Minimal experience of the Talas I’m afraid. My comparison is with a 2010 Float RC2.

None in Black Chilli though….

IMHO I think the Deville does give up some comfort in the name of control. You pays your money and take your choice!

Hotel in Austrian Alps

Went to this place last summer. Kids loved it as did the wife, and I got to do quite a bit of biking.

For the UK, we’ve found self-catering the best way to mix biking and family hols.

Saw in the New Year with a sloe gin & champagne cocktail! Awesome stuff!!

Mojo HD140 with BOS forks, XO 2×10 groupset and easton carbon wheels

Tick – well almost – XTR 1×10 😉

For me, I’ve got to buy bikes with the heart ruling just as much as the head!
Buy second-hand – that way if you get it wrong, you shouldn’t lose too much money! My best purchase was a second-hand Titus frame in a titanium / carbon mix (what they call exogrid) off Ebay. Cost me about 30% of what it would have been RRP, including a CK headset. Truth be told it rides well, but no better than a load of other bikes out there, but it’s a thing of beauty, a stunning bit of engineering, and pretty rare too!

Troutie – would you also be able to do this for a Liberator? Any idea of cost and turnaround (and for the mini for that matter).

PM me if prefered on ajryan@btinternet.com

Mavic too.

My vintage Hei Hei only gets out a couple of times per year, but it did get raced a month or so ago!

Let me know if you get any joy with Madison. Would love to do the deal!

geetee1972 looked into this a while ago – sadly madison are not taking part but L&M will do it directly but obviously you have to send to the US. They are offering to upgrade a HID to the latest 1400 lumin jobby for $225.

Reverb is approx 195mm
Joplin 3 is approx 150mm

For a Joplin 4 I guess you’d add 25mm (1″) so approx 175mm.

If you went for the Reverb you may be all right if you set the rebound speed to slow so it wouldn’t kick you in the arse too hard!

Got a set of the older ones. Not the stiffest out there but like them a lot.

For my wife’s 40th we hired a big house for the weekend with enough space to sleep a load of mates and their kids and got some outside caterers in for the dinner on the Saturday night.

For my 40th she took me to Verbier for a weekend’s mountain biking and hiking with no kids! I know which one I enjoyed most! 😉

As TLR says, the CCDB is incredibly adjustable and therefore easy to get horribly wrong. Having said that, I found Malcolm at Cane Creek incredibly helpful in giving me settings specific to the bike (a DW 5-Spot) that seemed pretty much spot-on to me. As such, swapping an RP23 for the CCDB was an incredible upgrade – was like riding with a rear tyre that was 50% bigger was the best way I found to describe it!

You can’t beat this place for the big kid in you….

http://www.snowdoniamanor.co.uk/

Has it’s own request stop on the Ffestiniog Steam Railway, is 15 mins drive to Coed-y-Brenin, and 15 mins to the Black Sands beach (drive-on).
Had 2 holidays there now, and can’t recommend it highly enough! Oh – the owners’ son is a mountain biker too, and aledgedly has built some jumps up on the hillside…..

I run The Ones on my Evil Sov and don’t find them overkill. Stronger brakes mean you can run smaller discs which are lighter and offer more modulation.

Between friends I ride with, I’ve tried the Dialled Alpine, on-one 456ti, Evil Sovereign, Cove’s hardtails.
In my view, outside of the 456ti which is stunningly nice to ride, the Alpitude does it all, jump bike, 4x bike, Xc bike, street bike.

What JP forgot to say is that the Evil Sov does it all better! 😉

Too short for bikes with sloping top tubes – like On Ones.

Last time I looked at GA, it didn’t appear to have seen much traffic, which is a shame as it’s a cracking trail, and def of the more freeride-y trails around.
I’m not a big fan of giving away trail locations on the internet, but it’s accessed of the road between the church and Dorking.

Thanks heihei. The Covert is on the list, though a single pivot does put me off a little, I’d need to get a ride on one. The only single pivot I’ve had a proper go on is a five and it wasn’t really for me.

I tried a covert and liked it a lot based on geometry, but wasn’t so keen on the single pivot. I fitted a CCDB to it, and whilst it improved things a lot, it still wasn’t as good as a DW etc.

Interesting comment about the DW 5 spot. It’s been on and off the list for a while (currently off). Really want to try a DW bike as the mojo is on the list too.
What did you go for in the end?

The 2011 5-Spot is slacker and lower based on rider feedback. It’s still not super-slack though, but it’s also got a 1.5″ bottom race so you could add an angleset to slacken further.
I’ve gone for a Mojo HD, which I’m growing to love….160mm is great around rocks of the Lake District, and 140mm is nice and low around Surrey Hills.

Greg – speak to my wife, she’ll explain it to you, including why she felt the need to stay up and watch the end of the last test then waking me up at midnight when she finally came to bed!!

I was looking at the Spitfire when considering changing my DW 5-Spot (too big & too steep), and the Spitfire came up on the list. At the time (November), Freeborn were selling everything that came through, so hadn’t had a chance to build a demo, and I wasn’t about to buy one without testing.
Something that put me off was that it’s a linkage design done in-house – it may end up being great, but I’d want to test it first, and perhaps get others’ views too as to how the linkage stacked up against more developed designs such as VPP, DW, Maestro etc.
Have a look at the Transition Covert – cracking geometry and good price if you’re happy with a single-pivot design.

Anything in the mountains around Soller, esp the brutal climb from Soller up to the tunnel!
Road up the coast from Palma towards Deia is pretty stunning too.

DW Link is the best design I’ve ridden to date. I haven’t found any major downsides yet, over and above things like added complexity over single pivot designs.
BTW whilst many of the DW designs have been built around using an air can, coil shocks work well – I ran a CCDB on my 5-Spot and was blown away with the improvement it made. The Mojo HD can also be run with a coil, with Ibis recommending a Fox RC4, but having spoken to Cane Creek, you can also make sensible adjustments to them to adapt it.

Yep that’s me! Small world! Maybe I should change his name by deed poll to Mojo! Still own my original HL 5 Spot though. Tell Hoffers to grow some balls and get back to biking and climbing!!

I rode same area as russjp, and at 8.30 everything was firm and fun, but by 12.30 it was thawing which made any patches of snow incredibly unpredictable. It’s now raining in Godalming, so suspect tomorrow will be pretty minging! Quite glad I’m off to the Lakes for a week!!

Is that a Kingdom Foia??

Am runningn XTR 1×10 so rear cassette, mech, shifters and chain and loving it.

Joplin 3 and Maverick Speedball are interchangeable – given how many dead speedballs there are around you might get lucky with one of these.

Coastkid – cracking video. Something a bit different – nice.

Phil

GT has covered the equipment we used. I’d make a few observations…

First one is that it takes time, and quite a bit of it. For the snow film we spent ovr 2hrs filming and the same again editing for a 2.5min clip. To get something good therefore, you can’t just include it as part of a normal ride – I always pre-agree with others when we’re going to film, so then everyone accepts what’s involved.
Second one is to have an idea of what you want to achieve, so you’re not wasting time out on the trail. I’d ridden this trail a few times, so I had an idea of how I wanted it to look on film – it’s a flow trail with some sweet drifty corners and a few floaty jumps, and that’s what I wanted to get across.
Last one is commit the time to editing it well – no-one wants to see the dull bits where you’re running around triggering the camera etc (although GT’s helmet cam footage included the bit with me climbing the tree which might have been quite funny)!

Sounds like you have the right idea so look forward to seeing the results!

Biggest difference to sound I ever made to my kit was to stick the CD player on half squash balls! Even my wife could tell the difference!

You beat me to it! In that case I’ll post this….

Believe it or not, Simon at Nirvana Cycles has designed one and had a few prototypes built! Sells nice bikes too!!

Ha ha – good on you! My id predates it by a good few years though – a 96 vintage ti Hei Hei hardtail.

And what if they eat all the cheese straws?

Would give the shop another excuse for a price rise!! Still – I’d probably do the same given their captive market and they are very good!!

I’m aware that it’s a highly selfish view to take, and that collectively we should be encouraging others to take up something active like biking, BUT…. I can’t help thinking that in an area that is already crowded and coming under pressure from the volume of users, that bringing more people into the area may not be a great idea.
It needs to be remembered that the Surrey Hills is not a trail centre!!

Am I the only one thinking as selfishly??

Cheers LoCo – would be 8.5″ x 2.5″ and/or 7.875″ x 2″

Propel are no longer the importers – it’s switched to Silverfish. Might be worth giving them a call and see what they recommend.
Head for the Hills in Dorking service my Formula The Ones and seem to know what they are doing.