We need some too so if you find any please let us know!

Fisher are out until mid-Aug I believe and I don’t know if it’s the sort of thing that shops keep many of in stock – we don’t, unfortunately for us…

Yep, no issues, in fact I’d have said that more bikes with BB30 bottom brackets have “normal” (i.e. 24mm) cranks/spindles, than 30mm ones.

Wheels Manufacturing (among many others) do an adapter which is one of the best out there.

Or go for Thorn’s own low-rider rack also from SJS (or from your LBS) – best racks we’ve ever come across.

Or, if you want to buy from a shop rather than online, and can persuade someone to do you a bit of a deal, you might end up with a really decent quality frame:
http://2014.merida-bikes.com/en_gb/bikes/road/race/2014/scultura-cf-904-1266.html

There’s an alloy version with full carbon fork which comes in at under £1000 too.

(And there’d be no need to rush to upgrade the wheels, either).

Warning – not all press fit BBs will fit in the 2013 Commencal frames. If you look inside the BB shell you will see that it’s not round all the way through – there is a large flat piece of aluminium across the bottom, in the middle.

If the housing for the bearings is too deep, it will interfere with this.

Shimano ones are OK if you are prepared to take a hacksaw to them and trim some of the plastic away.

Hope are more difficult as they’re all alloy and therefore harder to trim down.

Raceface ones are best as they fit without any modification, but you can’t use the plastic sleeve in the middle. The cups and bearings themselves press in fine though. That’s what I would use.

Merida Speeder T5 is very good.

The Ariel is a great bike. Wouldn’t want to put you off one at all.

The other option I’d recommend is a Pyga Pascoe – 140mm rear optimised for 150-160mm forks.

Err, yes, £4.99 for 6 rotor bolts sounds about right. These are the ones we stock, RRP is £3.99 for six:
http://www.fibrax.com/disc-pads-rotors/rotors/rotor-bolts-6

So you’ve paid £5 for 12 which sounds like a pretty good deal to me. What puzzles me is why you think they should repeatedly give you free stuff? If they were a bit busy would you volunteer an hour of your time to help stack the shelves?

If you buy new make sure the dealer is an approved mavic dealer that you can buy mavic crash/damage insurance for them £45.

Yep, MP3 is a no-brainer really on any of their more expensive wheels. We always recommend it, surprised at the number of people who don’t bother to go through with it.

Blank seem to be reasonably priced, decent quality, and popular/fashionable/”cool” too which is important in the BMX market…

Their Buddy (16″) is £209 and Hustla (18″) is £259.

Just sold off our demo pair sadly. When do you need them for, specifically? Happy to help if we can.

XT or Zee would be my recommendation, although having said that SRAM/Avid are just launching their new brakes and they look pretty good too, and very well priced.

£2.5k would get you a not-super-bling build of a Pyga One Forty 650b.

Ardents, Rocket Rons (or Rocket Ron front and Racing Ralph on the back) or Mountain King front and X-King back.

We have some good contacts for transport back from the end – likely to be cheaper than driving two cars up depending on how far you’re coming, and certainly less hassle.

It’s a great route, well worth the effort.

Give us a shout if you fancy a demo ride on the Pyga!

You wouldn’t expect Ultegra 6800 compared with Tiagra say, to feel the same as XTR compared with Deore – because it’s nor comparable. Ultegra should be on a level with XT.

My experience of Ultegra 6800 (on several of our demo bikes) is that it shifts very smoothly and works much better than previous Ultegra groupsets, and noticeably better than 105. It’s not far off Dura Ace performance levels in my experience. It wins our “bargain groupset” award despite not being cheap!

Pyga One Ten would be a great option – 110mm rear, ideal for a 120mm fork.

Zip tie the front wheel to your non-drive side seat stays?

Surly Long Haul Trucker? They do crazy small (and large) sizes.

If you want something lighter/more racy/are not interested in carrying loads of luggage the Pacer comes in sizes down to 42cm too.

Yep, Altura Mayhem would be a good option. Current model is probably going to cost you £90 (RRP is £100, 10% off seems to be the going rate online) but a discontinued colour option (the jacket itself hasn’t changed for the last year or so) could be 20% plus off.

Our minimum labour charge is £7.50 but I’d feel a bit embarrassed charging that for this job. What sort of relationship do you have with your LBS?

If a customer who spent the odd bit of money with us needed helping out with something like this I’d imagine we’d do it for free.

Sorry to hear about this. I’m sure the shop will sort you out but nothing makes up for the pain of having a bike nicked, I know.

We’ll keep an eye/ear out up this way (mid Wales).

Although personally if I was looking for somewhere to fly from Bristol for an MTB holiday Morocco would be top of the list…

A Blackburn aluminium carrier would be fine for that and costs about £30. You’ll need £20 for mudguards thus leaving £50 for panniers which won’t get your Ortlieb but it would get you something perfectly acceptable from Avenir or Axiom:
http://www.axiomgear.com/products/gear/bags/

So, your suplier is rippin you off then. Or Schwalbe are. Someone, smewhere is.

Why does anyone have to be getting ripped off? We don’t feel that the manufacturer, or their importers, are ripping us off because we’re happy to pay a bit more for quality branded tubes, which we then sell to our customers at a fair markup (much less of a markup than has been suggested here). Those customers are happy to pay the price we ask. In my world, no-one is being ripped off there.

If we wanted to buy cheaper tubes, we could. We could then choose to sell them for a little bit less, or we could sell them at the price we currently charge for Schwalbe, and make a bit more profit. If we lied to people and said that the quality was the same, perhaps we could be accused of ripping them off.

If you believe that the quality isn’t worth the premium over an unbranded tube, don’t buy them – buy from a shop which sells cheaper tubes, or online, or direct from China. As Ben’s example illustrates, most people are actually happy to pay a little more for a quality tube. If you’re not, that’s fine. But please don’t accuse every shop that sells inner tubes at their recommended retail price of ripping you off – we’re really not.

Sadly tubes don’t sell themselves – they take up space in the shop and for every customer who walks in and picks up what they want, and brings it to the counter, there’s another who hasn’t a clue what size and/or valve type they require. Helping those customers is part of our role as a shop, of course, and we’re more than happy to do so – but the cost has to be built into the margin.

The alternative would either be to charge a “consultation” fee on top of the cost of the tube for every customer who needed help getting the right one, or give a bit of a discount to people who support the shop regularly and know what they need – which is what we do.

And I can tell you for sure that the Schwalbe tubes Adam, ourselves, and Ben sell at £5-£6 cost us a lot more than £1.15 or whatever. We choose to stock and sell a quality product which comes at a bit of a premium, rather than buying the cheapest possible direct from source – and none of us are idiots IMHO.

For what it’s worth, I’d consider any shop owner importing their own tubes for £1 each to be missing a trick – there are budget options available through existing supply chains already – which we might just start looking at in order to offer a bit more choice.

We’ve heard very good things about Pure Mountains too, had a few dealings with them and they seem like great folk.

Genesis High Latitude?

We’ve just had ours delivered from Massi via R53. Ours don’t have rear pockets but they do quite a few options. Couple of quick pics on FB http://www.facebook.com/drovercycles

Like Adam we charge £5.99 for Schwalbe tubes (or 3 for £15) and have been for a while now. RRPs are going up now, and I see £6.99 is now what most suppliers are saying they’re worth.

It’s a tricky one as the cheapo tubes could be sold for the same price really but we’d rather stick to our guns and sell a quality product for a fair price – don’t want people to feel ripped off.

Funnily enough I was just thinking about it this morning when I realised we needed to top up on a particular size.

One option I have been thinking about is offering a choice – so an unbranded or cheaper brand tube for say a fiver, or Schwalbe/Conti for £6.99 (and a bit of a deal on 3-4 of each, say).

Would people like to have the choice in their LBS or would you rather just walk in and get what the shop have chosen to stock?

Just to throw another option into the mix, Neil Pryde bikes are 20% off for the month of June. The Nazare (Alize) is a fast aero bike, or the Zephyr is a very quick sportive-style climber.

20% off would get you a top quality frame with Ultegra 6800 for £2300 leaving enough change to upgrade the wheels to something nicer.

Or, the frames are also reduced, and are Di2 compatible if you wanted a custom build.

They’re great bikes, not just another mass-produced frame with nice bits stuck on.

Any shop with a Hope account will be able to order it for you and by the look of things, they sell it to shops by the metre too so no need for a shop to order a huge roll.

If your LBS can’t get it for you, we can stick some on our next order, though as we’ve just had a load of Hope stuff in it might not be imminent.

We’ve had slack, full-sus 29ers on there (Commencal Meta AM 29er) with no problems. Can’t see you having any issues at all to be honest. Wheelbase is 1182mm according to the geometry charts.

The Meta Hip Hop (2014) is the Meta SL – only with 140mm forks rather than 120mm. It was apparently been much more popular than the SL which didn’t sell well at all.

I’m sure plenty of shops would do you a chain-reaction-esque deal on a frameset if you asked, if you decide you want to go new (warranty etc).

We really rate the bikes but they’re not going to be in many shops from now on, I wouldn’t have thought.

I’m 6’2″ and our large demo is a perfect fit for me (funny coincidence, see… :-))

I’d guess a medium would be your size unless you like a longer bike.

We can send out our demo bike so if you don’t get any luck locally and fancy trying a large, give us a shout!

We’ve been doing Frog here this year and they’re great – using them in the hire fleet and have them available to demo too.

Easy to size up according to standover height, better pricing than Isla, and they’re light and reliable too.

Yep will fit fine.

We have a Krampus and will be putting together a Caribou and probably another Surly at some point too – anything in particular you were looking to try?

Surely the insurance company now own the “damaged” bike/frame anyway?