Was just about to post a similar thread so apologies for jumping on this one! I am in Dumfries and Galloway for a corporate outdoors jolly in September so was planning to stay on for a day or two and hit some trails.

What is Ae like as that is nearest to where I am staying?

Have you had a look on YouTube? When my ride on stopped working I found some great service vids on there made by people who clearly have far too much time on their hands! Mine wasn’t a Mountfield though

They have rental ones at the FOD I believe.

They’re awesome bikes and very capable. I only have the standard CTD Kashima shock on mine and have done plenty of DH focused uplift stuff in the UK and Europe and it never ceases to amaze me . You only need to watch Neil Donoghue ride one to see what they are capable of. They really are the perfect bike for all occasions although I occasionally think that a Tallboy plus Nomad could be the way to do it…!

I’ve got a large Bronson and am 6′ tall and it feels just right for me. Depending where you are you are more than welcome to give it a try.

I’ve done the Alps a few times but last year went to Portugal and loved to!

Original post and review here

YHM

What’s your email address and I’ll send you the details.

thestabiliser – Member
Q5 is a great car..
perhaps but it is also a bit spendy.

Fair enough although based on previous experience of me having Germans cars and the wife having japanese, they often hold their value better so can cost less to own overall.

Q5 is a great car..

I have a couple of flats in Balham and recently had a new boiler fitted by a plumber from where I am now (25 miles west of London). His sister lives there so he’s down that way a lot. I also do have the number for another guy who did a boiler in another flat a few years ago and did a good job. From memory, a new combi with system flush etc was sub £2k. Let me know if you want their details.

Interesting post as I did my first ever run on saturday (well, since cross country and school 21 years ago). I used to ride my bike twice a week, 12-15 miles off road on an evening ride and 15-25 on a Sunday morning, but since I started commuting back into London at the beginning of the year, I am never home in time for the midweek ride so it is back to just Sunday at present. I go boxing twice a week which has helped keep my bike fitness at an OK level, but I just couldn’t seem to improve it, almost regardless of how hard I rode.

I was chatting to a mate of mine who has raced national DH and more recently the EWS and he told me that running has made a big difference to his bike fitness and is something he can do within the limited time that your own business and a young family allows. He runs 4 mornings a week for about 30-35 minutes at a decent pace on top of his 2 rides a week, so my plan is to ride Sunday, have Monday and Saturday as my rest days, go boxing Tuesday and Thursday and then do a 30 minute run on Wednesday and Friday.

I only did 3k on my first run at about 5m20s/km which felt easy enough at the time and hasn’t damaged me too badly yet!

Should I stick with this for a few weeks until my legs get used to it and then build up the distance, or should I try and get faster over this distance first and then build up the distance later? Just after general fitness improvements and have no desire to be the next Mo Farah, although am pondering the Trans Savoie for 2016.

Muddy Bronson by CJK007[/url], on Flickr

Very muddy morning in Wendover. Good fun though and saw a lot of other MTBers out and about.

LOL – a mate of mine with 3 kids told me he had never had a bath with them which I thought was rather sad. My 9 year old daughter is getting more aware of her body now but I don’t cover up in front of any of them yet. I guess it’s time to stop when they start getting embarrassed by it – high school probably?

TheOtherJamie – Member

I’d beg to differ but this is STW not Pistonheads.

LOL! Good price – I had a few options added to mine (can you believe folding rear seats are not standard!?

stumpy01 – Member

Golf it just said ‘call us’ and wouldn’t give an online quote.
One site I found that would quote for a Golf was £466/month for 20k miles and £523/month for 30k miles. There wasn’t a 25k option on the website.

Don’t forget you can do a low contract mileage and just pay the extra at the end. If my wife did 25K per annum in her R then the excess would be 17,000 x 7.2 p which is £1224 per year or £102 a month, making the total cost £350 per month. If maintenance is included then there is often an excess charge for this too (as she only does 8k miles per annum her’s isn’t maintained)

Drac – Moderator
Thought I’d get a quote for the M5 just for comparison. £1200 per month for 3 years

Yes the deals of 12-18 months ago were very good!

curiousyellow – Member
I did a quick calculation for the basic 5 door Golf which is what we’re planning on getting. It costs £21,670 new. PCP over 3 years costs a shade over £16,000. I’d then hand it back.

A 3 year old 1.6 Golf with 30k miles on it goes for around 12000 on Autotrader. If I were able to sell it on for that much then I’d be looking at a loss of £9670.

Seems I’d save £7000 just buying brand new and taking the depreciation? Or am I missing something here?

No, that is a very bad value finance deal! My wife has got a new Golf R 5 door which is £220 per month on a lease so total cost over 2 years is only £6380 (inc VAT). That is for a £31k list price car.

When I got my M5 the lease price was £550+VAT so total cost over 2 years is £19,140.00 inc VAT. The list price was £75k and at the time, you could get roughly a 12% discount off list price so that would’ve made the buy price £63k ish. If you didn’t want to lease, you could either pay cash, traditional finance or PCP. PCP is the closest comparison to leasing but the deposit needed was double and the monthly payment £150 more. 2 year old M5s are selling for £45k ish at main dealers, so the PX figure would be more like £40k so a £23k depreciation plus interest on the monthlies making the total cost closer to £30k.

Obviously no-one ‘needs’ a brand new M5, but if it’s affordable and works out significantly cheaper to lease then why not?

LHS – Member
I can’t imagine any situation where leasing will be cheaper than buying smartly.

Not every decision in life should be made with an Excel spreadsheet! Much like expensive mountain bikes with XT or XTR rather than Deore, cars are often an emotional purchase. Sure I could run a 3 year old Kia diesel for much less than my new M5, but I can afford it and it makes me smile every time I drive it, so why shouldn’t I? There is no way I could run a new or nearly new M5 for anything like the cost of leasing it, but you are quite right that I could’ve boight a 520D smartly and saved money.

chiefinspector – Member
I am considering doing this for my next car later in the year. Couple of questions though:

Are you restricted as to how much of a deposit you can put down i.e to keep the monthly payments lower?

Do the monthly payments increase/ decrease depending on how much milage you state?

Normally the deposit is 3, 6 or 9 months advance rental payments. Putting more in does lower the monthlies, but I don’t see why you’d want to do that as the total cost is the same over the period and you could stick the extra deposit into an ISA or something and earn a bit from it.

Yes mileage does affect the rentals and not always in a logical manner. On my wife’s car, the excess mileage charge is 7.2p per mile, which is less than the increased lease payment would be if we added an extra 3k miles per annum for example. To work out the best option, get a lease quote for say 10k miles per annum and then 20k miles per annum, and add the excess charge onto the 10k figure to work out the actual cost per mile for say 60k miles (total rental cost for 20k miles versus 10k miles plus the excess charge divided by total mileage)

djglover – Member
Thats the business model though, once they’ve got you in you are stuck in the cycle and the prices will go up for the next car up the ladder etc. You’re not likely to get out of your M135i and into a Skoda so you’ll be in a 435i paying £500!

Or an M5 paying…..

Leasing doesn’t really work if you do massive miles – they’re aimed at the normal 10k per annum driver. A good rule of thumb is that if the monthly payment is less than 1% of the list price of the car it’s a good deal as most new cars lose 50% of their new price over 3 years which is 1.66% per month give or take.

I lease my cars. As I change them every 2-3 years it makes the most financial sense and I don’t give two hoots about not actually owning them. It all depends on the car and the deals available, but for some it is undoubtedly the most cost effective way of driving certain cars. I reckon I’ll be at least £10k better off then if I had bought my car cash at the end of the term looking at the price of used ones now, never mind the fact that the cash can be invested and earn me money in the interim.

Thanks guys – very useful input. Think I’ll give the FR Enduro a whirl and will report back with my thoughts.

Bearings on my Bronson are 12 months old and still feel fine. How often do you use the grease gun?

If it’s a vaguely valuable bike it might be worth contacting The Seatpost Man![/url]

I ride Aston quite a lot but agree that it’s not ideal for a first visit when it’s wet. I did a great 18 mile loop from Wendover on Wednesday which I’ve not done before with a mate who’s more local than me and liked to study the maps. Saw a few MTBers out and about (said hello to a guy on a Canyon when I stopped for a pee! – anyone from here?)

Quick update – the Helion was duly delivered by Santa and has gone down a storm! My 7 year old has really got to grips with driving it and it’s very fast and tough.

Fantastic service from Wheelspin models too. Both highly recommended.

.mikewsmith – Member
34 yes, TALAS no.

The 2014 Talas bear no resemblance to earlier ones at all and feel very similar to floats.

2014 Talas are fine. Was very happy with mine but, when mine needed a service I swapped to a float cartridge for an extra £60 or so as I didn’t use the Talas part and had them tuned a little. They’re now every bit as good as Pikes, so if they’re a good price then go for it.

Rorschach – Member
So all BIKES then…….amazing.

Sorry, forgot to mention the guys riding the unicorn and wild boar..

A flipping legend! A very heavy night for me this week with clients and an endless glass of wed wine and no food meant that I made it home only for the room to spin like crazy as soon as I hit the pillow. I managed to NOT quite make it to the bathroom. Woke up in the morning feeling very rough and she’d cleaned it all up and managed to strip the bed around me as the remnants ended up on the pillow and duvet.

I came home the day after and she’d been and hired a carpet cleaner to get the red wine puke stains out…

She obviously wants someyhing, but nonetheless I was suitably impressed and reminded once again why I married her and managed to create three beautiful offspring to continue the gene pool..

I’ve given everyone an extra 2 days paid holiday – unsure if that counts as a bonus or not but they all seemed happy enough with that.

My 7 year old bought himself the Hubsan nanocopter in the shop at the Science Museum for £30. It’s very impressive but way too tricky for an under 10 to fly safely as it’s very sensitive and doesn’t have guards around the rotors so if when you hit something they crash quite spectacularly!

Because he was rather deflated after trying to fly it, I ordered him one of these today Syma X3 which is much bigger and has guards around the rotors and gets good reviews.

I’m going to tell him that someone at work bought it but wants to swap for a nanocopter..

Attacks here too.

Most AV amps, even high end ones, are pretty average in stereo mode and in my experience, even a £500 stereo amp will sound better than a £1000 AV receiver for 2 channel music.

However, if it is just for pumping some music into your conservatory, it’ll be absolutely fine. You can get very inexpensive AV receivers with network connectivity now so you can control it from a smart phone which might be useful.

Curiousyellow – as above, adding a sub won’t make the system any ‘louder’, especially as human ears are far more sensitive to mid and high frequency sounds, but if your current speakers are quite small, the sub would mean it should be able to go louder before the speakers start flapping and should just sound ‘fuller’ at most volume levels.

A mate of mine rode Aston Hill recently on his Stumpy 29er FSR (130mm F&R) and reckoned it was as quick as his 26″ 160mm enduro, BUT, he said he lacked confidence getting it off the ground in any major way and felt nervous on some of the drops and nowhere near as much ‘fun’. With that in mind I am sure that if getting down quickly is your thing, then a burly 29er is fine, but if you’d rather mess about and have a little more security if you get it slightly wrong, then a 650B 160mm machine would be ideal.

I rode BPW on my Bronson and it was the perfect bike for there, but it’s also as easy to take on 50km rides than his Stumpy 29er.

A mate of mine rode Aston Hill recently on his Stumpy 29er FSR (130mm F&R) and reckoned it was as quick as his 26″ 160mm enduro, BUT, he said he lacked confidence getting it off the ground in any major way and felt nervous on some of the drops and nowhere near as much ‘fun’. With that in mind I am sure that if getting down quickly is your thing, then a burly 29er is fine, but if you’d rather mess about and have a little more security if you get it slightly wrong, then a 650B 160mm machine would be ideal.

I rode BPW on my Bronson and it was the perfect bike for there, but it’s also as easy to take on 50km rides than his Stumpy 29er.

I’ve got ‘athletic’ calves as well and have some Gore bib tights (unsure which ones but they are padded) and haven’t had any issues with them riding up. They’re stretchy enough and nice and warm so thumbs up from here.