Saints here, massive overkill on my HT but I do ride BPW, Antur, FoD etc so I think I’m allowed.

Feel is great, no Shimano ‘ on off’ cliches, I think one piston hits the rotor slightly ahead of the other one helping modulation if thats a big deal for you.

In all seriousness email the Dirt DH team and ask them, Zelvy are a sponsor this year.

Ditch the horrible brakes and get some Saints.

Apple, they just work.

I use rhater’s method, pipe cutter to lop the top off, then file the burrs down, takes 5 mins and ensures a nice straight cut.

Yeah, wore skinny jeans, trainers and t-shirt to an uplift day at BPW…..hadn’t reckoned on it being one of the hottest days of the year so far…..anyway I looked cool and was as fast as anyone there so it’s my standard uplift gear now.

Same can be said for ‘pedal and spoke’ in Peaslake, haven’t ridden in a while due to medical reasons but ventured over to the Surrey Hills, popped in and explained my situation and lack of fitness and they were most helpful in pointing me in the direction of some suitable trails, good lads…didn’t even buy anything which I felt a bit guilty about but there’s always next time.

The perpetrators of the abuse in Rotherham have been convicted and jailed. The follow up invetigations and potentail further legal action can now focus on why local police did not take approproate action and why local government appeared to attempt to cover up the scandal. I have my own strongly held views but let’s wait and see.

Could it be (whisper it quietly) that the convicted perpetrators were of an ethnic minority and all sense and sensibility went out the window as the police pussy footed around the investigation and decided to cover up evidence that might embarrass the local community?….I mean that would never happen would it, the police don’t see colour afteral do they?!

As others have said, make the phone 1mm thicker and put a bigger battery in there, sorted….there is no need for 6mm thin phones, they’re simply for pub bragging rights.

Re. Small and powerful phones, do catch up…my HTC One-S from 2013 had a 4.3 inch screen, was slick as you could ever want and had a lovely baked Alu casing making the exterior of the phone wonderfully textured if that appeals to you.

Unfortunately in the phone world some people acknowledge and only acknowledge iPhones and everything else must be tat…..then there are those who snigger at Apple for being several years behind the curve and wouldn’t countenance a fruit branded product.

I’d like to think I’m in the middle, that HTC I had was genuinely superb and would still be well reviewed if released in 2016, there have been some Android duds (Galaxy S5 anyone?)….but my current phone is an Apple S5….why?….the media content on iTunes trumps anything available on Google Play…..but if the content was the same I’d go back in a heartbeat.
Apple handsets are decidedly average bits of tech, the screen is made by LG (or Sharp), the processor is a Samsung item ironically enough and when I dropped mine from my pocket last week the much heralded Gorilla Glass shattered costing me an £80 repair…..oh for expendable memory that doesn’t cost a fortune to upgrade through the models to get the memory you want/need.

The 2900 mAh battery sounds promising and may stop me from going back to Google, I’ll have to have a play on one in a shop.

no_eyed_deer – he actually came on to a thread asking for opinions on a line through a set of corners and suggested the OP get a new hobby for not sharing the same cycling philosophy that he did. Go for it if you want to support him.

Close, it was more a critique on the current trend for ‘everyone’ taking this exceptionally fun hobby far too seriously with skills courses, seeking advice on how to take a section of bends like they’re all budding Steve Peats etc….what happened to riding and learning through trial and error?…with the associated fitness benefits and mistakes that went into the bargain too.

I love taking my bike into the hills and finding new sections, having no idea how best to approach them but trying anyway until I get it right…..or I could take photos and sit at home asking the STW riding collective instead….i know which one I’d choose.

“The sooner LBS as bike shops are gone the better, then we can just have good service centres in their place instead.”
So are you peppered to pay £50+ per hour on labour charges? (I know one shop charges £48 already!) Because that what will happen if they can’t/unable to sell bikes and parts to help keep the workshop rate down?

Yep that’s fine by me, small stuff like changing over brakes, swapping tyres, changing stems and bars etc I’m fine with, as i suspect most others on here are too…..but I can’t build a wheel and would happily pay those prices, likewise although I can fit BB and headsets they’re a ballache and if I was building a frame up project I’d happily pay them the £50 they want to fit the bastard parts.

It’s a changing market and the LBS days are numbered…..look at the number of 3k+ bikes on the trails these days, you’re telling me they won’t pay decent money for a good service!?

Can’t seem to register into the STW league no matter what!

Team name is Ceredigion mudpluggers if anybody could be so helpful!?

This is exactly why I have increased my use of good, physical shops.

I reduced mine when they straight faced wanted £50 for a tyre.

This is hilarious, there are a load of people on here who take great pride at supporting the LBS yet want the best possible discount from said bricks and mortar store and then go online, price match, have a hissy fit etc when they can’t get it cheaper.

Jesus wept, go direct sales it’s a damn site easier…the prices are unrivalled, no need to go to a ‘concept’ store and deal with the gob shites in there….any problems can be solved by a trip to the LBS….seriously, has anyone ever had a bike shop turn away a YT bike because it wasn’t bought there!?…..don’t make me laugh, they’re glad of the business and will happily true the wheel that was bent in transit etc.

The sooner LBS as bike shops are gone the better, then we can just have good service centres in their place instead.

No flex in mine.

It’s laborious but you could prize out all the bearings, use swarfega to clean them all, repack with marine grease and then your’re good to go….let us know in about 6 hours time when you’re still on your first bearing!

When did MTB stop being a fun activitiy we just did to one where some people over analyse every little nuance of riding until there can’t be any fun left, I just don’t get it…..i go to work to get better at my career, the associated stress is an acceptable trade off…but when people are fretting over how to take a series of berms FFS then something has gone amiss and I’d suggest a new hobby for these ‘serious’ mountain bikers as their pastime bears no resemblance to mine.

I must be old fashioned because I buy a fork, set the recommended pressure/sag and ride….haven’t had the need for tokens yet….maybe I’m doing something wrong and not buying into the hype.

Revel in the fact you ride terrain on a 26 HT that others need FS and bigger wheels for…..you are a riding God, you just need some conditioning work.

(I may also ride a 26 HT so have some bias, probably)

Let me make a small contribution to this thread, I was sent to carry out a disability assessment on a man who claimed he couldn’t drive, never left the house, couldn’t carry out daily activities etc….talking to him his wife seemed uncomfortable and silent….he said his son walks to work (the car on the driveway was dirty and obviously used)….he was very well prepared for the questions….changing tack and using a less formal approach we talked sport, I asked him how he got through the hours of each day, what tv shows he liked etc…..he then disclosed he was an avid Cardiff city fan, had a season ticket and never missed a game….plop.

Dropped himself right in it.

Contrary to what the left leaning would have you believe he isn’t unique and there are thousands like him costing us millions.
All efforts should be made to get these shirkers back to work….or if they choose to continue to opt out of working life then cut their benefits until it’s the only option for them.

Caveat stands for the genuinely needy, a civilized society supports it’s folk who are genuinely unable to work.

They should be about shoulder width apart, measure yours, they’ll be more than 650mm from outside too outside.

Most people would be happy on 700+ bars. Regarding stem length this can comfortably come down to 60mm to start with and then as you play with wider bars you can go to shorter stems too.

It’s trial and error, the 740 you have ordered sound great, there is a rule of diminishing returns where I’ve seen short arse riders blindly following fashion with 800mm bars on a 40mm stem unable to turn their bloody bike!

Manon Carpenter
Marc Beaumont
Gee Atherton
Sam Hill
Matt Walker.

….its as good as in the bag.

Steve Cummings as a real outsider. Having Cav and EBH in his team could work for him like it did at Tirreno-Adriatico. He’s a man who knows how to make a last few k solo break stick and clearly in stellar form too. Unlikely to win but I bet he’s in at the death.

This for me, MTN seem to be going quietly about their business and are almost under the radar with a team of has-beens and never-was’s….only problem for the other Grand Tour teams is they are actually doing something right, riders are coming back into form, older previously written of riders are on the come back trail and guys like EVBH who were dismissed as mere Doms at Sky are starting to show what they can do when unshackled from the constraints of a large team….loving watching MTN at the moment, i’d love to see them throw a spanner in the works and win….god knows Cav is capable and has done it before, EVBH could do it if he could believe and Cummings always seems up for a fight, bring it on!

Milan San Remo results notwithstading i stand by what i said, MTN are a great team to have in the UCI pro tour…kind like when USpostal turned up and shook things up…lets hope theres no doping this time though.

have a look at virgin care, not the sexual site but the one run by a cahp who also has a trainset and some planes hotels and a island.
and see all the stuff theyve privatised on the quiet.

He has been very quietly acquiring walk-in centres, minor injuries units etc an astonishing rate.
The care is actually pretty good because most staff have been Tuped across from when thhey were NHS run facilities…..the problem being from a staff point of view is that there is no NHS pension scheme meaning loyally is lost as staff turnover is huge, staff are on the constant lookout for better pay. In the old days you’d join the NHS and spend your career there knowing that your pay wasn’t great but a decent pension awaited you at the end of 30-40yrs….now people job hop, companies like Reliance, Virgin, Tascor, CRG, Capita etc merge, change names annually etc and take the easy part of NHS care, ie the minor stuff, they’re not interested in trauma care, geriatric wards etc as they are loss makers.

I do agree something has to change, the size and age the population was never envisaged to be this big…..it’s time to strip back the NHS to what it was intended for, emergency care and repairing life changing chronic conditions….nose jobs, tit jobs etc can do one and the people who want these precedures can raid their own piggy bank instead.

This is probably more of a rant than anything else……

Three weeks with a dodgy ear; two appointments with my doctor; the last, which was a week ago, he said he’d refer me to the ENT department. I did ask him if he could just syringe the thing and be done with it, but no; ENT or nothing.

Phoned up the ENT department today to make an appointment and they haven’t received my referral.

Once they receive a referral, it’ll be a six to eight week wait for an appointment.

What’d be the cost and timescale to get this done privately?

And…

I assume your ‘dodgy ear’ is not life threatening

Compare and contrast that to my experience on Monday night when i self presented at A&E with some pretty vague (to me) neuro symptoms…the triage nurse saw me immediately and i was moved to the corridor (sounds crap doesnt it it?) but the nurses and paramedics monitoring patients in the corridor while we waited for a cubicle was exemplary, i was continually neuro assessed, regular BP, pulse, temp etc….eventually a cubicle became free and in i went, the nurse was Michelle and lovely, she actually cared, it wasn’t just the clinical stuff it was whether i was warm enough, would i like a drink, are the light too bright in here etc…i had to provide a urine sample and when i came back they were ready for my ECG which was carried out professionally yet with good humour…after that i was sent for a chest Xray, the porters who took me and brought me back are great lads, full of amusing useless chit-chat to take your mind of what might be happening, the CXR was fine and then it was time for the biggie…time for a CT scan of my head.
I was nervous but the staff were wonderful, a few mins later it was done and i was pushed back to A&E on my trolley rather embarrasingly.
A more senior Dr then appeared and said the CXR was fine, my bloods showed my markers and the the CT scan was as expected for a 38 yr old man…he then stood me up and put me through what can only be described as a bloody hard workout!….apparantly these are used to detect any neuro abnormalites and it didnt take just 2 mins, he was thorough and worked me through for about 10 mins in total…he couldnt find anything wrong either and as the differential diagnosis when i’d first arrived of things like stroke/tia, seizures, brain tumour were all ruled out and i have and appointment with the Consultant Neurologist as an outpatient in 6 days time.

The system works, and it works brilliantly when they think something is seriously work.

I’m sorry to here about your ear but in the grand scheme of thing when they’re screening 38yr blokes for possible brain injuries you can (hopefully) understand being placed to the back of the metaphorically speaking,

Basically I want to get more speed going downhill (my priority right now, as I am sometimes spinning out on descents) but don´t want to lose too much climbing ability either.

Keep the running gear as is.

Fit longer forks to slacken out the head angle, tyres are important…sometimes you’ll want a semi slick out back, think about anglesets to further slacken things out and give you added confidence (speed)….next, and this is controversial although Liteville do it….but stick a 26 inch wheel inn the bank, it drops the BB (the bike will feel like it’s in rails) and by dropping the back slightly you further slacken the front again….you can actually end up with a Trance with a head angle of 65-66 degrees without buggering around with anglesets.
They’re then great fun in the DH sections and the DW/Meastro link rear suspension copes admirably.

There are loads of Nukeproof Scalp/Pulse 26 inch DH bikes on ebay for that kind of money currently….all slightly newer than a Sunday, slightly more modern geometry etc…i’d go there instead.

…or if you can stretch a bit Canyon have dropped the price on the Torque-DH bike to £1300 brand new…full Zee running gear and brakes. Rockshox suspension etc…nearly had me wielding the credit card last night, i think they’re clearing out ready for a new 650b DH model.

I’m a Shimano fanboy so I won’t get drawn into what you should’ve bought but change your pads….i’ve been running Uberbike’s Race Matrix pads for a few years now and all they’ve ever required is a few runs up and down the street to bed them in….it’s worked on everything from budget conscious Deore-615s to Saints…try them.

The only reason I ride a 160mm bike is for the geometry, as I ride steep stuff, and need the comfort a 65 degree head angle gives.

Those of you with 650b bikes could also try swapping to a 26-inch rear wheel if further slackness is your goal.

Works for my 650b Trance, the standard bike has a 67 degree HA with 140mm forks, Giant offer it in SX guise with 160mm forks and a 66 degree HA, at this point i was stumped and considering anglesets but i saw on a yank forum about running a smaller rear wheel…drops the BB a bit and slackens out the front a bit more too, lovely…havent taken the phone-app angle thingy to it yet to see what it’s given me.

Liteville have a similar ethos with their bikes although i believe theirs is based around rider size and bike size or something?

Build that as a frame only and i’ll buy one…been looking for a slightly more modern version of my Ragley Piglet 26 for a while now….do it.

The 5S is still a good phone, I wouldn’t get too hung up on having the latest OS….needing to have the latest OS and the features they sometimes incorporated is an attitude very much from several years ago when each version of a phone or OS was a decent leap forward….nowadays not so much.

All decent smartphones have good displays, run perfectly fast enough, take good photos, play music and sync your emails etc….other than that it’s just a case of want not need.

The next leap forward should be battery life, rather than continually make the iPhone thinner I wish they’d just stick a decent battery in there instead!

Three minute Gaps would be a good un

Yep, well worth the fiver from Amazon i picked it up for.

Looks like for £150 I can get some 1600g wheels from Superstar. Nothing special at all but actually quite a decent weight.

Buy them, they’re good…really good.

I bought the Elite-30 set a few years ago to put on a Spesh Allez i had at the time, i was skeptical about the weight but went online and searched for other’s experiences, turns out the weight claim is conservative…plenty of people had weighed their set in at LESS than Superstar were claiming, i duly paid my £160 and waited…a few days later they arrived and i weighed them…pretty much bang on 1600g, i believe they now do a set for 1400g which are also less than £200 for the pair!

I’m no lightweight at 14st/85kg and my wheels get a tough time as i tend to swap to road riding over the winter (dont like getting muddy on the MTB) but i’ve never had to true them up or change the bearings (their own Icon hubs, brilliant too)…the wheels are now doing service on my Ribble which despite also being cheap aluminium has come in at less than 8kg fully built with no use of titanium, carbon or such like…i love brands like Superstar, Ribble etc, they allow people like me with very average earnings to get decent lightweight bikes on the road for not much cash, there’s a lot to be said for cutting out the shop floor, overheads, salespeople, etc etc…

It’s not a groomed trail centre or bike park. Big holes, gullies and roots are all part of the fun.

This…

They are DH tracks, its meant to be rough.

…and this.

Fair enough you were on a HT and that can be hard going at FoD but i’ve also heard people on 160mm Enduro-weapons complaining about how rough the trails are…lol!

The UK has a rich and varied uplift scene given our relative lack of elevation, the appeal of FoD is that its not another BPW with groomed trails and ‘flow’ (yawn)…sometimes its nice to have to think about line choice and pick your way down a trail mountain-goat style.

Its one of the few places in the UK that dual crown/triple clamp forks make sense, i usually ride my Ragley Piglet HT there but had the pleasure of swapping to an Empire-DH rig when a bloke and i got chatting on the minibus…his bike was a revelation, the mythical ‘flow’ that people often say is lacking suddenly appeared, the big holes in the trail became mere divots, the exposed roots were nothing to be worried about etc…the speed over my HT was bonkers, at somewhere like BPW i’m usually able to keep up with FS bikes but at the FoD i dont bother trying…if i’m going abroad to the Alps i’ll often book an uplift day there as i think its far more technical than some of the longer runs in the South of the UK and great for getting your eye in before going somewhere challenging.

I love the place and would choose a day there over BPW any day of the week….(except maybe deepest winter, then i may relent and opt for the groomed Blue runs at BPW instead)… :D

Raceface Nelson here too, the Dirt magazine review was positive stating that the rubber compound works even in cold wet UK conditions, as a bonus they only lock on at the inner fixing meaning no finger or hand rub on the (non existent) outer lock ring which is something I’ve had with other brands.
Reasonably priced, cheaper than Renthals…as above, all my bikes wear them now.

Ran a 53/39 combo on the road bike in the South East and felt fine…moved to Wales and now I can’t wait to get rid of the bastard thing and put a compact on instead!

Embrace the compact, although those new Shimano mid-chainsets look interesting.

Anyone done the mix and match thing?

A mate has the new aluminium Ragley Mmmop (650b) on his older 26 inch running gear, works fine.
Arguably the lower BB makes it corner incredibly well, the fact that both front and rear wheels are smaller and match means that geometry is unaffected, the bike simply sits lower…perfect.

Didnt somebody win the Mega a few years ago with a 650b bike running 26 inch wheels?…gave the rider huge tyre clearance in muddy conditions.
Its what i’ll be doing when the time comes to upgrade my HT, its a 26 and i’ll be looking for 650b next…i’ll just put the forks, wheels etc from my current bike across onto the new frame and upgrade parts as and when i can afford to.

Flat pedals for me at the moment are the plastic Nukeproof ones, longer pins are available on CRC and various eBay sellers….they’re awesome, probably not good in terms of longevity due to the plastic build but they’re light and my feet never leave the pedals, highly recommended.

….that post wasn’t helpful, get the BMW estate, something about them just looks ‘right’…like you’re going off on a bank job or a drug deal.

Silver with big alloys stuffed under the arches too…may affect the load carrying ability but looks awesome….you’re welcome.

An estate car is no guarantee of load carrying ability….i pranged my Hyundai Getz hatchback last year which was carrying all our dog and bike stuff, my other half in her A4 Estate came to pick me up and we transferred loads from one to other….the Audi barely took everything I had in the hatchback, it was full to roof yet in the Getz it only looked half full!

Tardis-like I tell you, it did have the rear seats down van style though but then so did the Audi?!?!

Both seem similar in spec, Shimano brakes and running gear….but I’d go for the Bird purely for the fork, I run X-Fusion suspension on my FS and its top quality stuff….read the Cotic site as to why they’re going over to X-Fusion as OEM fitment.

Lastly, a good fork can make or break a HT, on current performance of my Sweep RL2 I’d happily recommend the Bird.