It’s a Fox Van RC with metric sizing effectively, so it’ll give similar results to that.

Can’t say I’ve ever missed having a climb switch on my RS Super Deluxe, but each to their own…

JP

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Thread drift, people. Stay on topic or lose it, please.

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Serious question: why are mods on here so active on this sort of thing and on vague thread duplication? Other forums of which I’m a member take a much more laissez faire approach to this sort of thing and the world hasn’t ended. It sometimes feels a bit like being back at school on here.

JP

I’m doing a round of the Southern Enduro in about 6 weeks time.

I’ve been focusing on going as fast as I possibly can on descents – sprinting where possible – then doing long steady climbs. I’ve also tried to replicate the sort of descents I’ll be riding (3-4 minutes long, natural stuff) where possible.

Also doing running on other days.

JP

As stated above, you don’t need a thermal one.

I’ve done a fair number of middle to long distance tris in water around that temperature, where you’re in the water for some time and have never found it a problem in a standard thickiness tri wetsuit.

JP

Nukeproof Mega also works well with a coil.

This is true, but my experience was that while coil solved the problems it had with air shocks, it was still a bit underwhelming and annoyingly inefficient.

Weird – never found mine inefficient or underwhelming. Do you mean the older faux bar Mega or the newer metric Horst link one?

JP

I seem to be alone in not liking Black Mirror. I like Brooker’s other work: Nathan Barley was genius, as were the various Brooker-fronted shows, but Black Mirror is so relentlessly misanthropic and dystopian that, despite usually being quite clever, it starts to get a bit tiring after a while.

JP

We did LA out to Vegas via Joshua Tree, then up through Death Valley, then Napa, North California then worked our way down the coast.

We didn’t stay in Vegas – just did a day there, which was enough for me. If we hadn’t been close anyway I probably wouldn’t have bothered.

Best bits for me were Napa Valley (beautiful and drank some great wine at Stag’s Leap), staying in Marin County right on SF Bay and riding Repack, Yosemite, the Pacific Coast Highway and the interesting bits of LA.

One of the best trips we’ve done.

JP

Commencal Clash and Meta. Nukeproof Mega also works well with a coil.

JP

Plenty of rose-tinted glasses/weird old git stuff on here.

Modern mtbs are massively better than older stuff in every way – geometry, shifting, suspension, brakes. I really can’t see how you could objectively argue that this isn’t the case.

JP

I’ve got some very special coffee in from Gardelli (2017 World Roasting Champion). I could do you a deal if you’re interested.

JP

Someone I know had an affair with Boris. Never had the nerve to ask her to dish the dirt on him, especially as she’s never mentioned it (perhaps for obvious reasons – not sure what possessed her).

JP

You lot care about the climbs? What are you – roadies?

JP

Yeah – for some reason it’s almost impossible to find the overall world cup standings until they are published by one of MTB websites. Why the UCI don’t publish them but do publish a weird amalgam of international and national race points is completely beyond me.

JP

I’m shocked that it’s only 40%

Still, I don’t understand why the other 60% are ‘weird misfits’.

Did I say that?

JP

My understanding of the clean air zones in various cities is that they are Euro 6 for diesel, so it shouldn’t be a problem if you’re buying new. Those regs may change in future, so I guess it depends on how long you plan to keep the car.

It does surprise me how poor real world MPGs are for modern diesels – most of my friends get around 40 – 45mpg from brand new A6s, 3 series, etc, yet my old Elise used to average 45mpg no matter how hard I drove it. Apples and oranges, no doubt, but it was a 20 year old car; I’d expected more from cars with quoted combined MPGs of 60.

JP

I think it’s time there was a bit more honesty about drugs. At the moment there’s this weird sanctimonious disapproval of them from the government, yet we all know that around forty percent of people under the age of 60 (and by inference, a decent proportion of MPs) have used illegal drugs at some point in their lives.

Personally, I’d be more in favour of a politican who had taken drugs and experienced life than one of the weird teetotal misfit wannabe politicans that the Oxbridge Unions occasionally produce.

Huxley had it right both in Heaven and Hell and Doors of Perception; it’s a shame that society can’t be more intelligent about this sort of thing.

JP

Or maybe we should all drive around with a person walking in front of us waving a red flag.

The widely quoted UWE study on the Bristol 20mph limit is shonky research, yet is repeated by the media as if it’s been brought down from Mount Sinai by Moses. I quote:

‘Because of the study design employed, it is not possible to state with certainty that the reductions in casualties are due to the introduction of the 20mph limits.’

I now await the rabidly anti-car faction of STW’s responses.

XX
JP

My mate had the same problem – his Commencal XL was too short in the reach.

We narrowed his options down to the following:

Geometron
Pole
Nukeproof Mega
Mondraker Foxy
Commencal Clash

In the end he went for the Clash – 500mm reach, so not too long to not be playful on the jumps, etc and with a great spec for the money. Also comes with a very adjustable coil in the top spec, which he needs due to his weight (air shocks struggle when you’re over 105 kgs) Just a shame that Commencal managed to lose his Signature spec XL after he’d paid for it and had no others in stock. They’ve now managed to build up a bike for him from the A La Carte option, but it’s delayed things by several weeks.

JP

Sounds good then. My five year old deore 2pots are the only modern Shimano brakes I’ve had that don’t do the bite point thing, so if these share that’s reliability they will be great.

Wonder what makes posher Shimano brakes less reliable?

Also – how do they compare with Zees for power, anyone?

With Saint pads in they don’t feel much different in power to Zees or the XTR 4 pots I’ve tried.

JP

Done 700km on mine, all off road, with no issues and no wandering bite point.

JP

Go for the cheapest halls that are relatively near to the university.

Expensive halls tend to attract the richer overseas students, mainly Chinese, who generally don’t interact much with other students, so make of that what you will.

JP

If living in the “culturally rich” city meant being around judgemental knobs like you I’d opt for the other one.

HTH

You OK, hun?

JP

Commencal are running out their remaining 2019 bikes at the moment, with the 2020 models becoming available from July. I’d probably wait a bit and either grab a bargain on one of the remaining 2019 models or get one of the newer ones.

JP

@hols2, that’s what’s known as Sprinting, all part of the speed event discipline which includes hillclimbing, tarmac against the clock stuff. Always a wide variety of cars from modified production cars, Caterhams to F1 style single seaters and everything in between, motorbikes too.

Much much better spectator sport than processional circuit stuff. IMHO of course.

Hmmm – not sure about that. I raced in the ASWMC series for a while many years ago and dragged my wife to quite a few windy circuits. Not sure she’d agree that it was better than F1.

JP

Everest had never been on my main list of things to do, but I maintained a vague aspiration to climb it one day, until a guy came into my shop who’d actually done it. It had cost a fortune, due to all the preparation, licences and equipment needed, he lost his front teeth when a boulder hit his face halfway up and the whole experience sounded miserable.

The picture above is a little misleading – according to a quick Google search, around 4000 people have reached the summit since the 1950s. The picture makes it look like it’s that many in a week.

JP

Deore 4 pots are pretty great – dirt cheap and don’t seem to suffer from variable bit point like some of the other Shimano 4 pots.

JP

Triscombe, Wind Hill, Tidworth,

JP

Thanks all – useful stuff there.

JP

I had (and still have some) bikes with every type of rim brake – side pulls, U brakes, Maguras, V brakes, cantis and even Grafton Speed Controllers, and they were all terrible. I’m surprised, given the option of having disc brakes, that anyone would still want rim brakes.

JP

Boris won’t win. Gove has shown himself to be inept and awful in all previous positions (his work on education was pitiful) – surprised anyone would rate him as a potential leader.

JP

Didn’t think anyone did anything different – brakes have been powerful enough for long enough now that I thought using more than one finger would have died out long ago.

JP

We use this service quite a bit and most of the time it gets delivered on the next working day. Do you live somewhere weird?

JP

dangeourbrain

Subscriber

Just as an aside, why would stock levels not being zeroed or indeed being zero have any influence on preorders for frames that haven’t been built yet?

The “stock” is just a qty manually assigned to the item (obviously there should be some logic behind it), it won’t be a fully automated amazon warehouse style operation, it’ll be done by hand.

So for example if they knew the next batch would be 50 frames they’d allocate 50 stock to the pre-order, the system will be set up to refuse orders for which there is zero stock so would prevent people being able to order frames that won’t get produced as part of the batch.
The stock system has no concept of whether the item is a preorder frame, physical stock of a frame or a t shirt, they’re just text descriptors.

Of course in the particular case the system appears to have been given 10^z stock so that doesn’t hold.

No – it doesn’t quite work like that – at least not with the versions of Shopify and other ecommerce software I’ve used. Generally, you can manually add a number of items that are in stock. Pre-orders or back orders are enabled by checking a separate box. If the quantity is 0 and the back order box is checked it will let the customer order, but will usually display a message (in our case we have something along the lines of ‘This is a back order item, please allow an extra 4 days for delivery’).

It’s possible to change the quantity to 0 and forget to disable back orders, but you’d have to be a complete doofus to do that.

JP

Touring bike
Tent
Sunscreen
Download “Archie’s camping” POI database to your garmin of all European campsites.
Head to mainland Europe
Cycle across it, enjoying amazing food & wine

I did that many years ago and it was the single most miserable holiday of my life. It rained every day and there are few things worse than packing down a wet tent, cycling in the rain, then setting up a wet tent in the rain. Couldn’t seem ever to get properly warm, and this was the middle of summer.

JP

I think a much cheaper option would be to do the following with your Meta:

Stick some lighter tyres on
Pump them up more than usual
Pump up your fork and shock more than usual
Ride faster/steeper/jumpier trails

JP

If you want a project do it. If you expect it to make any difference to your coffee then you’ll be disappointed.

I’ve got naked and spouted filters on the FB80 and I generally use the naked ones, but only because they’re slightly easier to work with (they don’t retain water in the spout when you wash them out, you can fit takeaway cups on scales under them more easily and they’re easier to clean). Taste wise there is zero difference (some nutters on coffee forums will tell you otherwise, but they’re deluded).

Was that snobby enough?

JP

I really don’t think 10 or 20mms less travel is going to make that much difference.

What, specifically, do you think is wrong with the Meta?

JP

This whole thing is like a case study in how not to run a startup.

They did a brilliant job at marketing and initial PR, and they found a nice little niche that could have been profitable had they not massively cocked it all up.

There is some weird stuff in the PB article – for instance they claim that the Paypal disputes procedure is slowing down refunds; this is completely false. This only happens when you refuse the refund in the first place (for example, I’ve only ever had it go that far in my business when I had evidence from a courier that the customer has signed and received an item, yet they were claiming they hadn’t – I wasn’t prepared to refund them when they were blatantly lying, so let Paypal sort it out). So, presumably, they’re letting the Paypal dispute runs its course with each case, rather than refunding, because they don’t have sufficient cashflow to refund instantly.

JP

Cheers all.

Looks like he’s going with a Commencal Clash, which is 497 reach and comes with a coil and a Fox 36 in top spec.

JP

Put the code stamped on the back of the crown into the Rockshox Trailhead app and it will tell you the model and year.

JP