if folk (like JC) are fitting one as an extra precaution, not like weight is as big an issue in Enduro.

If weight isn’t the issue for trail riders then why are we all discussing a £1000 ‘miracle’ upgrade 😉

They should be a like for like replacement.

IIRC Oakley changed the Half Jacket to a new name (can’t remember it off the top of my head) a while ago and the lenses are just slightly different (my LBS was complaining about it) – have you defo got the right lenses?

And didn’t the Olympic rider who was using XX1 have a chain guide on his bike during the ride that funnily ‘disappeared’ on all the promo shots?

The UCI tend to reactive, banning things bike firms are bringing in, rather than proactive and forcing companies to use Penny Farthings/Hub gears etc.

Depends where and what you ride though. Down South I’m rarely out of the middle third of the cassette, up north I’m rarely out of the lowest gears as it’s steep up then steep down requiring no pedaling. At GT I was rarely out of the top 3 gears on decents as they’re designed to be fast. So if you want a bike that can do all three* then XX1 would be brilliant, if you want to do one of those at a time you could run a normal 1×10.

Think I’d rather just spend £100 on three different sized chainrings for those different conditions, spend 5 mins swapping them over and save the other £900…

Is that chainring SRAMs reply to the clutch system on the XTR rear mechs? That supposedly stops chain flying off too.

Whatever happended to that Canyon rear hub that was supposedly light and had a three speed built into it al la Sturmly Archer? I’d certainly be tempted with that and a relatively close ratio (cheapish) cassette.

Add in the cost of shipping including a fair amount of insurance. Don’t think shop will just send a box with “value $5” to get around any import issues either.

youll also need a maintance contract and for it to be kept up to date

Think our yearly maintenance costs £90.

There was no requirement from insurers for our house to be alarmed etc. but out of interest I checked how much different the yearly insurance would be for alarmed vs non-alarmed. It came to a princely £12 discount and meant basically every night we had to put the downstairs alarm on (thus probably waking sleeping child) or we wouldn’t be insured. I just paid the extra tenner for the saving of the hassle.

Actually, am I right in thinking radios aren’t going to be allowed in next years Tdf?

I think that will have a big impact on the sprinters teams as I think a lot more breakaways will stay away without some team manager telling a train they need to work at ‘x’ watts for the next ‘x’ minutes to catch up.

Handbult Shimano (105?) hubs on Mavic Open Pro (or Sport) should be within range-ish.

I can see why he switched to Sky this year but unless he’s purely motivated by money

I can’t see why he switched. Can’t believe he naive enough to think they’d drop the dream of Sky winning the tour to lead him out on all the sprint stages.

He was a guaranteed shoe-in for the Olympics regardless of team (Millar too) and up ’til that point I’d not really seen Wiggins et al (apart from the final TdF stage) leading the sprint train so he wasn’t getting much practice with his new teammates.

Still, I learnt something new from CJs indepth analysis of the track events.

I’d never realised that the 400m hurdles was a 400m running race with hurdles to jump over as well.

As someone said – I’ve learnt loads about the olympics now, can’t wait for next years.

And the best post event interview I think I’ve seen at the Olympics too.

Would have been interesting to see if he had been ‘let off the lease’ and mashed his way up the moutains. He could easily have knackered himself and ended up losing time the following days so it might have not been as clean cut that he would have beaten Wiggins anyway.

Good Sky team around both Wiggins and Froome. It was almost a shmae the bickering started and put a bit of a spoiler on the TdF result.

Back stuff up onto CDs. Oh, wait, they came from CDs in the first place… 😛

If you’ve ripped CDs lossless then putting them on the ‘cloud’ on things like Dropbox etc. will take an age, but do-able. If they’re all small MP3 files chuck ’em up, or get a DVD burner.

Thing with NAS, external HDDs etc. is if you do get a virus or corrupt a file it’s often gonna take out the backup too.

If you’ve got SPD pedals and shoes then give ’em a go. Plenty use them.

If you’re gonna have to buy a pair of shoes then maybe consider pukka road ones, but if it’s just for winter training I’d be tempted to go for SPDs, but that’s just a personal preference and I’m sure the STW wisdom will beg to differ with me.

Seems to me they target very well the most important competitions, and are borderline 2nd rate at other times.

You can’t be at peak for every event (unless a little external dabbling is happening…) so it certainly looks like BC have accepted some failures in World Champs and focussed on the Olympics. Don’t forget the track season is typically over the winter rather than our ‘summer’ so to get training right for both would be difficult – maybe that’s why we’ve done so well where other countries seemed to have faltered.

The hard facts are the golds medals now are what is going to secure the funding, not the world cup wins. We can’t be far off a tipping point now where we can send a world champ winning, say, pursuit team to the World Champs and send a completely different one on a different training regime to the next Olympics.

Pendleton is retiring now and we ain’t got a replacement for her like we have for Hoy in Jason Kenny in the mens sprints. Hoy can’t really be thinking of the next Olympics so there could be 4 medals down already…

I’d also add my (positive) support for the Country file guy doing the gymnastics

I think he was actually a gymnast so at least he has an insight into the sport itself.

See they’ve stopped asking Amir Khan for any quotes before they showed any boxing as he was giving away all the results before they’d shown the fights!

Lance does/did a fair bit of offroad IRC. When he did that shortcut over a field on the road down an alp Mr Ligget kept going on and on about it.

We did Glasgow (the groom was originally from there and did a white water rafting about 40 mins away – they picked us up in a minivan from the town centre (or we might have organised that outselves, it’s a little, erm, hazy that detail).

It was a great trip. Hardly any ‘white’ in the white water but it just meant we had fun splashing each other and tipping boats over – no-one survived without a trip into the water from either boat.

Be warned, some companies end up using others to actually supply the car.

I know, as we booked our Spanish car through Avis which was fine, no problems, return it full etc. etc.

We left a couple arguing with the Avis desk as they’d booked through Europcar (I think) who weren’t at the airport so they palmed the rental off to Avis. They also returned the car full (needed a full tank apparently) but the T&Cs for their car said return empty so were asking (in vain I suspect) for 60 euros back for the fuel they’d put in as they were apparently told to return it full.

Don’t really like the ‘spirit’ of what they were doing but I can understand what they were.

Suppose it’s akin to a runner running slightly slower so he/she can get into a weaker semi final where, say, the first four go through to the final. It’s just in a sport like badminton you have to lose a point rather than just jogging round that last 33% of the lap.

I’d always assumed leagues were there so weaker nations at least got a couple of games rather than getting stuffed in the first round.

Liked mine on my commuter as I could flick the lever to change gear from the bar ends without really changing hand position.

Make sure those LX ones are hydro disk specific as I’ve seen some cheap LX ones on eBay and they’re for cable pull vee brakes.

Doesn’t show all the questions Cav got, I also think he correctly assessed the reporter.

I’m sorry, but if you’re going to push cycling into the limelight, get it into a larger audience blah blah you’re gonna get inane questions from the reporter from Newsround etc. who know nothing about cycling and you just need to grin and say no politely to the TdF question. Cav just looks a little stupid to me now. If people are going to put him up as a role model (and get nice lucrative shampoo advertising from it) then he’s gotta play the game to some extent.

Maybe next year a little media training would be nice.