The Crossmarks look pretty good to me

They may look good, but they are much slower than they look. They have much more in common with intermediate ‘trail’ tyres than the XC tyres they are marketed as.

Personally i’d go with an XKing or RaceKing as the Black Chilli compound is fast and doesn’t wear too fast on the road. I suspect the same may well be true of the new Schwalbe Addix compounds.

In the eyelid!
Luckily I was nearly home as eye swelled shut for about 12hrs

@Ivan: Basically i agree that you should never have to visit a 3rd party site for that stuff, but since integrated matchmaking is notoriously poor in many genres of online gaming it’s nothing new, and zwift could point to any number of big budget games where it’s considered acceptable.

Well believe it or not, Giant make bicycles designed to be used in more places around the world than in UK mud.
Write to them and maybe they’ll do a custom UK model with no lockout and extra mud clearance.

Look good but wonder why with such an efficient platform they feel the need for rear shock remotes.

Because there isn’t really such a thing as efficient rear suspension – its just varying degress of watt sucking misery.
They mentioned on the coverage from the world champs at the weekend that Nino uses his remote lockout approximately 200 times per race.
And there was a WC race last year, where judging by the TV footage Jenny R seemed to be running her Spark locked out for most (possibly all) of the lap.

Didn’t even know it was cycle to work day.
If I had, i’d have taken one look at the rain and taken the car anyway.

Not tried a mudhugger, but the crud catcher works quite well, but only lasts about 2 years before it parts company with its fixing bracket.

If your rims can do tubeless i’d like at XC race tyres. Specifically a Race King 2.2 Protection comes to mind. The black chilli compound is really fast and quite durable (even on tarmac), and the tubeless gives you puncture protection. And whilst not cheap at RRP, can often be found on sale.
If you can take going slightly narrower than 2″, the WTB Riddler 45c looks like a really good bet.
Think there are some new sizes of Schwalbe G-One coming this year too, but definitely miss the ‘cheap’ criteria.

@crosshair, the novelty of climbing NEVER wears off, it’s how all roads should be!

Thanks all! I had a lightbulb moment

:idea:

Drift is not too bad at all on the crono fluid, certainly much better than my Cyclops Fluid2 in that respect.

Nah, its just a minor limitation of A) the design, and B) fluid trainers in general.
Sure a softer tyre will make slightly more resistance, but we are talking a shortfall of 30W, and Dad isn’t that fit (quite fit for 60+ though). I’m even lighter than he is, and stronger, so more like 70W short on resistance for me.

Generally fluid trainers are designed to give very road like levels of resistance, and if you went out to do big gear intervals on the flat you’d also run out of resistance. For example I use a 2% slope that’s always into a slight headwind in 50-12 or 50-11.

But aside from that 1 minor thing, its been a great trainer, very good ‘feel’ to it and perfectly reliable for 3-4 years so far.

My house is a disaster most of the week, then it usually gets tidied on a friday because we have people over at the weekend and we’re ashamed of how we live

If it can all be tidied on a Friday, it can’t have been a disaster to begin with!
See at @ScaredyPants above who has made me feel just a little bit better about my own mess levels this morning :D

Excellent trainer in terms of feel, my Dad has had one for years.

One small thing to be aware of – due to the floating design forcing the wheel onto the roller it means resistance is proportional to body weight. A by product of this is that for lighter riders (Dad is around 63kg) it doesn’t offer enough resistance to do big gear (60rpm) intervals.

Two very obvious choices:

BMC Teamelite TE01 (2017 onwards)
Trek Procaliber

Total shambles I think would be about right.
Working full time and riding 5 days a week = time/energy for keeping on top of tidying up are about non-existent.
Usually manage to improve things to tolerable by taking a few days holiday and chipping away at it, but doesn’t take long to return to looking like an explosion in a wiggle warehouse.

You are wrong sadly, simplest way to see this is to find someone you share the ride with, copy the link, log out, go onto their flyby and see that your ride is shortened.

Nothing to be sad about, quite good news in fact – hadn’t thought of doing the logging out bit. I’ll have a play one evening this week :)

I turned it off, as i strongly suspect it uses your uncropped ride hence neatly bypassing any exclusion zones you may have set up.

I’m more than happy to be proved wrong so I can turn it back on

Yep, that was my original thought before I discovered the existence of PolarProof.

Good to know that TX Direct will work as it can often be found in a pretty good value twin pack with TechWash which i seem to get through a fair amount of.

Good spot! 2.8 MM in Speedgrip may make a nice front for my Cooker SS

No, but then they’d never qualify to ride world champs on a more suitable bike either.
Does make you wonder if there’s possibly demand for larger front tyres in softer compounds for XC racing though.

I’ve also got the BT ones which have been more or less flawless for 4yrs.

Slight side question – the wifi in my smart tv has died – can i plug the output from powerline adaptor into cheap ethernet switch to provide cable connection to both tv and bt box?

Watching on TV. Weather looks grim!

Certainly getting close to affordable, although still not catering well for lots of bikes, and perhaps dubious weatherproofing for the bike that takes wet/muddy/gritty roads day after day through winter.

Still, may treat myself to some Vector3’s for the nice bike. (And maybe a new nice bike to hang them off :wink: )

Grrrr!
Not the same one, but seems the US Navy were ‘playing’ a lot that day.
I was slowly grinding up a climb just after Ullapool and suddenly i heard a ripping noise, split second of horror as i thought a car had locked up and was about to skid into the back of me.
But no, then a low flying jet ripped past at head height 200m to my right.

Check out youtube, there’s a couple of good guides.
Still got a hole in ceiling over my bath from leak i’m having trouble tracking down.
Anyway, don’t need to be too neat with what you cut out as new plasterboard comes in large sheets and you’ll be cutting to size.
Doing a good job of the plastering looks like the hard bit.

Good luck, and hope you have more joy tracking it down than me

Two really good races.
Now time for bed :D

Awesome start to the race, and great to see Annie going well, although not looking as strong as Neff or PFP.

Crazy course to ride on an XC bike, and taking its toll with a lot of crashes already.

Oooft, 2:50 and 5:20am, i may be getting a bit old for that!

Given that we had a thread two days ago about a new caadx with creaking bb30 i’d say they are still as bad as ever.

I haven’t, but i would for gravel.
Seems a perfect choice

Possibly an insane idea, but turn inside out and paint with liquid latex?
http://www.instructables.com/id/Coating-Fabric-with-Liquid-Latex/

We keep speed limits to a sensible level. Theya re what they are, they’ve been simlar for years, plenty of time to get used to them.

Except we don’t, that’s the point. That section I linked was NSL for years and years, it was a sensible limit when cars were less good, it would still be a sensible limit now.
And thanks to the handy link to crashmap up there it shows that whilst there were indeed some accidents on that stretch, no more so than on other stretches.

You are just pissing and moaning because you want to speed. Tough shit.

Not at all, I just want to be able to do the speed i’ve been doing safely for the previous 15 years, in a car that’s more capable than the one i was driving 15 years ago.

I actually think Fife Council just mess with the roads to use up some budget some of the time. For example: Fake speed bumps….
Exactly what they are supposed to achieve I have no idea

Wasn’t familiar with Fabsil, but it appears to be designed for tents which are a different material to rucksacks.
Maybe something like the spray on proofer used for fabric style walking boots?
Certainly don’t see why that wouldnt work, although clearly would result in some degree of water resistant rather than waterproof.

So what, wait until people die before lowering the speed limit?

FFS.

This is why we need speed limits. Because people apparently really are that stupid.You seriously just wrote that?
So following that line of thought, we should reduce all speed limits on all roads to 20mph because someone may at some time in the future have an accident?

fifeAndy that limit is to slow you om the approach to the built up area. It will help the slow of reaction to be in the vicinity of 30mph by the time they get to the junction just past the limit change. Has the town/village grown in the last 20 years? What’s the accident stats like for that first part of the 30mph limit?

There is no built up area (or 30 limit close by). I don’t have accident stats (nor do I know where to find them), but in 30yrs, really not that many. Nothing has changed except the addition of the golf course maybe 15yrs ago.

The reality is that a 40 limit doesn’t really make a huge difference as the road ultimately leads to StAndrews, and all traffic heading to StAndrews more or less always has a top speed of 40 anyway (why? who knows, its weird). But there really is no reason at all for a 40 limit to be imposed.

Check out this website:

http://www.crashmap.co.uk/Most excellent link, cheers

There is too much obsession with speeding and not enough with crap driving.

+1000

This used to be NSL when I was a kid. And someone did in fact die IIRC.

Works both ways.

This used to be NSL when I was a kid. no-one did in fact die IIRC.

I’m struggling to get too excited by this.

Well no, getting excited by being softly beaten by an old man with a stick is probably a whole other forum

maybe the only overtaking spot for miles and miles might also be an accident blackspot from frustrated drivers making poor decisions?

Possible, but unlikely imo, just revenue generators. They even feature commonly on crawler lanes etc, which is as stupid as stupid gets.