I use 29 * 2.2 Continental X-kings for similar type of riding and they feel fast enough on the road.

+1
Xkings are fast – really fast – and grip pretty well on most surfaces for XC riding. I got around 2000mi of mixed (road, forest road, trail centre) riding out of a rear.

~That glen finglas loop is a known route – double track all the way and very steep one side with a lot of climbing IIRC – I have never ridden it

Yep, excellent route that gives easy access to a real big mountain feeling.
Only done it anti-clockwise (the shallower climb) and its still very steep in places. I would expect its hike-a-bike done clockwise.
Possible to pick up crazy speed on the way down – worth keeping in mind its a long way from help and not going too crazy.

From Callander take the marked path along Loch Venachar to get out to Brig o Turk – lovely little path.

I’d plan on it taking near enough your full 4hrs from Callander. I did it with my Dad from Loch Katrine which is closer and that was just under 3 hours moving time.

comrie croft is well worth going to – much more “natural” feeling than most trail centres although its years since I have been

Agree, its been a couple of years since I went, but very much a different feel to most trail centres and enough there to keep you occupied for an evening.

^^ That’s the sort of feature that you don’t really give much thought to on a slack FS with a nice big front tyre, but somehow morphs into something to be afraid of when approaching it on an XC HT.

Not a Duster, but my Dacia experience is to stay well away. They may be cheap, but cheap is not necessarily good value.

I had a Sandero as a courtesy car which:
Didn’t accelerate,
didn’t brake,
didn’t steer when you wanted,
alarmingly, did steer when you didn’t want,
was very noisy,
had virtually no adjustment options for driving position,
which combined with a comical bite point on the clutch lead to me banging knee on back of the steering wheel every gear change (I’m not even tall).

I didn’t actually think it was possible to make (and sell) a truly terrible car these days, but Dacia have managed it.

Holy thread necro!

Well, unfortunately i have the misfortune to have another Sandero courtesy car for a couple of days, and it may as well be a completely different car to the first one I drove.

This one does accelerate (although with a strange random throttle lag).
It does stop (brake pedal has 4 positions, nothing, nothing, nothing, STOP!)
It does steer where you point it (as long as the tarmac is smoothish)
Importantly, it doesn’t steer all by itself like the last one.
Still has a silly clutch bite point, but no knee banging thanks to a more adjustable drivers seat.

Based on this, i’ve re-evaluated my opinion from – ‘utterly abysmal’ to ‘not very good’.
I can now however see how people might buy one based on the fact they are cheap.
I can only assume they have some seriously poor component tolerances and/or quality control to produce two cars that look identical but are in fact totally different to drive.

When was the last time you were on the uplift?.

I don’t – there’s no tracks for mincers.

There was never a question if the current uplift was popular, but I was addressing the idea of running it as a ‘venue’ which has a whole other level of costs associated with it, and therefore needs much broader appeal.

To quote an article on the BPW site:
Being the UK’s largest mountain bike destination means that we provide a lot more variety than most other venues. We are essentially a trail centre, a downhill venue and a freeride park all rolled into one.

To cater for a wide spectrum of riders, we have a wide range of trail styles to suit different abilities and preferences, from natural technical style trails through to smoothly manicured yet highly challenging jump lines and everything in-between.

I think a lot of the time a transition knob is a worse solution to the grip/slip/grip issue than an adjustment of the tyre shape, centre knob design and side knob design to change a tyre from a ‘commitment tyre’ to one that’s more tolerant of poor technique,

Its a bit of a trade off. Transition knobs give you fairly uniform grip over a variety of lean angles, but as you say, they do increase likelihood of clogging.
Another alternative is to square the tyre up so it puts its edge knobs down earlier, but this runs the risk of washing out at bigger lean angles.

Ultimately, I think its good we have a choice of manufacturers that have different design ideas and goals so we can all learn what we like and pick accordingly.

TIRE

Argh, mods, can’t we add this to the profanity filter?

If you aren’t already, try wearing glasses/sunglasses(yes, even indoors).
I had crazy bad hayfever as a kid and that always helped.

In theory you should be able to absorb ~60g of carbs per hour.
In practice, over such a long day (especially if repeated days) you’ll want to get most of your calories from ‘proper’ food.

I’m a huge fan of energy drink, as I struggle to take on enough solids at times (IBD) and it allows me to do rides I wouldn’t manage without, but even I typically favour at least trying to take on some food while intensity is low.

Hard to see how to make a bigger operation without funding new trails though.
There’s only so many gnarcore riders to go around, so if you want to attract enough riders to run a ‘venue’, there’d need to be at least a couple of blue/blue+ trails.

Bit chicken and egg – no funding without the people – no people without the funding.

Does anyone else find that a HighRoller2 has an odd spot that appears to have no grip as you lean into it? Upright or hard leaned it is fine, slight lean = slidey

I thought this was pretty commonly accepted about most Maxxis tyres as they tend not to feature transition knobs.

Some described it to me as “not a mincers* tyre”, ie you have it ride it hard and lean right over in the turns to get it to work.

* No offence Matt, I don’t like that slidey transition either I’m definitely a mincer, and prefer transition knobs for exactly the same reason.

coming back to the point about nhs funding, i really don’t understand this idea that private health insurance is the way forward.

I don’t think there’s much if anything to be gained from private health insurance as the way forward.
I think there is a strong argument for providing some integration of private/public though.
As an example, I think I saw on TV a London hospital that has a private wing that channels profits to support the main hospital.
Has to be other fund raising ideas too – chargeable wifi connection? Better meal options for £x/day? Extortionate parking close to the door to fund free parking for everyone else? etc etc.
Guess what i’m trying to say is there has to be a way we can milk people that can afford it to improve things for everyone else, but in an optional way outside general taxation*

*we probably need to increase tax take too.

The Treasury has more up-to-date estimates than the ONS, and uses slightly different accounting methods. They show that the UK government paid in £13.1 billion in 2016.

That’s still £252mil/wk, and would have had exactly the same effect on the side of a bus. For most people 100’s of millions are fairly incomprehensible numbers which can be approximated as a ****load.
So if £252mil = ****load, and £350mil = ****load then £252mil = £350mil.

its not an accurate figure we literally do not send that [and the figure above ignores the £4 billion we get back]and we all know it, therefore it is a lie

Well no, we don’t all know it, and therein lies the problem.
It should be part of the rules of ANY referendum that an impartial 3rd party compiles a booklet (at the governments expense) of relevant information which is delivered to every household with registered voters so people have the correct information to make their own mind up without having to actually do their own research.

You’re the first person I’ve ever come across who uses Yammer. The traditional approach is to install it because you’re told to install it, then never use it because no-one uses it.

I’ll have you know I used it religiously for a whole week after I was told to install it. Until i realised I was talking to myself cos no-one used it 😆

I’ve got BT, parents have Sky.

Sky is considerably better, but then again, it would want to be as its considerably more expensive.
For me my BT kit just works. Just moved to the new box though, so no long term impressions so far.
I very much hope it continues to just work, as there is a reason BT have a reputation for being the only communication company you cant communicate with at all.

Corporation Tax increase from Labour is projected to 20bn.

Which they also want to spend on education and welfare.

Also tax fraud/evasion is around 16bn

You’ll never get that to 0, but even if you could, it’ll only pay for 2 years out of your 20-30 years of increases.

No need to be personal.
Tax has been too low for a long time. So, yes I am for real.
You explain to me how Austerity and cutting taxes has impacted our society as whole for the best?

Wasn’t intended to be personal – apologies for poor choice of words –
And fair enough if you actually do think that level of taxation growth is correct/possible. Good luck convincing anyone to vote for it.

Austerity sucks, there’s no doubting that.
And yes, I agree we could pay more taxes.
I voted LD as one of the more attractive policies this election was an extra 1% tax for the NHS. But there’s a whole world of difference between modest one off tax rises, and doing it every single year.

Money comes from taxation (the not so magic money tree) , not impact to other services.

I guess you didn’t really think that through? Or look at the graph?
How are you realistically going to find an extra 8bn in taxation year on year every year for 10, 20, 30 years?

As mike correctly points out, the whole system needs an overhaul as there’s simply no way we can fund even the current rate of growth in the long term.

1% tax increase is not enough?

are you for real?
so you are proposing that an increase in tax that will see the BASIC rate of tax at over 40% in 20 years time is not enough?
We’re not talking 1% rise. 1% rise EVERY YEAR

Whats the difference between a slowing down and a slowing down of the rate of increase?

Just a ‘slowing down’ would imply the graph trending down. Compare it to a car – its still currently accelerating – just not as hard as before.

I don’t think you need to. We can stop effectively subsidising tax cuts and have better services?

Take a look at the graph again. 2005-2010 saw an increase of 40bn over a 5 year period. To maintain that through taxation we would need to take some revenue from a growing economy AND to 1% to income tax every year forever.

It clearly shows a slowing down of the rate of increase in spending on the NHS around 2010 onwards.

FTFY

Just out of interest, how long do you propose the NHS should keep on getting that rate of spending growth for? And what other services are you willing to sacrifice to achieve it?

High5 zero tabs for me – as much to hide the taste of warm plastic bottle water as for hydration benefits.

Energy drink when riding hard or long.

Don’t like the strava one based off HR – it massively overvalues some rides and undervalues others.

Have a strong coffee before riding = bigger score
Go out riding later in training block when HR is suppressed by fatigue = hardly any score.

Also, miss one ride with power/hr and your chart is screwed as you cant manually enter it = one of reasons I cancelled my premium.

Was 7 days straight of 3-6 hours per days riding. Around 1200m climbing average per day… My legs felt OK on the way home, but are still now feeling pretty heavy ! How long should i expect to need to recover after a week like that ?

Kinda depends on how deep you had to go each day and how well you recover.
Short easy spins as recommended by nathb above, but don’t be surprised if it takes 1-2 weeks for legs to feel fresh again.

Birds are lightweight things and less massive than they look.

Loads of Buzzards round here, and having had one fly out ~1m in front of me on the bike, I can safely say that up close they are even bigger than they look.

Probably could take a very small cat, but seems unlikely.

Re. froome. Did less well in TT than expected, faded on the final climb. So seemingly not quite there, he says he’s got stuff to work on, but three weeks to go, including tapering theres not much time for improvement?

At 3 weeks out it’s entirely possible he came to CdD half gubbed at the end of a training block and all he has to do now is rest/taper.
Although I think he’s just not there this year – which may be great news for Thomas – Landa and Froome make for a strong pair of domestiques!

Certainly quite a final stage.
We could have an exciting TDF ahead.

It’s a good job track is too easy and not tech enough to create differences or Gwin might have finished half a day ahead 🙂

Ben Swift got hold of some of Valverde’s energy drink? 😯

Maybe my maths is faulty, but when you rule out the 13 under EVEL, you also rule out the SNP thereby increasing their majority for EVEL votes?

No, she’s still one of the strongest politicians in the country, and would probably make a better PM than either TM/JC.
Needs to put aside the obsession with independence for a bit though.

Are the compounds new?

Reading between the lines it looks a lot like they’ve poached a compounds engineer from Conti and Addix is probably based strongly on Black Chilli and tweaked enough to avoid any patent problems.
https://www.schwalbetires.com/addix-compound/%5B/url%5D

now let’s imagine where we’d be if the established labour party hadn’t spent the last 2 years telling us how rubbish jezza was.

We’d be sitting watching TM bungle along for another 3 years as she’d never have called an early GE if JC had looked this strong all along.

08/06/2022

would they want to go again on tight margins with the momentum against them?

They’d be crazy to go again until they actually come up with some policies.
They already tried ‘stay mostly quiet and hope for 5 years of the same’ and it didn’t work.

Well I guess I was wrong, wasn’t a waste of £100m after all

I’m pretty sure we could have found better uses for it.
Should send a bill to the conservative party for it.

I imagine some of the east coast scottish voters were going after Brexit due t the fishing industry…hate quaotas more than tories?

Possibly that, but I think more just fed up of SNP relentlessly gnawing at the independence bone. SNP need to get on and focus on delivering good government for 10-15 yrs.

Yes she should definitely go.
Can’t imagine anyone is queuing up to take over though

Ahh ****, SNP hold NE Fife by 2 votes

Well this is looking like quite a mess going forward.
Can’t see Conservatives getting much through parliament, although having said that, they didn’t seem to have much in the way of new policy anyway.

My seat still to announce, hopefully continues trend of SNP losses.

First flip of the night, +1 Lab, -1 SNP

Sky news here.