Truing will alleviate the symptoms, but is it the rim off centre to the hub or the frame/dropouts itself misaligned?

Try putting the wheels into the frame/fork the other way around and see if the offset swaps to the other side of the bike – if it stays the same then wheel itself is centred on the hub and it’s the frame/drop-out that is misaligned.

Di2 Ultegra on merlin is £999

<Being Lazy>

Is that for a complete group or just electronic bits to ‘upgrade’ an existing cable-activated bike? Was going to wait for a 105 version and check the harness standard was now fixed, but……..

</Being Lazy>

Splitting maul…. pick a coolish day…… fill yer boots. Warning – can be slightly addictive!

If your wood is anything but straight grain/free splitting then you’ll need something more substantial and expensive than the basic 4 tonne electro-hydaurlic jobs from Machine Mart and alike.

So I’m getting more inches and with the massive tailwind it’s easier to turn the cranks

FTFY 😉

To go at the same speed with a higher ratio you must have been turning the cranks slower….. if that feels easier/fits your natural cadence better, then great, but you’re not getting something for nothing.

I think it depends – last time I wanted a full 5700 group, minus the brakes and it was cheaper to get a full group and sell on the calipers….. time before that I just wanted some transmission parts (minus cranks) and it worked out marginally cheaper to shop around for the parts than buy a group and split (including the hastle).

Rose are pretty cheap if they have all the cassette/rings/crank options you want, and I see Ribble are still doing 25% off groupsets at the mo.

You can get a Stonglight 38T for around a tenner. My latest geared commuter is running 50/38 compact with 12-25 cassette and it’s pretty much spot-on. I spent ages experimenting with 52/38 standard and tried the usual 50/34 compact etc etc, but the bigger inner ring on the compact helps reduce the gaps and the lower BCD gives massive scope for changing both ring sizes over a (relatively, compared to standard) huge range.

OP you may like to enlist the help of your local Parish Council, whilst not a planning authority in their own right – they can be a bloody nuisance when mobilised

FTFY 😉

Greeble’s route does cut out the Cumberland Basin and a load of traffic lights and one-way sections….

M5 – A4 or A369 (either side of the river, both have bottle-necks) – A370 or A38 (either side of the airport, both have bottle-necks)

My pref would be M5 – A4 – A38.

As soon as you use bevel drives to turn the drive direction (two off on a standard safety push bike) you start to incur mechanical losses. Don’t have any figures to quote for efficiency though.

http://www.roymech.co.uk/Useful_Tables/Drive/Gear_Efficiency.html

A sample of 1, but this suggests otherwise. I’d like to think the bigger losses would be in whatever gearbox is used to give a usable range, not in the bevel gear drive itself (assuming the bearing supports for the shafts are stiff enough so the gears don’t skew at the meshing point as the torques will be pretty high of the gear size).

What would the A432 from Chipping Sodbury be like bikey-commute wise?

Not too bad, quite wide, 30 mph limit through Coalpit Heath and cyle lanes for most for most of the rest of it though. Do watch out for the staggered 4-cross-way by the Kendleshire golf course – real accident blackspot. Only been hit from behind by an HGV once there in 10+years, but once is enough! 😉

I go round the ring road cycle path from UWE, then the A432 from the Willy Wicket roundabout out to Yate as the Eastern half of my commute. The cycle path is pretty good – a few pinch points, and can get very busy with bikes, pedestrians and the occasional horse, but OK.

I would echo comments about Westerleigh Rd + A46….. in fact a lot of the roads further out can be narrow and pretty quick in a car, so choose your route well…..

Thanks gents – in the meantime, I’ve discovered what looks like the right parts/kits on Ebay. If this falls through I will follow up on your suggestions.

Thanks again.

My GUESS is that using the combi will be more cost effective, but whatever it is, the difference will be in the rounding of the overall household consumption (unless you use it for hours at a time each day)

Cost overall….. not sure. However, having done something similar (well, identical except it was a Mira 10kW electric that came out), the difference is huge. Won’t being going back to electric unless I have to.

I’m by no means big, but I wouldn’t describe a Pompetamine as “noodly” – anything but infact, to the point of feeling dead. This is fine at 6:30 in the morning when you just want a tank to steam-roller through everything on the way to work but it really is the most lumpen and uninspiring bike I’ve ever had – I have a very ‘love-hate’ relationship with it…..

Pick the right cog sizes and you can run a vertical dropout frame without a tensioner. It’s not hard and any LBS shoul be able to do that.

Taking that a step further (and because it going to cost a bomb anyway), my thinking is to go vertical drop out and EBB if I go custom, so I can just swing the rear wheel in and out without having to retention the chain in the event of a rear flat.

So, if a Pompetamine was made in Alu/carbon that would be just right i reckon.
Any suggestions, as i dont seem to be able to find anything that fits this bill.

If you find it, let me know – considering going custon alu or titanium to get a lighter equiv. to my Pometamine frame, with the geometry slightly tweaked.

Too far for everyday +1. Everyone’s different, but 15 miles each way every day is enough for me without being completely burnt out by the weekend.

There was a bridleway I used to ride along where, on one of the adjacent gates, ‘Please shut the gate’ had been ammended and scratched to ‘Please sh!t the cat’. Mindless and meaningless in equal measure, but it does still make me laugh….

Marathon Plus? Add a separate polyprop breaker strip inside and/or slime the tubes if it is to be truly ‘must not fail’.

delux +1 – just do it per the instructions and it works, with a bit of fine tuning on the barrel adjuster.

Anyways – some Missing Links ordered, so thanks all.

I would like a Link to make taking the chain on and off for cleaining easier…. and it seems like there is a solution for that.

I would have put up with a lock, rather than using the joining pins ‘routinely’, as it seems like a better solution if I was going to have to split the chain as (IIRC) the pins plastically deform the plates, hence it’s not a good idea to break/rejoin the chain at the same location.

If I’m ‘out in the field’ I tend to carry spare power links, rather than pins as it’s less hastle to push out the duff links with a chain tool and then put the chain back together in a matter of seconds with a spare power link.

iainc – You’re getting the idea! 🙂

Before for me, then caffine til lunch. Tried waiting til I got here but ended up being ravenous all day.

NB: I accept that this goes against the percieved wisdom.

Pompetamine here to. I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with it. Love the fact I built it to be robust and dependable and it is that, has survived all winter with limited TLC and hasn’t even complained with a puncture, plus it’s relatively cheap. I hate the fact it feels dead and draggy to ride and seems to suck energy from me with every pedal stroke. Can’t wait til I don’t need the lights anymore and can jump back on my geared commuter.

Might give Alfine Di2 a go on it though when it comes out….. like I said – love/hate relationship 😉

dhb +whatever. Have 3 pairs that I use for commuting everyday and wear them at least 6 months of the year. Oldest pair is over 4 years old now and good as new. My backside prefers the older red pad over the new grey one, but other than that they are tops.

Well, this didn’t go the way I was expecting…. but I like it! 😉

bristolbiker is scaremongering with his 15m3 figure!

<…bloody work getting in the way of forum time….>

To qualify – that was last winter, which was a lot colder than this year – this year, looks like we’re going to come in at around 8 m^3 used. Our wood source is free, and essentially limitless, bar about 5 days work each year to fell, split and stack, so we don’t rein-in the fuel use over the winter – and will quite often have chimnea patio heaters on in the summer (that really does go through wood….. ) as well as occasion evening burns through late spring/early autumn which all comes out of the wood stores. This summers project to to build wood store No 3 to add another 4-ish m^3 capacity…..

TBH, I havent properly costed the 15m3 of wood.. Im guessing I wont like the net result

No, no you won’t….. That was for someone in the house all day for most of the winter – I think the central heating came on for a couple of hours overnight when it was really cold, but that was it – gas bill less than ~£12 per month over the year for a 3-bed-semi.

If you just light up in the evening, then you’ll use a lot less, but the costs of wood will still be…. um…. 😉

so where do I stand walking into my local woodland and nabbing fallen wood?

A no-no all ends up, unless you have the owners permission and you are not compromising the ecology plan for the woodland (fallen wood is very important). Even so, the amount you can carry out is going to amount to a short evenings burning (even if it’s not partially rotten anyway, in which case it’ll go up like cotton-wool).

Out 5kW stove, in all the time from ~October to about now, used over 15m^3 of dry wood last winter when it was cold – about 8 or 10m^3 this year.

TBH, if you haven’t sorted out your supply, or accept you’ll have to pay the going rate (i.e. – pricey) then I wouldn’t bother – it will definitely not be cast-neutral and may approach ‘folly’ status (but is the best thing in our house when going) 😉

Pah – do it properly. Hired one of these Hilti jobs the other day

Wish I had the need/money to get one – proper man-toy.

Solidworks maybe? Think it’s currently ~£1500 a year, depending on your support package. Seem to recall there were lots of archives of pre-built architectural features to add to your models off the 3ds portal *

* – you may want to investigate this/maybe bollx now – we’ve not been covered by support for a couple of years, since the move to the big, corporate, 3ds-land!!!!

I’m not even going to talk about The Darkness

Not sure about Justin’s new look, but they were rather good on the comeback tour late last year….. part of me still thinks he should have carried on with Hot Leg….. awaits new album with interest before passing final judgement.

On the plus side, I hear Ugly Kid Joe are working on an EP as a prequel to a full return, which I am actually looking forward to…..

Showing my age a bit there…… 😉

I never find that a loaf lasts more than 2 days, because I have eaten it.

Tick

Have you got a decent, sealed breadbin to keep the air from it?

Tick

I also add a touch more water than the basic recipe suggests, because that’s the way I like it, but it also seems to stay nom-able for (a little) longer.

Have a trawl through the pics on here http://gearmechhanger.com/ (and other sites like it) to see if you can identify the hanger/frame then either buy one of theirs or work back to a (probably/maybe) cheaper OEM equivalent?

In the early days, I got a frame/fork/headset through work/Cyclescheme. I raised an eyebrow at the time, but employer/Cyclescheme/bikeshop didn’t so I just got on with it 😉 Don’t think you’d get away with it now through one of the one-stop-shop schemes unless you had an internal scheme….. and a friendly one at that!

Well here’s the thing. Back in’t day cheap china was brittle and needed milk first to stay intact

Indeed, but that was in time way before teabags – the tea would be first brewed in a pot, so all of the above correct answers stand and the space-time continuum has not been broken……