Mattocs Pro’s have a really good damper with well tuned adjustments. The controls can be a bit stiff at the extremes of adjustment and watch out for play in the bushings with Manitou forks!

Costume drama Sci-Fi mash up **** yeah!

Frankie and Benny’s are already closing branches aren’t they?

Nice one hope the commercial landlords get scalped, end up with letting voids and have to redevelop the sites at mucho costo.

Utter shit.

^^^Yep sums it up. Expensive but only middle of the road quality and a bit bland. How the **** it lasted so long I don’t know. Went in the Manchester one years ago and that was enough for me to know I’d never go again.

I vote Frankie and Benny’s next! Again bland as **** corporate toss baggery.

I love it when these corporate arseclowns go bust! They treat customers like idiots, their staff like camels and think they can charge top money, whilst only aiming for mediocrity and just about getting away with it.

It’s like when you see “New Recipe” on supermarket food. You know it’s been cost reduced, ingredients swapped, sizes/amounts smaller/lowered and watered down by a team of arseholes, who assume they can blag the thick as **** plebs. I reward them by never buying it again and so far it’s worked, I’ve seen plenty go bust ****-em!

Why no shell suit?

Rename the final descent, the cliff or whatever it’s called the gold run as a tribute to the late great Bob Holness!

Now you put it like that it seems so reasonable, everything’s too cheap you’re so right.

Hopefully they will cover the surrounding area in double yellow lines so the council can get in on the action and swarm the area with parking pataweyo’s. Ratcheting increases every year (no **** it every six months) cos tech businesses are doing it and they are so like innovative and mazing.

I think they should charge per exhalation due to climate crisis and per step for walkers due to erosion, horses free of course the queen and all that!

Let’s not go there with Ebikes, license, per millimetre, bastards.

Jesus **** lizards.

IME most air shocks default tunes don’t work well (wallow and blow through travel) with 4 bar horst link designs (vertical shock next to the seat tube). Even when bike brands claim they are tuned for the design!

It has got better compared to the days when bikes came with Fox RP shocks. They were so soft, you were either always sat in the last third of travel or had to use high pressures and put up with poor small bump compliance. Volume spacers improved things but only came as an unsupported aftermarket option years after they were needed and still didn’t reduce the volume enough to get decent ramp up.

IME they mostly need a medium/medium damping tune in SRAM speak for average male rider weights, volume spacers for large air cans (I ran 3 pos 1 neg in a debonair) or a shock with a low volume positive air chamber.

The rare in the wild, firm tune, LV can for aggressive and heavy riders!

20% pork eh luxury. There’s plenty of horses in that race to trump it!

Will go well with the national loaf, dripping, tripe, spam and corn beef.

The best thing that could happen to Gregg’s is a venture capital take over. Then the quality will go through the roof and everything will be brillianttttttttttttttttttttt.

I regularly switch between the two and for the most part, but not always, play to there strengths rather than there weaknesses.

Quite different beasts I’d say. When going back to a HT the obvious benefits are it feels like an out of the saddle sprinting machine, is a touch lighter, climbs better, pumps & jumps better and is generally more responsive to ride.

However the benefits stop there. As soon as you hit rugged rocky trails, case big jumps, trails with deep holes, ruts, square edges and try to crash through rock gardens/boulder fields at the same speed, the back end bucks like a bronco and you end up flatting in short order. If you are an aggressive rider, you end up needing a high volume DH casing (DD bare minimum) and insert for the rear. Being clipped in helps to stop your feet getting blasted off the pedals and your shins turned to minced meat, but doesn’t stop your ankles being ground to dust!

So in conclusion depends what your bread and butter riding is, how you tackle trails and how you plan on deploying the little scamp.

@ Dez B – Never heard of that Catspiss, Catnip whatever, but can imagine it would make me vom. MTV has been wack for a long time.

It’s funny I can’t stand to be in the same room as one of those generic super hero films or them American sitcoms which are all the same. Yet I can tolerate some of those panel shows which are all the same!

For 2020 I am going to work on being more consistent with my outrage and disdain.

It’s more a case of tradespeople are wise enough to not let these middlemen/parasites get a hold, leech off their incomes and dictate terms like they do in other sectors.

Reds under the bed. They gone get ya money!

Richard Ayoade has done one of them book things on the topic.

That whole bullshit American dream with teenagers living millionaires lifestyle in gigantic beach front houses, driving around in brand new sports cars, like it’s the norm and everyone’s doing it!

Glamorising/idolising/bigging up all parts of the legal profession (even the most tedious parts), police, state surveillance and secret services. The **** DA’s office!

Very few bald, fat, ugly (except when mocking or documentary) people in lead roles.

Baddies dressed in black/black leather/rubber usually Russian or Chinese.

Just in case you didn’t grasp the nerd is a nerd, glasses and bucked teeth. Or poor black, Mexican or losers.

Dealing with real life issues/mundanity via non-threatening cartoon animation.

Since when did all heroes have an office, admin team and corporate presence?!?!

There’s a message what could it be!

Not bad I’d say a bit better than a Charge Spoon but nothing exceptional. Average sort of padding thickness, if you’re looking for something super plush, look elsewhere!

That’s deep man!

Hahaha yeah I saw that picture and thought the same.

Had an old Trek Fuel with scruffy uneven welds (no holes though) it got jumped plenty and didn’t fall apart!

I wouldn’t accept a new bike like that, especially at the prices Orange charge!

Had two Monarch RT3’s do the same thing. Another load of badly designed junk SRAM should not have unleashed on the market!

Plug-ins are so good now that’s all I use.

Really like what this guy does.

Great race and poetic finish to the season.

Murica delivers **** yeah USA! Snowshoe (even though it’s not the steepest) and Northstar were arguably the best tracks of the WCDH and EWS this year IMO.

They were only ever a middling brand reliability wise with some decentish boilers and some built to a budget.

Potterton, Main and Baxi were part of the same group and many of the boilers were shared across the brands! The older condensing combi boilers with diverter valves have all the maintenance issues associated with that type of valve i.e. they need the HW diaphragm replacing regularly and eventually all the internals of the valve become worn/stiff, the seals leak (can be replaced cheaply if you know what you are doing) and don’t function smoothly. Often when working on these boilers, they were susceptible to leaking in other areas, because of the push fit o-ring seals on many of the fittings, which are easily disturbed even by the most surgical engineers!

Many of the components are from well known names in the industry Grundfos pumps, Honeywell components, that Italian expansion vessel maker etc and are relatively easy to get hold of.

Doing a job two people used to do, imposed employment contract changes, little to no security, shite pension/reduced perks and expected to work longer hours. Imported American workplace ideals, less holidays, restrictive and repressive rules the government wouldn’t get away with. The threat of being replaced by contractors, if not already a contracted employee. So the contractors parasitical admin team can pat each other on the back, earn a decent living at the rest of the workforce’s expense and allow employers to dump liabilities.

The trick is to do nothing about it, retire early, act like you know nothing to those stuck with it.

It’s standard now-a-days, just keep screaming at each other out of your car’s window, have a break down or GTFO. Besides there’s always new camels!

There’s nothing more British than looking down scornfully on others. It’s what get’s people up in the morning! The levels of petty snobbery have got to be unmatched by any other nation on this planet.

The inciters/shit stirrers, shills and opportunists should be the ones under the most extreme scrutiny.

+1 ODI Elite Pro although they’re expensive for what they are.

Made the mistake of buying thin Deathgrips which spoilt what is a good feeling grip.

If your’re more budget conscious/won’t pay big brand inflated prices, Token and Funn do some perfectly adequate lock-ons for about 8-10 quid.

These parking rackets take the absolute piss and make people fight and behave like arseholes, who knew!

keep fighting each other boys and girls.

Nope not for the foreseeable future. Expanded 1×10 and 11 speed are pretty good for me. I reckon expanded 1×10 is the budget/functionality sweet spot ATM.

Always thought expanded 1×9 is ideally suited to kids/budget bikes and should have been an easy widely available option years ago!

Instead we have been drip fed stuff that has been held back by the big two, so they can pimp “premium” new stuff with gold chains all the time.

A contributory factor has got to be that people are running/bikes specced with thicker carcass tyres actually suited to mountain biking and not trying to get away with lightweight paper thin shitters. Which many brands used to pimp as premium products and spec on bikes so the headline weights were lower!

I remember a while back, before the Enduro moniker was attached to everything, I could buy thicker carcuss tyres for peanuts. They were often sold as “training tyres” sort of ugly sisters in the range, how times have changed!

No more do we have riders coming on to the forum up in arms about how their, 120 tpi single ply toilet paper tyres, puncture all the **** time when there’s a whiff of rock in the air!

You’ve had some good advice here. Especially breaking it up and sessioning. Don’t go steaming into complicated technical trails where you have to use all the bike handling skills at once, it can be brain overload til you get used to it!

I find if I don’t constantly ride steep trails I almost forget how to do it. I revert back to hovering over the back wheel and hammering the brakes, which puts you in the passenger position with hardly any steering control and will lead to a crash, as well as being really slow.

Treat the arse over the back wheel as a temporary position, only adopted briefly for negotiating obstacles, where keeping the front wheel light so it doesn’t hang up is priority number one!

A good old British summer.

I’ve had this with Maxxis, Bontrager and one Onza tyre mounted with a uniform bead line but with big deflections.

Another load of shite QC we have to endure. Honestly I think MTB products are worse then electronics for snide cost cutting, piss poor QC, stuff designed to fail just outside the warranty and the shady practice of dumping known faulty shit on to the market via discount retailers!

Was over Whitehough, Chinley way yesterday, plenty of beer there.

Road closures have certainly helped get rid of the long queues up High Lane down to Hazel Grove caused by the new bypass, alas it will soon be back to the new normal!

You can still access a lot of the surrounding area through Goyt Valley and Long Lane AFAIK.

Stiffen your suspension up (add some air and/or compression damping) and pump your tyres up harder than usual! There’s nothing sharp to puncture on.

It’s like a giant set of pump tracks. All man made, smooth berms, jumps of all types for all skill levels, a few drops (one pretty big one and couple of crazier unofficial lines). Most of the jumps are tables and easily rollable. Where there’s doubles, triples, gaps and the like it’s optional with easier lines!

Don’t miss the BMX track, main jump line, bridge jump line (the biggest jumps and hips there which are full on), the easier longer one next to it and obviously the fun to session woods stuff! There’s even a few cheeky steep booters hidden off the woods trails, which are part of the original trails before it was an official spot. keep your eye out for the short cut to loop back the best bit of the woods trails about 3/4 of the way round before the quarry drops section!

If the back end is welded on straight (had 3 mk2 27.5 frames all welded together out of wack) then pretty decent. The welds themselves were neat and well done, the frame looked good, rode well with decent geometry. I gave up after the third frame as they were all the same, so can only assume it was an entire batch/year/design feature! 😀

Unless they have improved of late, If you’re used to tough paint finishes like you get from the big established brands, these are not as durable. Was as if the clear coat hadn’t been baked properly and was soft.

Hopefully Boris will sort the things people really care about.

– 0% income tax and business rates for anyone earning over 40,000 per annum
– Public grants for purchasing and refurbishing BTL properties
– Priority parking for SUV’s at Waitrose and other premium retailers
– Higher speed limits, **** it unlimited, for German cars under 2 years old
– The end of pothole hell, nice smooth ride for the Rangey when going back and forth to the village wine bars
– Vehicles worth under 25k banned from the roads
– Cheap and grateful imported nannies/servants from Montserrat, to be housed in HMO’s in the most deprived areas. A benevolent and wonderful opportunity to lift them out of poverty
– Compulsory unpaid internships for all young people/scum making gourmet food at village restaurants and gastro pubs
– BTL tenants to be evicted on whim, subject to birching, called “peasants” and required to undertake compulsory work repairing potholes, litter picking, maintenance of grounds and public spaces.

Those water cannons could yet prove to be a bit of genius foresight!

Always used the uplift. It’s a mountain biking theme park to me (so much fun as long as you don’t spanner yourself) and treat, once maybe twice a year. I like the luxury of being bounced around in an old tranny, soaking up the drivers distinct music preferences! Jeezuz you wouldn’t buy one those secondhand would ya?

It was packed when I went. Occasional long queues and a bit of waiting around while loading up, not much though. It’s not the quickest uplift that’s for sure. Looks as though they aren’t ignoring the problem, there was some pretty big excavations going on!

Dez is your lad a keen jumper? If so he’ll be in his element. The jumps (on the reds) are a fair bit bigger, with steeper take-offs than they used to be and all the better for it IMO. I can imagine the +reds could be a bit much for beginners.

Good god man are you sure you want to see a slew of Thai ladyboys massaging fat white men. Or prostitutes from war torn countries doing unspeakable acts?

The ban hammer will burn bright.

besides which the donkey would probably require it’s own seat on the plane for the return journey

Of course your emotional support animal. Worth every penny, much more willing and grateful than entitled British donkeys.