If its a small shop where cust’s can get at you, then you’ll never get any work done as you’ll constantly be talking about stuff/ being distracted.

But yes, big breaker bar, infinite supply of lubes and non bike related humour (you get completely fed up about hearing about bikes) and be honest and clear to anyone and everyone, the mechanic is everyones friend otherwise you don’t get any work/ it gets real miserable real quick.

And the bigger the shop, the more of your time goes into paperwork. I.E smallest LBS = <5% of time doing mechanic related paperwork. Biggest monster workshop = 40-50% of time doing aimless typing and swearing aimed at computers and people who break the computers.

They are cheap as hell to buy. Put it this way, if your thinking of rebuilding the lever and are looking for the rebuild kit, its only about another £15 to buy a whole new brake.
Also juicy’s are now obsolete, can’t get parts for them (or whatever is left on distributor’s shelf is all thats left) so they will be getting rid of all their dead.

Rose.de

But yeah, watch out for grey imports & OE models sometimes even the retailers aren’t aware of which is which.

Yup it shouldn’t be a problem! Don’t force it as those bladders are very tricky to get ahold of!

You need to play with cycling the damper cart with the compression damping turned one way or the other and the bladder will contract allowing you to re-insert it in the fork leg. Make sure its bled properly too otherwise it’ll ride like a bag of crap.

Sounds like epic value to me, looks good too!

Just those DT swiss OE wheels I’d watch. If they are anything like the ones Spesh send out with their bikes OE, they’re utter pish. Bearings last anything from 800-2000 miles (a few months for some), freehub’s are actually a joke and you can’t get spares (of any higher quality) for them. And you’d think they’d be build with their own quality spokes right? No, they’re built with bugger know’s what. For the money you couldn’t even buy those parts at trade/shop prices so very impressed, just keep an eye on the penny pot for replacing the wheels for something better (hope’s on mavic open pro’s etc).

guy I know works at FreeFlow in Glasgow, they’re pretty good from what I hear (both to cust’s and to work for).

Dales in Glasgow also do 0% financing jobbies.

Depends entirely on usage as you’d expect!

I’ve seen decent quality rims (mavic open pro’s) go in under 2,000 miles underneath a normal size guy, riding year round, on an immaculately maintained bike. Seen big big guys riding through filth for years, never a care in teh world toward cleaning rims/keeping on top of brake pads and get 8-10k over a few years.
I’ve *just* thrown a set of mavic 217xc rims away after about 15 years service. Rear was a freaking joke to be honest though, must have been less than 0.8mm wall thickness left in the mid part of them (dodgy as ****). They did 4 years of mountain biking, then 10 years of commuting/SS/abuse, no idea how many miles, anywhere between 6-15k, no idea!

correct, its just lever geometry thats changing. AFAIK none of the systems actually change the pad to rotor relationship on the fly.

If its an older (and high end) lugged road frame then you’ll actually be removing value. All that lovely detail put in by the builder filled in my clumsy amounts of powder = fail.

If its a daily use bike/ mtb of not particular worth then yeah, its a good selling point. But a £100 worth of frame + £75 of powder does not equal £175. maybe £125 and will sell easy at that price I guess feels right to me.

No one find them?

Figured they are exactly at Waymarker 39 – (https://maps.google.co.uk/maps?q=innerleithen&ll=55.616589,-3.033873&spn=0.00193,0.003449&hnear=Innerleithen,+Scottish+Borders,+United+Kingdom&gl=uk&t=h&z=18)

http://thestanes.co.uk/mapsof7stanes.pdf (second page, marker 39).

I knew exactly where they were when I realised I’d lost them, just with the group wanting to go, pretty cold out, didn’t fancy making them wait 30mins for me to get back up the hill, find them then come back.

Guess it makes a great excuse to go and buy new ones 😀

Morpeth is a really nice little market town in the centre, but the last few years its been a permanent traffic jam thanks to councils bad planning as there isn’t actually that much through traffic anymore!

Its a bit of a yuppy commuter town for Newcastle so house prices vary from OK to slightly inflated, but not so that you’d really notice.

Out of town its OK, though there are lots of cheap box houses popping up everywhere and they really help cheapen the place, though the entire country is now full of houses like those!

Alnwick is equally nice, but the roads around there are all ruthlessly policed with speed cameras, so be aware!

Some good riding about too, especially if you head just 10-15miles north & east of Morpeth towards and above Rothbury (which also has a really good bakery)

Dunno about auto box, it might.

Driving style does, my mate works in local VW main dealer as lowly mechanic, and he’s performed more italian tunes on 1.4/1.6 tdi polo’s and golf’s in the last 24months than he has had injector problems in 5years.

Almost exclusively cars owned/run by people driving them like miss daisy, the retired etc. More problems being reported with the lower powered models I guess not because there is any technical differences, but the lower powered models are owned by vicar’s etc, vs the higher powered models more by young proffesssionals etc.

I’ve met Fisher before, and would say he’s a ‘strong’ character at the best of times, let alone thrown up in the 1st episode in direct head to head with Obree. Squirmed in my seat a bit the way he was talking at him, and to anyone that doesn’t know either of them (or what a washed up F1 bankroller has to do with cycling) would be kind of at a loss.

Safety bit I thought was OK, though could have been improved, made clearer, and not being sexist, but afraid most people would probably pay more attention to the nice lady presenter than some random gadge.
Everyone can always benefit from safety tips, though I think showing/symbols/scenarios from driver/ped/rider perspectives and how one should go about it would be very useful.

Pyranha master (223litre?) are what we used to use for instructing all sorts on open water & within a harbour, VERY stable, and with the optional skeg, hold a straight line pretty well for a boat of their type. Easy to carry though heavy, and they DO stack very well. Once had 6x 223 masters, 17x paddles, 3x people and 5x peoples equipment in/on a mk1 fiat punto.
No idea how much they cost, but for one for yourself, enquire about a better outfitting set for them as the cheap/stock one is maybe OK for a 10yr old, but the elasticated back doesn’t cut it for anyone else.

sit on top’s are great for a French resivoir in summer, in shorts. But lets be honest, we get maybe 2 or 3 days a year like that in the UK? (when we’re not stuck in an office 😉

Would get something from teh likes of Dagger, thats quite long with a decent seat & back rest arrangement, as for a boat of that type, its comfort and ease of use that your after, especially for the inexperienced occasional user. And most budget/flat water boats I’ve come across often have a very poor outfitting, when what you want is a floating armchair, I know I would!

£500 is a generous budget for such a boat too. I would expect £375-425 would be about the right ballpark for that kind of boat.

Paddles can be very expensive (I dropped £300 on some lush carbon jobs, but then I’m probably in the water 200hours a year) but some decent fibreglass blades will be in the £75-95 range, less for plastic, but they are generally awful, though judge it depending on your usage.

Wetboots, spent about 5years teaching uni kayak groups and we would always suggest the 1st purchase should be wetboots! In the UK/river/lake/sea, they are all cold so its really nice to have warm feet and not ruin your other shoes. cost about £20-40. Nookie/reed/palm all make good ones for that price.

I’ve had several of the old superstar pads fail, and they’ve always replaced them with new. ONly once did both pads fall off in the same ride but still had some brakes (after all the material is metal).

Newer pads are all OK, been riding various pads/various bikes for 18months or so and not one failure, I would call that progress no?

Although if I was going someplace desolate I’d be fitting genuine OE pads, 3x the price, but if it buys me piece of mind for a critical safety componant, then fair enough.

Also, anyone remember years ago before disk brakes were invented? When we just had those blocks of soft gooey dirty rubber jammed against mud, jammed against grit, jammed against quickly eroding aluminium?

They would frequently fail, on every single corner/braking point after a muddy puddle/wet grass/weather not quite ideal/that time of the month, so you’d always tap the brakes just a second before you actually needed them to assure they would actually work before you wrapped yourself around that tree. Not rememeber those days?

Lighten up guys! Its the first show, and they’v obviously allowed the entire 1st episode to be dedicated to talk of the Tour.

LMNH is actually a very good cafe, and yeah might not be some peoples cup of tea, but it is for a much larger proportion of riders than you’d think.

Also bare in mind the variety of riders and their tastes, there must be at least 30 competitive disciplines in cycling, let alone the HUNDREDS of different forums and their tones/attitudes. So give it some time and see how far it goes, if it fails, ah well, at least someone had the balls to get on and do something about a dedicated cycling show!

Obree though, wow, I thought I talked fast.

“Train travel in this country is a joke.”

Never mind it’ll all be sorted soon with what Cameron describes as “the biggest infrastructure investment in the railways since the Victorians”.

Oh how we laugh.

10years ago a Japanese fella said he could build a full maglev in addition to the mainline (so not affecting it too badly during construction) from London to Glasgow for £9.8bn
They laughed him out of the room.

10 years later, they’ve spent over £12bn just fixing up the west coast mainline to the standard it was touching on in the late 1980s (or thereabouts)

Yeah I realise they put a heavy £££ emphasis on ‘now’ travel and thats fair enough, but what really gets me is the con nature of buying tickets.
So I jump on a train from home to Glasgow, I know as a fact I have to buy the two tickets for the branch line, then mainline seperately despite what the ticket man will say. Price difference (bought on the day of travel)
open return right through = £60
day return for each portion = £47.50 (ish)
open return for each portion = £21.50 + £11.65 = erm, £30 somthing?

Confused? yeah much! I guess the reason is the ticket will say something like ‘point a to point b by any means within 1month’, but then, so do the two separate tickets. In more built up regions in the UK I could maybe see the benefit of the full open return, but generally people get ripped every day when they don’t have to.

My GF making the same journey from a slightly different starting station was DEMANDED to buy the through ticket at the higher price as she ‘wouldn’t be allowed to be in the station without an onwards ticket’ or some such grade A. It really pissed me off, two reasons
1) the ticket guy was blatantly taking advantage of a person who wasn’t that familiar with the way trains work.
2) I bought the onward ticket for her at the next station/part of the journey in the ticket booth as had been told can’t get them on trains any more, or its an offense? So qued for 20mins, got the ticket, neary missed the train (gf arrived in mean time and qued with me), then when we got on train, uh oh, we both have tickets for her. Then took about 2weeks+ to get money back for extra ticket. All because couldn’t buy ticket on the train.

Bugger it, I’ll just drive everywhere, its borderline cheaper, 5000% less stressful, and I can take my bike***

***try taking a bike on a virgin train, even when you’ve booked/rang some Indian call centre for a reference number that means bugger all when you get to the platform and the guard informs you the train is full and please kindly go away/wait 90mins for another which ‘might’ have some space.
/mega coffee fueled rant over.

buy from the station? you must be joking.

i.e. for me to get train to london, by standard class no reserve, tomorrow so <24hrs notice.

Online, not even the cheapest, just any old = £60-120 return
online a month in advance, = £40-60.
online 3months in advance = £20
at the train station on the day = £510

Yes, FIVE HUNDRED+
I could go and hire a BMW 7series, drive it like a dick to london, park it wherever, stop in a decent hotel with decent dinner and breakfast, then drive it back like I stole it and still be about £50-100 up.

Public transport in UK = jokes

Yeah would aim for a 48-52 big ring.

Make sure your front mech can move UP the seattube far enough, and chainstay space (though on outer not often a problem on a double/triple setups).
Make sure rear mech can take the difference!

But yeah, try to avoid being in the bottom 11t gear too much, as that wears the fastest and spreads to the rest of the drivechain quicker than you would imagine.

Dual masses are a headache to me!

Two family members have vag cars with dual mass, and both failed/worn to the point the car was undrivable within 2years from new.

Apart from that they’ve been great, though if you base 5years worth of driving from new vs. a 2.0gti. the GTI was way cheaper to own.
Held its value better (£21.5k new, £11.8k trade in after 47k/ 4yrs), cost less to service (about £80 on average), tax was more which negged that out, and MPG was similar 42-44 for the gti, and 46-48 for the GT170
But it was resale value of the GT170 that killed the dream, think he got about £7k on a £19/20k car after 4yrs with similar usage.

I think Hope should run for government, own a bank, be the stick that all other retailers are measured by**

**it obviously costs them to keep this up, but their tireless reputation obviously works for them as they have expanded massively in the last 5years, let alone the 10 or 20!

We’ve had LOADS of saab’s over the years, and my advice is:-
Family has had saabs since mid 80s, and prob put 500-750k miles on about 12 cars in that time.

SERVICE, its everything. THe petrol engines are quite highly strung and must be done on the dot and by the book. there are dozens of independant saab specialists who are a must. Kwikfit will not suffice.

Main issue with (all) the petrol engines is the air/vacuum/boost/egr hoses, they sludge up if the service isn’t done on time and then causes all kinds of expensive (if you entrust a dealer who doesn’t know what they are doing, as they will spend hours trying to find something that should only take 30minutes).
Gearboxes used to be an issue with 80s/90s car’s, but the newer ones are solid, though you may find high milage cars (150k+) will have worn synchro on 1st/2nd/reverse making it hard in the lower gears, this is often caused by the clutch dragging (usually last 120-140k before they start dragging).
Diesels, only had one, a 3.0t v6 in a 9-5 and it was great (had from 40k-95k) only needed oil once a year and lots of front tyres though that as probably the fact I drove it hard constantly and never got less than 38mpg. Though MOST other people have had a nightmare of a time with the 3.0t diesel and then changed to the lower powered but much less troublesome 2.2. No idea about 1.9’s but you don’t see many of them about anymore so go figure on that one.

Electrics wise, heard bad things about the newest 9-5 (6months before they went bust) on random models, but every saab we’ve had has never had an electrical problem.

Ride on them is generally good, though higher powered models are often 20-40mm lower on the same stock dampers so after a few years get a bit tired, and saab stock shocks are pricey! Instead go to abbot racing or partsforsaabs.co.uk and get uprated ones for way less £££

Fabia sounds like a bad one, currently have a polo with the same 1.2 3cyl lump in it and yeah they are gutless and thirsty as hell (average 35-40mpg for a 1.2 driven in ideal conditions is lame). Diesels in VAG cars are great so long asyou don’t expect it to be a shopping car as the EGR + DRV (right term for it) get blocked up unless you drive them hard.

Anyway, my next car will prob be another 9-5 2.2tid wagon.

DO NOT BUY ANYTHING THATS COOLING MECHANISM IS A FAN!

Capitals are really really required to convey the useless’ness of that concept.

Either buy a proper job (a few hundred minimum), or get down to wilko’s and buy a large regular cooler box then fill it half full with those blue ice pack things, you’ll have frozen milk for the first day, icey for the start of the second, and still <10c for the third.

If train is £75 each and there are af ew of you, then always worth driving it!

IN the UK I generally find with most train tickets by the time you have two people travelling to same destination, then driving becomes the obvious choice. Crazy but too often true.

+1 for the Delica/L300, so bloody useful those things! And almost agricultural as far as the guts of it go, anyone can fix one of those, and having a fridge as PART of the dashboard is unbelievably worthwhile.

finnistere! thats who I was thinking of

Its like, standard road jersey price £20-60
NICE road jersey, flavour of the month, £45-85
Rapha jersey, £180

Not even a little bit more than the competition, but often 2-3x the top end value again.
BUT most of their stuff is reputed to be very nice.

Theres a company I’mthinking of but can’t rmemeber the name, they specialise in Merino sportswear, still pricey, but pennies compared to rapha

Last time I was in russia they were asking how much M class/ML/wagon’s are in the UK as some were looking at moving over here, I told them how cheap they are vs. Russian prices (nothing with 4 wheels really depreciates that much, you’d pay $2k for a 30yr old mocbavich). Then was intrigued why they wanted one, as they are aweful, they knew but they are somewhat of a status symbol in the east, as are those porsche 4×4’s

Really really avoid, get a disco 2 with 2.5tdi or even a range, or anything jap. There is a reason those merc’s are cheaper than mondeo’s they are the definition of rubbish.

Last time I rented, the landlord had a few flats in teh same apartment block going spare, they were already cheap, but I made a cheeky offer (£75/month less) and they accepted it so long as I didn’t get late with payments.
The whole year I was there I was at that letting agent dropping the cheque on time or a week before (whenever I had it), never late, because they were doing us a a deal on an already good deal, I was happy, they were happy, everyone wins (especially the letting agent who had to do absolutely SFA for quite a bit of money).

IMO if the letting agent is so slack that you as a fee paying landlord have to worry to this extent, they don’t deserve to be in the business. Burn them, and make a google review of them to that effect to warn others.

I’m really not sold on the BB30 concept yet. Especially for lower end bikes where people will be working on it themselves, or lower end bikeshops that haven’t even got the hang of HT2 yet let alone anything more tolerance critical.

For road/track I can see it being a great idea, but for MTB, I really don’t see the point (SS/cyclo-cross might be the middle ground), and can see the number of threads on bike forums asking ‘fitting/maintained/why is my bb30 worn out after 5days’ kind of thread appearing more frequently.

Doesn’t that German company offer modified Di2 rear mech’s, which have a normal XT/XTR long cage bolted on and a few other mod’s to make it work?

But yeah, can see why he’s a spinner, I am too, hate grinding up climbs on road bike, my current lowest gear is 38/23 and at my lowest comfortable cadence that’s about 9-10mph which is still a fairly high gear, I’d welcome something lower** like a decent coffee machine in the workplace.

**would also mean I could climb faster and for longer, as grinding slow means my legs just seize up after about 5-10minutes.

We got one of these last year for £140 for short weekends etc . great bit of kit and up in a couple of minutes. Excellent quality too. We have a Montana 6 for longer trips but this is superb

Pretty sure decathlon give these away free outside their stores? Theres always at least one free tent in the carpark. usually no storage bag or spare pegs with them mind.

So are these actually hand reproductions of existing photos, or just photo shopped? Noticed a few have some odd perspectives/ mistakes in them, but could have been like that in the photo?

25% less on apple products? Guess its the age old thing of rrp matching in different currencies.
i.e. $99 in states = £99 in uk

Buy 6, sell 5, and end up with one free for yourself 😛

Might be the brake surfaces are worn out? I’ve worn a few out over the years (MTB!) and when it comes to it, done the same as you, looked around for rims that would be better/lighter/stronger/more bling, but then found that the cost of changing increases massively when you have to factor in new spokes (decent spokes are now around the £1 each mark, £3-10 each for aero blades!), so always come to the conclusion that i’ll just replace like for like.

Open pro’s are well reputed road rim, sure there are better, and there are more aero, but at 32h, the differences are really only going to be aesthetics and more side wind failures.

No it’s not, track needs the stickers on expecialy if they’re njs certified rims

NJS is always stamped isn’t it? Never seen an NJS sticker before, and would feel it was a bit suspect no?

yeah fair enough, THOSE are garish as hell.

All mine are older mavic rims (and a synchros which is a bit more labelly) and they only have little labels.

crc have them now!
http://www.chainreactioncycles.com/Models.aspx?ModelID=20615

Cheaper from abroad though

I guess like mountain boots you get different grades of stiffness for different uses too?

Road/Track? Labels off
MTB/anything else? Labels on

That is the rule.