mk1fan – you really do run the risk of just putting her right off it all though.

I know it was all rigid forks back in the day and we all got on fine, but it is tough (I still ride rigid now and again) and MTBing was a lot less popular back then – had to be hard innit!

Just leave the Tora on. If she’s having trouble lifting the front end, it’ll be technique more than the fork weight that’s the issue anyway, if she’s anything like my Mrs she’ll be trying to lift the front with her arms and upper body alone and not using her body weight and legs through he cranks… Technique!

Possibly. I plonked my Mrs straight on a full susser. There was always a gamble that she wouldn’t take to it but she has.

She might plough on through sections relying on the suss but what’s more important – that she develop the skills to ride it perfectly on a rigid bike or that she’s riding at all and enjoying it?

Conti Mountain Kings and Explorers – I have extra hate for the Explorers as they came fitted on a bike and I used them for years not knowing any better. I look back and laugh how I bought them time and time again when they wore out as well!

Joined a club, a guy leant me some Kenda Nevegals, realised that tyres were not created equally and suddenly my tyre fettish began…

1 tab in 2 litres for normal riding, 4 tabs in 2 litres for racing…

Lapierre Froggy, 7 incher…

I’d agree with Sharki’s assessment. A lot of the descents at Afan are very drawn out and pedally still, having ridden a Froggy there, I’d still pick a 5″ bike in order to get down quicker…

Even on the enduro, you’re only actually timed on one climbing section which the winner will do in about 5 mins I think, most about 10…

Our design studio stashed all the booze for the launch tonight – spent an hour lugging it all down to a van while his minions made phone calls and didn’t help.

Refused tickets to the launch tonight and we were begrudgingly given 24 bottles of Carlsberg to share… EDIT: after being warned to NOT touch the booze as if we were some alchy thieving scum (all designers dressed in shirt and trousers)

I love celebrity!

130mm max on the ST4 :-/
Does it have to be 140mm (i.e an existing fork?) An ST4 on Maxle Rebas would be immense! I found I was going so dam fast half the time that it was just skipping straight over the nasties! (And that was on the 9mm Recons)

(I did miss the 140mm at the 75km mark of my test ride on it when I was proper ****)

WMB really liked it…

http://www.bikeradar.com/gear/category/bikes/mountain/product/dawg-08-28294

ST4 110mm rear, 120mm front

Seriously smitten with this bike, I need to get back on my Five and try and fall in love with it again before I do something stupid!

Fox don’t ask anything more than say Rockshox – it’s not a ‘service’ every 15 hours FFS! If you actually read your RS manual, the same is required…

But ignoring all that, I had a set of abused (cwmcarn, afan, Qs, Mendips and of course muddy old Bristol) foxes finally serviced after 18 months and they were fine. *shrug*

And ADH at his best…

My response to the Bristol Bike Fest start being delayed and the well timed rain shower kicking in…

Last lap of the clic24

I’ve used enterprise a few times now – always have offers on and the cars are usually very good.

Cheers guys!

I’ve not put them on flickr because if I put them all up there it will clog up my account. Probably just easier to right-click save them or just right click get url and hotlink them…

They’re on photobucket but if you could credit them to http://www.garylake.co.uk that would be awesome…

Ok, First batch – LVIS riders… (again, sorry about quality of some of them :))

Surely it’s the Stumpjumper?

Yup fair enough!

(and yes, pretty much all of them have some kind of flash sync issue – noob!)

Yeah, don’t get too excited people, I shot plenty of crap ones so there’s guarantee yours will be good :)

Still hopefully you’ll find them a bit more exciting and dynamic than the rather static (albeit perfectly shot) mass shot ones you have to pay for…

Yeah, just think how much traffic that’ll drum up by the time every cyclist with an internet connection has had that come round – all those page impressions are probably doing wonders for ad revenue!

What’s more worrying is the few that do read this tripe and carry that belief around with them.

There’s a female bus driver in Bristol I’ve seen going round deliberately running cyclist off the road (myself included) – I’ve seen the same one do it three times on Park Street alone but I’ve yet to be quick enough to catch the route number…

Gary, the new P7 bears very little resemblance to the P7 of old. I remember there being howls of protest from certain people about them being made all “hardcore”.

Myself included actually :) I had one of the last not-hardcore ones before it got half inched in 2007.

I think the current P7 is a modern classic, great bike but they put the wrong name on the top tube!

Not sure how old the Orange 5 is, maybe too old, but its continuing popularity automatically makes it a modern classic to me.

Well someone set the date at 2000 and the first sub-5 was 2000 I believe…

It just a bunch of oldish bikes as far as I’m concerned.

What are you actually referring to?

Oh and the P7 – possibly the longest running model name in the biz?

(Although I accept this probably falls into the already a classic in it’s own right)

Orange Five for sure then – slowly evolved since 2000 and stick kicking arse left right and centre – an inconvenient truth to advocates of modern suss bikes.

It’s the Porsche 911 of mountain bikes for sure! Supposedly fundamentally flawed but still one of the best!

Done a QR to 15QR here. Needed needle nose pliers to remove the old QR adapters as the O-rings had stuck over time.

It is a ridiculously easy job though…

I call BS – there’s no way she’d ever marry that…

Is this what the Jeremy Kyle show is like?

Yes.

Na that’s fine clubber, just link to my flicker page as a credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/zero303

I’ll see what other LVIS one’s I’ve got. Andy’s last one was the best shot I got all evening though. I’ll do a Flickr set just for LVIS…

Andy, your pose factor was immense! Glad I got the shot off then!

Here’s some of team mates and people I know…

All at 10mm with Speedlite Ex430 on hotshoe with diffuser. Grab full sized originals from my flickr page: here

anotherdeadhero – that gurn was purely for the camera I might add – it didn’t appear till I lifted the lens up! ;)

anotherdeadhero giving it the MBUK cover shot treatment… was quite scarey at 10mm!

I’m uploading ones of friends and team mates now, will get any requests sent out at some point this week.

Adobe Bridge and Flickr uploader keep crashing out on me so I’ve closed them down for now.

Floats and Vanillas.

I was going to say, pics or it didn’t happen!

I went hammer and tongs at Afan the weekend before (Penhydd, Wall, Whites and July) with our other Solo rider (who finished 14th, not bad for debut!) and noticed a knee niggle tuesday when I got on the commuter – it never really went away all week and forced me out on the fifth lap, not that it was going well, as I was having horrible drivetrain issues in the first few laps and a double puncture and faulty tube forced me to walk back, abandon and restart lap four…

A farce, was my 12 hour solo debut. I’ll be back though! The one clean lap I had was a very chilled and comfortable 42mins so I was feeling pretty optimistic and settled before lap four and five ruined things…

Antony, got a wicked photo of you btw… will process them all in the week.

I always felt start could be sorted by having the run to the bikes but then lead the pack in a rolling start down the road to the bottom of the deer park and then release the riders as they begin the big climb and complete the second half of the lap.

Ok, it effectively adds half a lap to the initial lap time but it’s the same for everyone and it would quite probably eliminate all of the queuing.

Not that I finished due to injury but it was quite depressing queuing for the bridge for 15 minutes watching other solo riders already coming up to go through the bomb whole.

Brawn himself, and Adrian Newey (Google him if you haven’t heard of him)…

Still nothing in central bristol