Mmm I’m currently building an evo. I used to hate carbon. I think it’s progressed. I’m now broke. Enjoy!

“pretty hard” I’d say. More so if you’ve a decent amount of muscle strength to back up the bones. I’ve shoulder-barged (and lost, spectacularly) trees at 30mph and not broken my collar bone.

Having said that, I went over the bars on a flat, muddy section at 10mph 6 months ago and ended up with a ruptured disc and cauda equina syndrome requiring emergency surgery to get feeling back in my legs.

From this I take that injury is more down to bad luck and how you fall, rather than what you’re doing, generally!

As much as physics says front up, push forward and the rear will just follow up and over, it stays firmly glued to the ground

Yeah I don’t believe that version of physics. You still need to unweight the rear and help it up, or you just push the front back down. I feel that’s just evidence of the poor descriptive/teaching methods employed by folk who can do it by feel.

It is awesome for clearing path-crossing water (watch out for square edge drainage snake-biting you), giving your arms a rest when on washboard nonsense, stuff like that.

Yeah 1×11 really isn’t suited to extremes of any angle – I’ve just changed to it because most of my riding is “inbetweeny” but if I had lots of uphill or downhill I’d not be going there.

Manualling for about 3 seconds is actually a pretty long time when you think about it. I love a nice short-chainstay frame because it makes manuals super-easy.

Watch any section of this for 3 seconds and see how far he goes!

Gunk green engine degreaser.

I use mine in a jam jar with shaking but expect it’ll be just as good in a chain cleaner.

Word of warning with this. IT says on the tin “do not use on hot surfaces” and not to get it on skin or in eyes. REALLY DON’T. I used a diluted quantity (about 10:1) in a warm water bath (40C) to clean a REALLY greasy engine part (as I’ve always done with the red stuff, which tells you to heat it, but I decided to try being “green”). Breathed in the fumes by accident (well ventilated area but took the lid off and got a waft in the face as I breathed in) – 24 hours in hospital, chest X-rays, blood tests, heart monitoring being watched for CO poisoning and lung disintegration. Not fun stuff, take care out there and obey the instructions!

Sad news. I didn’t agree with much he wrote and a few times was driven to distraction trying to (genuinely, not maliciously) point out some of the issues with his logic. Eventually I realised it was pointless and left him to his own thoughts. He seemed a nice chap though, and no more eccentric than 50% of the people I call good friends, but over the internet arguments can become heated and personal easily.

Yeah they’re cutting a lot of the research funding into the more unusual concepts up here, last engineer I spoke to about it said they’d been laid off and there were no more jobs in the field anywhere in Scotland. Seem offshore wind is being selected as the primary way forward. Nuclear decommissioning seems to be doing well.

Every band I’ve ever seen live has sucked except the verve. I’ve stopped going to live events because they’re always guff in comparison and I have the same “over it” response.

Except being well groomed for important events is pretty indicative of a number of key traits. Having spent a decade or more in universities I’d say you can tell a lot about students by their attire but it’s not the whole story, of course.

I did suit for interview, as did all but one of the people I saw being interviewed on that day. M
The staff did suits for interview, and generally did shirt and trousers on normal days, some with tie. Guess it depends on the uni and course though.

All 26. Not keen on larger. No plans to change but it seems like the supply of 26″ parts is getting smaller and smaller.

Yeah, they try not to though (having worked in one for a while) Taking the hits on mates rates and never recouping the costs on other bits. most people buying a groupset won’t need it fitting, if they don’t need it fitting they don’t need pretty much anything else doing and will only come back for more cheap parts. That’s how we ended up going under.

Matching online sites kills LBS’s. If you’re going to order from them at least do so at a decent price, they have overheads. Otherwise buy online from the guys that don’t have the overheads.

I’m looking at mostly medium rocky or rooty, damp singletrack. I’ve got some mud tyres for real muddy days (good old mud-mad DH) and on dry days I’m not too bothered what I ride as I’m not fast enough to push most stuff to its limits.

I cope OK on the Fire XC, they feel kinda nice and bouyant and corner predictably but they don’t cope with pressure dropping – they tend to roll off the rim with my 110kg behind them and I do have to be a bit delicate over rocky stuff (or run 40psi+). I may have run the HR too high a pressure, it was quite a while ago now and I was coming from tioga 2.3 DH tyres so I may be being a bit unkind when I got rid.

Some good and clear repeating comments here so I’ll have a hunt for bargains and try to balance weight and volume. What’s the worst that can happen eh?

Now to find a wheelset… :)

Anyone see much difference between the various compound types or is the difference minimal? OR is that tyre dependent?

A lot of these tyres are really quite heavy – the fire xc pros are only 600g each, most of these are coming in around 1Kg which is a fair old increase!

Being a heavier chap I reckon I’ll need to head towards a stiffer sidewall too. Some good options here though, thanks – was a bit hard to see where to start!

Beaver does look nice. I like the rounded profile – I find sharp edged tyres roll up onto the knobbles and then “fall off” them and wash out.

Never found any way of transporting clothes in a neat way and I don’t really even have to be that neat at work and they’re still unacceptable.

I tend to sacrifice riding on Monday to drop off clothes by car, then bring them back on friday and wash them all.

Don’t understand commuting slowly enough to not sweat!

Got a Christmas bottle of 15y/o personalized Glengoyne.

Oh I see. Off to read that then :) Ta!

WTF are you all on about?!

My first trip to les Arcs was with a rigid bike on xc wheels, riding the same routes as everyone else. Melted HS33 pads, but had a whale of a time. Returned with 6″ front and rear and had even more of a whale of a time. Been a few times since, never failed to have fun despite different bikes.

Dunno about the bigger stations these days but our local station has direct access to the lines. As a kid (15 years ago) we would regularly walk the tracks without problems. Of course the station master would come out and tell us to get off but the train line (or rather the access path next to it) was a short walking and cycling route to many places nearby!

For live monitoring try etherape (or for more info but harder to identify, wireshark), you can get it on a Linux live USB pen. For historical logs, not sure.

I don’t think there’s a “correct” sticker. Both versions have been bandied about on the internet for about 8 years.

I really don’t see the point if I’m honest. Any prog stat will do 95% of what they do, the only bonus is being able to postpone or advance remotely. Which you do what, once a week at most. Which will make about 20p a year difference in costs.

But also more boring.

Rollercoaster collisions are not exactly a common source of injury.

You reckon?

I’m really not too sure why this:
would have been any less fun with a few hundred mm of impact protection. It looks dull to me anyway, with that big barge area up front.

If it had been this one:
Then sure I could see the argument.

Those statistics above prove our manufacturing industry is shrinking. Unbelievable that so many on here are in obvious denial of the facts. Our skills base is evaporating. People are less and less able to make and fix stuff. Less decent stuff is made here. You simply can’t argue with that. Saying ‘oh but we’re really good at F1 or this or that’ is just burying your head in the sand.

Maybe so, but is that something to worry about? What’s left is high-value, high performance manufacturing and high level skills. Sure we farm out the drudgery to other countries, where it’s cheaper and easier to make, but that’s not necessarily a BAD thing. Just a way of progressing. If everyone were busy making nuts and bolts, no-one would be making planes. The romantic view of core manufacturing skills being the backbone on which everything rests is a nonsense – sure you need some capacity, but there’s no need for it to be measured and missed. Now it’s just as easy to jump on a plane and fly to somewhere to organise your quality manufacturing at a much lower cost and much higher profit than it is to get it done here unless you do it in house (which is what many top-end manufacturers do). While I believe the engineering world needs to know the basics to understand how it’s done, I don’t think it really needs a bottom heavy iron-bashing base to be successful. If the markets fell apart and it became cheaper and better to make it here we could. It would take some re-jigging, but the skills still exist and are still taught, just rarely used.

I just walk out as normal start car scrape windows and leave.

Scrapers rip the hell out of windows – seen so many scratches from dirt/dust in the ice being dragged over the surfaces.

In many moons of driving, including in -17C winter in 2010 IIRC when my diesel gelled and wouldn’t start, I’ve never been failed by body temperature water in a large jug. Start slow, spread over an area. That day I had to pour water over the whole fuel pump assembly, fuel filter and rail too :)

I’ve always found the insides of Skodas to look like a leather lined waiting room in plastic heaven.

There’s plenty of high quality, high tech manufacturing in the UK. Just not of general everyday items, because it’s cheaper and quicker to make it elsewhere. And very often the china imports are designed here but made elsewhere.

We have a pretty hefty space and aerospace industry, given that we have no launch sites.
We have a pretty hefty automotive industry which does turn out some well designed, well made hardware.

We don’t make tat and cheap low-volume hardware very well, because our designers/makers are too good to be wasted.

Suggesting our “making” days are behind us is a disservice to the hundreds of thousands of engineers, technicians and designers out there doing kick-ass projects that you just haven’t heard of because generally they’re exported to places that can’t do what we do.

The bike market is over-filled with both large scale manufacturers and niche manufacturers as it is.

Dirtyrider – yep, from an energy in/out point of view a heavier frame makes sod all difference until you take into account feel. A heavy frame makes a bike feel slower, react slower, and when not just riding along (some folk can get wheels off the ground I hear!) then the mass of the frame can significantly affect the way the bike feels. This might be subjective, but a) humans are influenced by psychology b) if weight were not an issue, there would be no market to propel lighter frames to the top.

Careful with that imagination…

You never had it happen? Me neither, but I’ve been on a group ride where it has, and I’ve had a friend who had it happen too. I’ve had a chain snap 5 miles into the hills and had to walk the whole way back, late, in the rain, in shorts and Tshirt without lights. I take reliability a bit more seriously now, purely because I don’t like walking bloody miles for no reason!

Clearly I touched a nerve…

Are you Sifting my post history you cheeky little closet stalker?

No, you just came across like an unhelpful smart arse (I’ve no idea whether you are or not, to be fair), so I clicked two buttons and found a post which showed a little hypocrisy, largely in order to reflect on how your own posts can come across the same way. I guess I just forgot how ridiculously competitive this forum gets for no apparent reason! It’s nice to see your response here though – bit more constructive, thanks!

A- suggests you’ve set you bars too high and far back, supported by B… Your hanging off the arse end of the bike, and setting it up to make this habit worse not better…

Two different situations though – setting bars further forward and lower makes OTB far more likely (I have swapped out 3 stems over the last 12 months or so,shorter reduces the OTB sensation naturally). Sure taking weight off the front makes washout more likely but that’s really only to counter the OTB sensation that comes from not being able to dial out the 50-60mm of sag up front in a neutral position. I can lean forward when cornering to transfer weight up front, but if the bike is too long I cannot get far enough back (for extended periods) to counter an unexpected divot or rock lobbing me over the front (I think this is injury specific lack of mobility). It’s a compromise, but with the nose-diving forks it’s hard to balance with other features. Hence my considering longer forks and a slacker frame geom with approx the same sag – leading to a naturally slightly higher front and allowing a longer stem again. IT’s one of a number of solutions I can see, but your points are valid, I don’t disagree in principle.

A good instructor won’t just tell you when to brake or pedal, they should find out what you want to get from the session, so tell them about your issues with cornering on the HT, in your case they should advise on how you position yourself for corners and probably give some pointers on bike setup too, their advice would at least be based on observation and experience…

Aye, of course – and it is something I wanted to do, but not just yet while I’m still recovering from the surgery and can’t put much effort into anything -all I can do is try to fix any hardware induced tendency to crash! The long-term damage has meant that I find it pretty hard to carry momentum into rough stuff – those moments where the bike tends to decelerate quickly and you can unweight and shove forward with your hands and feet to ease it through – I can’t do that just now, those core muscles are at about 5% of normal and bending isn’t really fully up to speed, so I just get punted forward.

~£300 on a new carbon frame (plus sundries) isn’t an insignificant spend, are you really sure your plan will cure your issues better than a spot of coaching?

It’s not much TBH, plus I felt like a change and wondered what my options were, and it’s a bit of an incentive to get out when I know it will hurt like hell and leave me with nerve pain for days. IF I have to bin it and move on in 6 months it’s cash well spent. I’d rather call on the help of tuition to improve my flow and jumping TBH, which is certainly an area I could do with help on and have been considering for a few years!

That said, I’m tempted to just stick with my FS for now and deal with “fixing” the HT when I’m less damaged, I just find 6″ of dual travel in the UK turns most trails into boredom when my fitness won’t let me get up to a decent speed just now!

As far as I recall setup involved guessing the oil level and swapping the washers in the preload stack, after that you could change oil or springs. Not much. Tried most things and the cheap pikes that replaced them were a lot better. After that the 36’s were stiffer and lighter and better.

Yeah, I never had any problem getting them to feel exactly as I wanted with a slightly heavier oil and some basic adjustments. I find most air forks feel like pogos in comparison, but to be fair I’ve never bought a set and spent time nailing settings the same way – they felt so bad I didn’t even try, plus the idea of seal failure “in the wild” seems like a fundamental insecurity I don’t like much! Maybe I’ll risk a set soon!

Hi; yes; you’re currently running forks that’re too long for the frame.

YEah, the 130s are too long for the inbred, but it doesn’t suffer the usual sloppy head angle and horrible handling because I just end up with boatloads of sag which corrects (my sagged A2C length is approx the same as a “properly” sagged A2C length on a shorter fork, if you get my drift). It does make it feel a bit more spongey due to the heaps of “negative” travel.

Oh you’re “Experienced”…

I should have realised, sorry…
That 20 years of accrued bad habbits, plus an injury induced hiatus from riding and an expensive frankenbike/spares bin mashup will almost certainly prevent you aggravating your back further…

Oh, and further to this. What would you like me to answer to the skills option – “ah yes, it must be my skill – I’ll go spend a few hundred quid on a course, ignore all possible bike-caused issues and assume it’s me at fault despite all other potential causes”. And if so, how many bike issues do you think this could cover, and would you only ever take the word of a championship winning rider when considering skill level to be OK? And what do you hope to achieve by asking the question while not suggesting other avenues of investigation?

:roll: Maybe I should have suggested the same thing as an alternative to your wife’s bike stealth upgrades? :roll:

Oh you’re “Experienced”…

I should have realised, sorry…
That 20 years of accrued bad habbits, plus an injury induced hiatus from riding and an expensive frankenbike/spares bin mashup will almost certainly prevent you aggravating your back further…

There’s always one who takes things the wrong way… today it’s you… congrats.

Everyone can learn something.

Naturally, I’m not suggesting I consider myself perfect, or even close to perfect, but certainly competent enough to know it’s not a skill issue that’s causing a dodgy handling problem. I don’t have the same issues on my FS or my rigid – hence thinking it’s a setup/hardware problem. Of course the others could be masking my dodgy skills, but I’m pretty confident in my ability not to go OTB on a rigid or a FS on the same trails, and neither of those catch me by surprise like the hardtail does, so I’m guessing the sensitivity is caused by the setup.

That said, I wasn’t ever asking for judgement on my skill, I was asking a specific question about a specific piece of hardware; it’s a long time since I’ve been here but I forgot some locals try to answer every possible question but the one asked :)

Oh and Jnr T’s are shit, in the realm of pogo sticks, more flexi than a modern single crown and basically not that good.

I’ve no problem with 20mm JnrT’s being pogo’y or noodly, did you have them setup right when you owned them? I often get people commenting to the contrary after trying them, with a look of surprise. Heavy as hell though.

I’m not a massive fan of air forks, never have been to be honest – I’m still a large fan of coil/oil as nothing quite matches the feel (from modern alternatives I’ve tried, most feel stictiony (higher pressures for my weight maybe causing higher seal contact forces) and I don’t have a grand to drop on a new set of top end forks to get similar feel but I do have a number of alternatives sat around the garage!).

Thanks to the folks who actually answered the question or something close!

Yeah skills course not needed thanks, as mentioned im no genius rider but I’ve spent most of my life with mtb being my primary sport including quite a few races, mech’d for a bike shop for 4 years, been fairly decent at trials riding and previously never had a fit or skill issue (though existing spinal injury did drastically affect both my fitness and my ability to resist impacts and shift weight backwards due to nerve damage – core strength demolished).

I’m just not overly happy with the way the inbred is dialed in just now.

Yeah the jnr t will be shorter at fully compressed but will ride higher at normal sag levels from my half-assed testing. Compression is a good call actually, my added mass may well be requiring a lot more damping on impact as static sag isn’t a million miles off normal. Hmm.

Yeah I like the idea of monster front end but a frame like that would be unusable for anything other than downs!