Yeah, that Finish Line Pro-Road looks like a good compromise. Pace Wet seems to get good reviews as well….

Yes, they turned up yesterday – and very nice they are too!! All in original packaging with all the relevant cables/stops/barrel adjusters etc etc. There will be a polished alu or gloss black option on the retail versions – mine are gloss black, which will go nicely with the rest of the kit.

Gotta find some time now to do the last bits of fettling and connect up the hub to the shifter…… having never built an Alfine bike (or used a dynamo front hub) it may take a little longer than I suspect. Prepare for further questions, if the YouTube walk-throughs let me down!!! 😉

I’ve gone 28mm on my commuter and I got Gatorskins as I couldn’t get hold of 4 seasons. Already had a puncture, so thinking I might go Marathons for next winter.

Have switched from Gatorskins to Marathon Plus for this winter….. whilst I’ve not had a puncture yet, they are slower, have much less feel and grip is lower esp. in the wet. Think I’m going to try Durano Plus next time as compromise.

The On-One Pompetamine Alfine 11 Speed is something i would like as a present

Patience….. 😉 My VRS-11 shifters arrived this morning, so I may have it built by the w/e (my understanding of non-turn washers permitting). Colour cordinated white/black/silver…. includes BB7 discs and a dynamo hub running B+M lights. Been a long time coming, but looking forward to the first ride. If I like the Alfine experience, the frame will change to a Van Nic Amazon…..

Now, if you were a commuter in That London’s Famous City of London, you would not be so….

True enough – get a similar effect on the ‘urban half’ of my trip – the half closest to the office is almost pan flat, in open countryside, where the road run generally East/West for 7 miles…. there is no hiding!

f’ing windy – 55 mins into a head wind. Looking forward to the return leg…..

Smidge under 15 miles each way – a bit more on the way home in the summer.

As it’s only just opened, I’m not sure it’ll be quiet though

Yeah – let the hubub die down a bit. Looks nice, but was completely rammed this w/e.

How about either The Wellington or The Inn on the Green, Mueller Road/Horfield common way (avoid quiz night at The Welly to aid your quiet-contemplation-with-book)?

Or any of these in Bristol http://www.thelounges.co.uk/. May be busy at w/e’s and late eve….

In town, I’ve found the The Hole in the Wall to be quite quiet on week nights….

Mister P – I have now seen a photo of my actual shifters in an actual box with actual instructions and everyfink. Went in the post this morning. Crosses fingers…..

I know more than is heathly about the engineering of the Shinkansen wheel bearings and bearing housings…..

though I’m not sure I fancy hub gears for a “fast”, albeit long-distance, road bike. All that weight at the back…meh

Yes, my worry too – on a few v short blasts, can’t say I’m noticing the concentrated weight. Need to wait for the ‘proper’ shifter to arrive to do a like-for-like with my equivalently specced geared bike.

Helmets without TJ?

<….wipes away a tear…> 😉

For Rucksack-age, I find Deuter’s range works for me….

….. how about panniers though, if you’re having back issues?

Come, come…. what price quality?? 😉

Ridiculous as it sounds, it’s floating to the top of my ‘next commuter’ list – testing the water with a Pompetamine/chain drive to see if I like the Alfine and find the right gear ratio, then may swap frames as funds permit…..

Van Nic Amazon…. with Alfine 11 and the belt drive option. Perhaps not super bling, but bomb-proof and about as niche as you’ll get 😀

some people use one of the crank/bb bolts and a big washer to hold the tool on…

Yep, never failed me…..

I shouldn’t have thought so – I run FE jobs on an 8 core 64 bit machine (Windows) and it’ll chug along for days at a time at 90+% CPU load using most of its 64Gb of RAM.

Royal wedding = extra bank holiday. End of.

TINAS – been down the bodge route. Better off starting with an 11 speed Campag unit then bodging a travel adjuster for the cable…. however, given the cost of the original lever, the Versa lever is a damn fine deal and tidier to boot.

Apparently, the seller is ‘having problems’, but I’m now a bit more positive that they’ll turn up within the week – the rest of the bike is done, so the roller-coaster ride of this build is on the up again! 😀

http://www.sussex.com.tw/news.html

Road levers pull less cable – road specific ones are designed to work with cable pull road levers deliver.

EDIT: Similar q here for BB5’s
http://www.singletrackworld.com/forum/topic/bb5-road-and-bb5-normal-what-the-real-world-difference

2 x Hand Grenades on flashing plus 1 x 1/2 Watt on constant. May be overkill, but the side visibility is pretty good.

Interested as well. Full build got a bit of a panning here http://road.cc/content/review/28748-cotic-x-weekday and for commuting the bit about the front mech cable running over the mudguard hole could be a problem

EDIT: Too slow… again!

Are you getting involved with the NCC or SPark?

NCC – maybe, a few irons in the fire to either collaborate, pay for space for client projects…. or maybe even “join the crew” as it were. Peter Chivers, who’s fronting the first phase of NCC, is on the IAB committee, which helps 😉

SPark – one of my commuting routes goes by it, but that’s as far as it goes for the moment…. watching with interest mind.

No, pre ACCIS – though still in composites. I go back in every now and again to see my supervisor/go to conferences/seminars/talk about collaborative research. Also sit on the Industry Advisory Group for the Mech Eng department, so I keep my toe it 😉 Have had a tour of the ACCIS labs as it was being done – looked good even then!!

Could send you the overview anyway – call it interview practise if you like 😉

Out of interest, what was your PhD/who supervised? Did my PhD in Mech Eng department at Bristol, with help from the Aero’s….

One step ahead 😉 Almost all of the undergrads are already signed up to graduate programs…. still waiting to hear on any PhD’s finishing soon…..

@pastcaring – it was aluminium. Chemically dipped – no idea what, told the guy what it was and he said no problem…. and it was indeed no problem.

Kuco its definitely easier to pay somebody but it would cost a lot more. This way I can work around the bearings and hopefully not have to replace them

Really?? Last time I stripped a frame I picked a place out the yellow pages close to work, dropped it off on the way in, picked it up on the way back – £10 cash, and a really good job to boot. Gotta be worth phoning around, Shirley??

There’s 11-spd joint kits on Ebay from the continent (mine should arrive tomorrow – which will mean I’ll actually have two, due to a small “admin” error on my part… :oops:), and shifters…. in fact, I could have had a continental hub, joint kit and shifters delivered to my door for about 20% than I paid for just the hub here in the UK.

Good call – think I’ll just join in the fun ‘over-there’. Ta!

What do you mean by “normal”? Sprinting out of the saddle, puts a lot of torque into the down tube, likewise a lot of compression/bending into the driveside chainstay. Loadings due to impacts/’normal’ offroad…. well, the worlds your oyster – get a data logger and find out!

Might be able to get a number for a guy to give you a second opinion – boss recently had an oil fired boiler commissioned, so could get a number off him…. but he’s out of the office this afternoon. 😕

Can you buy home heating oil in small amounts anywhere?

FTFY

If you do go down the dual ring route, you’ll have a mish mash of shifters for either flat or drop bars as there isn’t a ‘front’ shifter for Alfine…… that might not be the only problem though – are there issues with chain-line etc?

IIRC, historically, US built frames were generally made of 6061 and Far East frames of 7005 simply because that’s what the native aluminium mills made the most of in each region…..

FATBOYSLIM – Why the question?

+1

wwaswas – ok, you have the good grace to stop digging 😉 You’re underlying sentiment may well be correct, but I’m struggling with the pseudo-science of the argument… and here isn’t the place to go through a degree course of material science and solid mechanics to get to the bottom of why.

FWIW, looks to me like a fatigue failure a well. The fact that the OP is a skinny runt (…none taken…) would tend to support fatigue cracking, rather than bending (yielding of the material) from taking a big hit under the backside of someone of larger proportions.

A few lines of history and a couple of pics is far from conclusive either way though, so the pitchfork stays in the barn 😉

…are designed to bend and not snap when they reach their fatigue limit…

I’m trying to get my head round this – are you saying the design fatigue stress of a Thompson post is GREATER than the yield stress?

is it worth a trip to A&E to have it x-rayed?

Hell yes!!! The problem with my first was M’ingTFU, leaving it for a bit, then going for and X-ray, finding a fracture, spending longer in a cast, losing more muscle strength and taking longer to recover. If you have a fracture you need to know about it ASAP – it may determine of the joint needs to be immobilised or not.