TJ – I agree, but the pictures of his 'co operation' means the builder's making things worse (certainly aesthetically, if not structurally). Even if it is water-tight, which is sounds like it's not, you'd have to look at that gopping bead of sealant everyday and think that, however many thousands of pounds spent, it's all been let down by his 'fix'.

Surely if the builder has stated he's only coming round once more (regardless of whether the problem is fixed or not on this final visit by the sounds of it) surely there is very little option left for M_F?

Without rehashing a load of recent threads (and defo not trolling – it's a genuine question – I really dont know the answer as the build will consist of a proportion of services, as well as items purchased by the builder/sold to M_F as part fo the build)….

M_F has been sold a window…. after a year water is leaking in…. this seems an unreasonable period in which this should happen…. Sale of Good act? Does this not apply? The builder has had a chance to repair/replace – surely M_F is within his rights to demand compensation to the value of the windows at least? He 'bought the item', had it for a year, but it's now developed a fault which must have been there at the time of 'manufacture' as the builder has come back to try and rectify it.

Confused and waiting to be shown the light :-S

I've used MET for years, probably more out habit than anything else. Have used the crash replacement program through Fisher's once and the whole process was as quick and straight forward as it could be. Think it was 50% discount on a replacement, but it was a while ago now…..

VPN client and remote desktop…. as I'm doing right now?

I thought if you used the 'post office finder' tool on the website (in top right hand corner IIRC) it tells you the opening times of that branch, including if they are closed for lunch etc?

If you don't want it to drag on, then do as doc_blues suggests. I have a work colleague who is doing a similar thing with a double glazing company at the moment. I would tell your builder in advance (in writing) what your intended course of action will be, including that you will recoup your additional costs through small claims court, giving him a date by which he has the chance to make good before you get someone else in. If you can provide an estimate of the remedial work you will have done and what work is required, so much the better.

Edit: Lowey has faster fingers ;-)

As uplink – I use the Castrol Red rubber grease. A pot so big that the remainder will have to buried with me at the rate I use it was had for about a fiver online.

rightplacerighttime – Yeah, it seems a pretty rare thing – I believe it started a 'commoners rights' which all but went out of use, but now carries on under a conservation banner that gives the local a supply of wood that would, otherwise just be burnt on-site (case in point – last years coop contained a lot of large poplars, 50yo+. Looked into selling them as they seemed too nice to burn. As it's not a commercial timber tree typical price per felled tree was 40p, so on the fire they went!). Even so, there is quite a lot of H+S/insurance etc to sort out before we're let loose and there are quite a few meetings to go to so everyone knows the management plan for the areas to be coppiced, is clear which 'standard' trees are to be maintained, which trees are to be removed completely (usually the non-natives to this woodland) and which are to be left as maiden's to be coppiced.

Having been doing it for a few years now, I've asked around my more immediate conservation groups if they'd like to set up something similar but either they don't have the area of woodland to make it sustainable on a reasonably long term basis or they go a whiter-shade-of-pale at the thought of 'the public' being let loose in a wood with a chainsaw into which other people might wander.

Replacing the seal and greasing the piston will prob cure your sticking piston. With the bore cap tool it's a piece of p!ss – plus a couple of quid for the seals and however much the rubber grease is. As for the spongy lever – dunno…..

Terry's is the shop most local to my office – as above, I have found their service/knowledge/willingness to help to be fantastic. Prices for consumables and kit is generally expensive though – don't know about complete bike prices. Believe they are a Marin/Whyte dealer, as are Bike UK on the Triangle (IIRC).

Do you have a brand in mind – Mud Dock do Trek, Specialised shop at the bottom of Park Street, Giant shop over in Sadly Broke etc

Yeah, we were clearing the felled logs with a couple of LWB Landy's with offroad trailers but it was taking foorrreevvveeeerrrrr (it's about 3 miles from the wood to my boss house where we process it and it's about 15 miles then to my place).

Now with the 'proper' kit and three of us, we can fell and stack the wood in our (prob about 1/2 acre?) coop in a couple of days and transport 20 tonnes of wood in 4 trailer loads – so a late summers evenings work ;-) Plus, I don't have to do trips back and forth to collect the split logs in the car – one trailer load of logs tipped outside my door is now enough for a year…. stackign it anothe rmatter entirely!

One of the groups in the coop next us was using a grain trailer and front loader on their tractor and that made the loading and transport task a one man job in a couple of trips. An investment for the future……

I was afraid someone would ask that ;-)

There is a large conservation wood land near me (well, it actually near my boss who is leader of our team of three) where as part of the conservation work a lagrish area is set aside each winter for local people to coppice. There must be 15-20 coppicing groups who get an area set aside each winter to work – in a good year each area yields about 15 tonnes of beech, poplar, ash and oak. I believe it is the only such scheme in the country – we had a guy doing a PhD in land management and particulalry coppicing and he said he's certainly never heard of such a large scale scheme where members of the public get to work, effectively, private land. The leader of each coppicing team has to do some H+S training, egt insurance and whoever is fellign needs a chainsaw ticket, but other than that the only bit of burocracy (sp) you see is the need for a rick assessment at the start of each days felling.

It started out as a bit of a hobby, but in order that the felling and transport of the wood doesn't take an age, between us we have a 4wd tractor and trailer, PTO driven saw bench and a large selection of chainsaws…. next year we may be looking at a hydraulic splitter to attach to the tractor (its really all about the toys ;-)

Apaprt from getting a virtuely limitless supply of 'free' fuel ( the areas to be worked have already been set aside for the next 15 years!) it's incredibly good fun and hugely satisfying to go back to areas that have been previously managed and see what's happened.

Woffle/Drac – I had to tell my insurer that I had the stove installed and they wanted to see the HETAS stamped certificate. Beyond that no real issues, but I can't comment on if it was done DIY/builder.

If you go down the HETAS route, they are 'qualified' to make installation decisions beyond building regs – due to space in the chimney they fitted a 5" flue to my stove, even though, as Woffle says, the requirement is 6". Also the stove is also a little closer to the chimney in the hearth than 'allowed' by building regs, but again, bypassed and signed off without the need for a PCO to visit and inspect.

One electric drill, one looong drill bit and a very steady hand…. problem solved.

HTH

He really wanted an Mx-er, didn't he, but couldn't afford an engine….. ;-)

Crankboy makes a good point about smoke control zones – have a look here (http://www.uksmokecontrolareas.co.uk/). If you are in a smoke control area and/or want more contemporary styling have a look at the Euroheat Harmony range (the Harmony 13 in either wood or multifuel is of an equivalent power I think). You'll be paying about 20-25% more compared to the Squirrel, but you can fit a remote control to the air control valve for armchair control….. what's not to like!!! ;-)

As others have said – hands and feet generally with addition messages to says if bridging/smearing/features are allowed or not at that grade.

Also be aware that – generally – if you doing the top-roped routes the grading can be a little all-over-the-shop as the route setters put less effort into these compared to the longer lead routes. So, you find you struggle on a 5b, but clean a 6a easily. Certainly the case as my local wall.

Cut down the woods and stored outside in cords for about a year, brought home and cut/split and stacked outside under a tarp for another year then as the winters stock is used up this gets moved into the wood sheds adjacent to the house and a further covered store some way off in case we run low (so stored properly covered for another year before burning).

Can accomidate about 20 m^3 in fully covered storage… though this is nothing compared to my boss who I'm in our wood 'syndicate' with who has a covered store roughly equivalent in volume to the downstairs of a typical 3-bed-semi…. he takes it more seriously than me though ;-)

As Drac says, they do.

It depends what you burn, but for wood it tends not to be the soot that is the problem in chimney fires but the creosotes that deposit and then ignite when they build up, throttling the flow of gases up the chimney (I too am not entirely clear if it is the flue gas temp that ignotes the creosotes or unburnt embers drifting upwards….).

I think this tends to happen, for wood, when it's too wet to burn efficiently, so all the volatiles aren't burn in the stove and so go up in chimney and condense if the chimney temp isn't high enough (you can see that this is a vicious cycle as if you don't get enough heat for complete combustion in the stove, it is unlikely that there will be much heat in the chimney).

With an insulated steel liner you have a double benefit that it heats up quickly (being metal and insulated) and the liner area is lower than for the chimney itself so the flue gas velocity is higher, all giving less chance of deposit condensation.

I cut/process/season all my own wood and run the stove pretty much non-stop all winter. Uget about an eggcup's worth of ash from the liner when it's cleaned.

Even if it's spotless, they'll disinfect it for you on arrival. Budget this into how long you'll end up hanging around the airport. Can take a while if it's busy. The dirtier it is, the more arsey the staff will be and the longer it takes. My walking boots were, apparently, filthy….. ;-)

I believe the theory goes that in a stove, 80% of the heat goes into the room and 20% up the chimney. For an open fire it's the other way around, so if you run a stove stright into an open chimney it doesn't get the chimney hot enough to encourage thermal draw…. plus as the exit gases from a stove and chimney walls are at a lower temperature the creosotes in the gases tend to condense more readily leading to more cleaning and high chance of chimney fires etc if you run the stove straight into a chimney.

Yes, always seesm to be NDS.

In most industrial applications, the grease is considered part of the sealing system and is supplied as part of the bearing kit (races, rollers and SPECIFIC amount of grease to be added during assembly come in the box.) As it is accepted that even 'sealed' bearings aren't perfect, as part of the maintenance procedure, the grease is flushed taking away the bits of carp that have passed the seals and been contained by the grease, the parts checks are checks and the bearing repacked.

As CK has said, you don't want too much grease or you get skidding, equally you don't want too little in high load applications as this can lead to micro-welding of the rolling elements to the race and pitting of the race/rollers (this is probably unlikely in most biking applications – a bigger problem will be impact loading of the roller on the race surface at low rotating speeds).

As others have stated, the average hub cartridge bearing are stock parts designed for 'average' conditions (high speed, low load, benign environmental conditions) and given the relatively low speed and wet conditions on a bike, adding more/extra grease and flushing it every now and again is PROBABLY better.

This are the musings of a bearing application engineer client of mine, whilst drinking several beers in a German hotel a couple of years ago – take or leave it, but it works for me ;-)

Do you mean duathlon? Biathlon invloves target practise as well, no? ;-)

I THINK there used to be one at Longleat but it'll be in the summer and I've not heard abotu for a while…..

I don't think that's true – I thought things were meant to last what a reasonable person would consider a reasonable amount of time. Can be up to 6 years or so.

I can't say if it's true or not either, but the length of the warranty is a factor when I buy things like white goods. The length of the warranty must be determined on the point at which the cost of repairing in-the-field units is eating into the profit of each unit sale – which is done by the manufacturer and is therefore biased towards them.

Clearly a reasonable service life to the company is a small as it possibly can be so they can sell more product (accepting it has to last 'some time' so people think it's worth buying again). To the consumer, we want stuff to go on working forever and pay nowt for it…. so the definition of 'reasonable' is about as subjective as it could possibly be.

I'd give LG a ring first and see what they say.

As an example I bought a quite expensive oven on which the oven glass shattered a little while ago. I knew the warrenty was for a year and that it was getting on for two years old. Phoned up the customer services desk without expectation, looking for the price if a new glass. Within the week they'd sent a man round who fitted the new glass all for nowt. Saved the best part of £100. Similar story with another company when the washing machine went on the blink a few weeks ago.

Edit: MMW wins fastest finger first ;-)

longer than 18 months

So you say, but if the manufacturers warrenty is only for (for example) a year, surely they are certifying that, based on their design parameters for the product, they believe that it should operate, without fault for at least a year – if not then they'll repair/replace as approriate.

If it breaks after a year, well, you knew what the manufacturers warrenty was and should have factored that into the buying decision. As m_f says, if it's got a long warrenty that says something about the design/build quality and after service you may expect.

In answer to the OP, prob best to find out what the LG warrenty is and try to work inside that…. after that, you're probably into good will/repairs at cost/if the retailer (then manufactuer) is in a good mood and wants to help.

5' 10", 172.5 on the road bikes and 175 on the MTB's

I can defo tell the difference, but I think some of that is the crank length and some will be the Q factor. As I do 90% of riding on the road it takes a few miles to get use to spinning on an MTB again. Change is good though ;-)

CD-in-the-microwave was a favourite post-pub game at University :-)

Been hoovering up ashes from a fire? My boss admitted to 'tidying up' at home one day, which involved hoovering the living room. The benign cinders next to his wood burner looked ripe for removal….. except the sudden rush of high velocity air over the still-smouldering lumps of wood, once they were sucked up, caused a firework display inside his Dyson the likes of which I doubt he'd seen before. Going into 'WTF DO I DO NOW?!?!?' mode, he didn't turn it off, but ran round like a headless chicken until there was sufficent heat to melt the plastic of the collection tube, reducing the oxygen supply to his tiny towering inferno.

Stay safe out there kids ;-)

Going slightly off-topic, but I'm looking into childcare vouchers as BB Jr has just started nursery and Mrs BB has gone back to work P/T. I phoned the tax credit folk who, despite being as helpful as they can given the whole tax credit system isabout as complicated as it can possibly be, said that if I did use childcare vouchers they'd need to see a whole hill of documentation to further ammend our tax credit claim.

As the benefit of the tax credit is likely to amount to f'all now Mrs BB is back at work and our combined income is write on the borderline, am I right in thinking that the childcare voucher is going to give me far more benefit than the, er, benefit from the tax credit system?

+3 for Photobox

I have the same injury in the same place (and chipped bone as MrMW).

Must be nearly 3 years down the line now and it is generally fine (range of motion is as good as it was before….. but I did dislocate the same – left – elbow about 3 years before fracturing it. The orhtopaedic specialist has expressed, in no uncertain terms, that I should not see him again with an injury to my left elbow!!!), but get twinges every now and again and there are certain positions of the arm where I know I won't have as much power as the right. Press-up are one of those, but it is slowly geting better. I found gaining confidence in the range of motion was as important as the fracture healing before moving on and looking to strengthen the muscles around the joint. Take it steady though and it'll be ok in time.

> Bitty ?

In the context of the discussion that could be considered borderline inappropriate….

….. but I have just spat tea at the screeen and am being looked at strangely for laughing at my computer – chapeau.

Not enough profit, by a long shot, surely, for the business to be sustainable in the long term. The amount of money that needs to be put into the pension pot is incompatible with the money needed to invest in the long term future of the business, versus the profit it can reasonably generate in it current form. I have no numbers to go with this, but my understanding fromt he media reports is the pesnion black hole is such a millstone that no private company will be interested in wholly buying RM unless the goverment addresses this in cold, hard cash – which is seems unwilling to do.

Yes, it does, but if you find those terms unacceptable and terms that you would find acceptable means the company folds then you're looking for new job either way.

> And if you were in a position to prevent that happening, what would you do?

As an employee, you are in a position to prevent it happening – just leave. You don't need a Union to decide, based on you personal circumstances, whether the choice/new T's&C's you're being offered is acceptable to you.

The bottom line is I just want someone to deliver my post – I don't care who it is and how they do it. In fact, I don't really give a flying f'ck if there is a postal service or not – I just want to know that if I put a letter in a post box it'll get delivered in a few days. If TNT/Fedex/anybody wants to make a business of doing it, then good luck them. If they have to put prices up to do it then I'll make a decision on whether that rate is acceptable and either use it or not and the business will sink or swim on its own feet.

Either RM stands on it's own feet as a private company, or it's a a prtected public service and the workforce is prevented from striking, but the half baked pile of sh!te that it is at the moment is a national embarrassment.

Struggled with a small hatch for a while after the baby was born – eventually bought an 06 Focus Estate and the whole job has become so much easier. Mate with two kids tested a C-Max against Focus estate and decided (pretty much the same as we did) the Focus was better for when they were younger with prams and wot-not and C-max would be better when a bit older and didn't need to lug quite so much stuff around whilst doing it all one handed and in a hurry.

Mate just bought a Mazda (6 I think) estate as their first baby car, which is cavernous and well speced, but a bit too big for my tastes around town.

As a father with a newborn, you won't need to worry about its bike carrying capacity for a while ;-)

As others have said, I'd be doing the NZ thing without a second thought if I was in your position