It probably costs quite a lot to marshal – I mean you need to pay a bunch of canoeists to marshal the swim, loads of marshals for a long cycle course, and then you still have a marathon worth of running course to marshal.

Then you have timing, first aid, hiring a reservoir etc. which for such a big event isn't going to be cheap.

Then to add to all that, it is triathlon – to enter it you probably have a £2000+ bike, £200 wetsuit, all manner of fancy shoes, tri-suits etc. so they charge what they think you can afford. After all, the big triathlons are very much a business, and they run them like one.

Joe

I have a Wahl one (Super Taper I think), came from some hairdressing supplies site for £40. It doesn't look as fancy as the consumer ones (looks very practical), but it appears to work very well. It has a cable, because I hate the way rechargeable things always turn out to have flat batteries when you actually want to use them. I don't think the cable is a problem.

They come with combs so you can put on a number 2 comb, and in theory all you have to do is run it all over your head and it is done. It is fiddly to do it yourself without missing patches, if you have someone who lives with you, get them to do it for you, quicker & easier. I have my hair cut outside in the yard, or in the bath if it is raining, just because it is easy to clear up (plus if you cut your hair outside in spring, you get to watch the birds pick it up for nesting material which is nice!)

Joe

In a shop they'd have told you that they could order them in if you gave them a deposit, then once they'd got them in (probably 6 months later in my experience), they'd say 'ooh, they'll cost £20 more' and you'd be screwed.

Joe

You did say 'lightweight' didn't you? All of those smart looking old fashioned bikes are going to be 35lb or so. They look jolly nice but they are a pig to ride fast. Lovely if you just want to pootle, but not going to be much easier to ride than a cheap heavy steel bike.

You probably need to find out if she wants a fancy looking steel bike or one that is nice to ride fast and is low effort to ride.

Joe

I'd recommend not buying a platypus – I've been on a couple of trips now where people have had platypus bladders either explode when fallen on, or just start leaking, whereas my 8 year old camelbak one is still okay.

Camelbak used to do lifetime guarantee for the bladders didn't they? If yours is broken it might be worth checking that out.

Joe

A lot of people in New Zealand buy bikes and parts from either shops in the USA or Chain Reaction in the UK by the way. I guess it's the same in Australia.

Joe

He has to clean the frame anyway, so he might as well clean the wheels. Tyres are pretty easy to clean (just hose em down), but they aren't exactly expensive to replace so you might not want to bother with them.

Make sure that he really really cleans it very well – I cleaned mine very well with an old toothbrush and that was okay, but when they checked it in New Zealand they sprayed it with disinfectant and grumped a bit at me. The same when I went to Australia with it, except that time it was super clean and they didn't grump whilst they sprayed the disinfectant.

Cost when I looked at posting a bike the other way was going to be quite a lot, I seem to remember it was over £200. Are any of your family coming to visit – that's the easiest way – especially if you can convince them to come on one of the airlines that does free bike carriage (Air New Zealand do, can't remember which other ones).

Joe

Seriously, whilst product design people are lovely(1), and I'm sure you've got a great idea(2), I'd ask yourself about your idea – would you be willing to risk thousands of pounds of your own money on the idea at this moment? If not, I'd make as cheap a prototype as possible and work on that until you have something where you believe your idea works in practice, so you are confident enough to want to put some money into it – those product design types don't come cheap (and if they're anything like the people I've known in that area, don't work on a percentage of future profits – it'll be billed hours after the initial consultation).

Joe

(1)and there is quite a lot of useful stuff on that site, even if it is a bit biased towards a particular model of making / protecting inventions.

(2)or at least you think it's a great idea

Have you actually built a prototype, or is it just an idea?

If it is just an idea, probably the first thing to do is hack something together.

If you don't have the skills to build whatever it is, then you need to find someone to build you a prototype, which will either require you to find someone with skills who really wants to help and take part in the idea*, or to pay an engineering company to build you one (which requires you to be able to do a full drawing / design of your idea).

Bear in mind that everyone and their dog has a great idea for a fancy widget / bike part / piece of software etc. Ideas are worth nothing without actually building anything, so there's no point in being cagey about your super duper ideas. Building things is what is worth the money, and is where you find out how stupid your idea is. If you can build a prototype, then you actually have something where it is worth considering things like who might build them, how you might avoid them ripping you off and not giving you any money etc.

Another thing that helps is asking other people, getting the idea out there and finding out what the obvious problems with your initial take on it are. The more people you talk to, the more likely you are to meet someone who can help with making it an actual product too, which is the only way you have any chance of making money out of it (assuming that is why you're interested). There is a tiny risk that someone will nick your idea and build it themselves, but to be honest, if the idea is amazingly good, yet dead simple to copy, once you started selling them, some company somewhere would work around any patents that you get and just build them or something similar, so you don't have much to lose, and you gain loads by talking to people.

Joe

*Although if they are any good or sensible, chances are they will want paying for any work on it.

I work in the softwrae industry so dont need a guilt trip about piracy thanks, like bike theft it happens and we're powerless.

Blimey, you think piracy is equal to bike theft, yet you'll happily go out and do it yourself? Do you nick bikes in your spare time?

Joe

hydraulic drive is the way forward in my opinion, but i dont think its working very well at the moment.
cannondale had a concept bike made up, but it hasnt got anywhere yet.

Isn't the efficiency of hydraulic drive about 75% or something silly low – i.e. it'd be like riding with your entire chain covered in mud?

Joe

Humans are about 25% efficient when cycling I believe. This compares fairly well with a petrol engine at 25% but not with a diesel at around 35%. Although I think those figures refer to the engine itself not the whole car whereas the human figure I think refers to an actual cyclist – air resistance etc should make the car worse than the human I'd say. Although are we talking the car travelling the same speed as the cyclist?

Surely even if these efficiency figures are right, those are just energy-in vs energy out efficiencies, which don't mean anything in this situation – the car weighs 10-15 times as much as a single person plus a bike, meaning that to take a person from A to B, the car has to use 10 times as much energy, making your 10% difference in efficiency a drop in the ocean compared to the massive weight difference.

Joe

The rebuild cost should be on one of the survey documents (I think it was on the mortgage valuation that we got). If it is a normal house it is typically a bit less than the price you pay for the house, and you can estimate it using a calculator assuming you know the floor area. For our 3 bed terrace which is listed, rebuild cost is way more than the cost of the house, as you'd have to rebuild it to 1790s standards.

Joe

I think you need to cut a gap in your chainstay or something in order to fit the belt for some reason, although I can't remember why.

A belt off an engine probably won't work – they're fancy special bike belt drives.

Joe

It depends on your lifestyle – if you have a crazy car centric lifestyle where you live 50 miles away from work, then it'd be a hassle.

If (like most people) you live less than about 10 miles from work (more if you're a keen cyclist), then work is pretty easy to do without a car.

Other stuff, there are often people you can pay to do it for you. Like long distance journeys = train, short distance journeys where you need to carry loads = taxi, trips to the dump = white van man, buying furniture etc. = pay £10-20 for delivery (although round near us, most independent furniture etc. shops seem to do free delivery, which is nice).

I grew up in a carless family, in a strong Tory area of Surrey, which meant basically no public transport locally (trains into London which was nice, but buses were for poor people, so they didn't really care about them) and have never had one since. Right now I live in a small town in Derbyshire, near a train station and with good buses (way better public transport here), although I don't use them massively what with having the bike.

I do get lifts off people to events / to go riding sometimes (offering petrol money obviously), although local riding here is pretty good, and we have easy train access to parts of the Peak District which is nice too, and I organise quite a few of our local rides, meaning I can choose them to be handy for me.

Joe

An LED torch from dealextreme? If you get a P7 one, will be stupid bright and cost about £50. If you get an old ultrafire cree one, slightly longer runtime, slightly lower weight, and about £15. The cheap one will be brighter than the original Exposure Joystick, and not much difference in weight. The p7 torch will be really silly bright, although it might be a bit too bright if your bar light is an original exposure – you might not be able to see the bar light any more.

Joe

I think his biggest error in this statement was in writing off a very popular communications tool, and insulting a large group of the voting public* who find it fun and useful.

It's not so popular though – a few people use it, quite a lot of people have tried it once because of all the hype, but so far the vast majority of people give up after a couple of days. Maybe that'll change though, I dunno.

Joe

No I didn't. I was just suggesting that maybe, given it is a great piece of software, and dirt cheap to try out, you could perhaps consider supporting the lovely people who develop it rather than pirating a copy. Same way as if I want to ride at a race, I'd pay to enter, or if I want to get a spare inner tube, I don't sneak it off the counter at the bike shop.

It is excellent by the way. Well worth the money.

Joe

The national parks only version is very cheap, and has tons of mapping on it. I'd buy that if you want a try out. Or just buy £20 worth of mapping from their choose a map service, you get quite a decent sized bit of map for that.

Joe

Average wage in London = about £24k

Living in London on 20k is doable, especially if you're happy to share a house with someone. 25k should be pretty easy, 30k would be comfortably off. There'll always be people earning a lot more than you, and it is nice to have a bit of money in London.

Joe

That's cos it's a commercial system. Stuff is done because the hospital makes money from it and the insurance company pays (if you're lucky).

It's also a lot because of the legal system – firstly a lot of the cost of medical treatment is covered by other people's insurers, for example if you fall over at a friends house, your insurer will typically try to sue theirs to recover the costs. The legal costs involved in this kind of case are basically just money wasted due to their system. Secondly, they do a lot more pointless tests and investigative procedures on rich patients, because if you do end up having something and a hospital doesn't find it first time, again they will quite likely get sued.

Oh yeah, and they have way way more paperwork, partly because of people needing to cover their arses to avoid being sued, and partly because there are so many companies involved, eg. insurer, your gp, hospital, some of the people actually treating you, ambulance that takes you to hospital etc. may potentially all be working for different companies, which will all have paperwork on your case and overheads. Oh yeah and they may not have standardised ways of communicating these between companies, so there is a burden there, of sharing information / entering it into different systems.

edit:oh yeah, not forgetting the obvious difference which is that private companies want to make as much profit as possible.

Joe

I wasn't recommending privatisation (nor condeming either). Health incurance would cost less than the saving on tax. Priave companie cost less and are more effient than publics one, there is a lot of uneeded treatment on the NHS.

It is weird that people still persist in believing this kind of rubbish, when if you look at the numbers private companies are more expensive (about twice as expensive) and less efficient (significantly more people die) at providing healthcare .

Like in the US those who can't afford it (even with the saving on tax) are generally subsidied by the goverment.

No they're not. People in the US regularly suffer serious health problems with no cover because they simply don't have insurance. Even with their limited cover for the very poor, they have massively worse outcomes for poor people than in countries with a civilised healthcare system. This is a country where if you get knocked out and put in an ambulance, you get charged thousands of dollars for the journey and can end up in serious debt just because you had the bad luck to fall down or whatever.

Also, going back to the actual point, what about other social costs of smoking – smokers have way more time off work, are probably less productive when they are at work, cleaning up litter (which cigarette ends etc. are a large proportion of, and most smokers seem to litter pretty much anywhere). I dunno how that compares with the NHS savings.

Joe

you can make commuting as entertaining as possible but ultimatley it's a monotonous excercise that gets you somewhere you'd rather not be (unless you live to work) If your favourite trail was between your home and work I reckon you'd soon get sick of it cos it's part of the daily grind.

You either live in the wrong place or work in the wrong place, or you have chosen a bad route between the two! Commuting is great fun. It's like a 'free' bike ride, cos it doesn't take much extra time out of your week compared to other ways of going to work, yet you get to play on your bike.

Admittedly my commute is a nice hilly road ride over Derbyshire, with some beautiful scenery at one end, then a nice blast into the edge of town at the other end, but even when I lived in London I loved my commute.

Joe

Rucksack is better than messenger bag (for that matter panniers are better than rucksack, but you probably already have a rucksack). Messenger bags are just something for fashion people (other than for messengers, where the ability to quickly swing it in front of you is useful).

If you ride further out from the kerb, then you have more time / space to avoid people stepping off the kerb.

To be honest, if it's a 2.5 mile commute, then just ride slower, don't wear too many layers and don't change clothes (you've obviously got flat pedals so you can use any shoes). It'll take you less time to ride there slowly, than to ride there quick and shower and change – even at a snails pace that's only 15 minutes ride.

Joe

Richmond Hill is a pretty stupid shortcut though – it's a super narrow pavement, which makes it slow, it always has people on it, lots of old people & kids, and to make it worse, it doesn't even save you much time going slowly down the pavement compared to whizzing down on the other road, even if you are going to the bridge. Do people just use it because they've never bothered to explore the alternative?

Joe

I've had postcards printed by vistaprint – quality of what we got was good. If you're in any kind of hurry, they cost a lot more, and it is a right hassle turning off all the useless things they try to add to your order to bump the price up – a bit like booking ryanair flights.

Joe

Funnily enough, the aforementioned mal-verbiated Americanized coffee chains bend over backwards to do your drink exactly how you like it…

Only if it is coffee or some coffee related drink. If you like tea made with boiling water (rather than just some quite hot water off the coffee machine), with the teabag put in before the milk and left for a moment to brew, and then milk put in after it. Or god forbid, if you wanted a pot of tea made with leaves (or even a pot with a teabag in), they won't do it at all.

Joe

I found Aviemore okay, but would still prefer not to camp. West Highlands (Fort William etc.), Skye are mental I'd not camp there in May, June, July & August.

Personally I'd stay at hostels etc. rather than camp in the summer, unless you are going to camp really high, out of shelter and nowhere near water for every night.

I'd particularly avoid the campsite by the loch in Kinlochleven in summer – the worst place for midges I've ever stayed.

Joe

did I hear something about these suits being banned ??

Yup, ban is already decided, but rule changes only come into force in a few months time. The world records set at this championships are likely to stay for quite a time now they've banned fancy suits that make you float higher in the water. Given the rule change, it is hard to see what the swimsuit people can do to make people faster any more.

Joe

Be a nice run across Hyde Park.

Bear in mind if you're usually an off road runner, you might find it tiring running on hard flat surfaces.

Unless you went too far south and went across Soho, I can't really see anywhere that it'll be too crowded to run except maybe right near Kings Cross, depending on where you are finishing up. Running in crowds is fun anyway, think of it as a challenging obstacle to get around.

Joe

I looked a bit into this once. It is *very* expensive to enter, even as a solo rider. You need support vehicles, a team of support crew etc. Typical cost to do it is well into the tens of thousands of dollars, so you've either got to be rich, or sponsored by some generous companies.

Joe

Spds – you can and do have an upward force on the back part of the pedal stroke – or at least I do when I want to

I think the point that the studies on fast people are making is that whilst you obviously can do this, it doesn't appear to be more efficient than just putting down force on the pedals (and minimizing it on the upstroke). Several possible reasons for this have been suggested – I think one was that upwards pulling is so inefficient compared to downwards pushing that it is a better use of energy to just relax your feet and use the energy to get a bigger downwards push.

Joe

Oh yeah, the other thing I know people have done in this situation (other than super-strong loctite), is weld the pedals onto the crank. Only works if cranks and pedal axles are both steel though, so probably not an option.

Joe

The pedal unscrewing thing is all wrong.

Pedals will unscrew themselves (if seized) on normal crank set-ups. To check this, put a pedal spanner on, turn the cranks as normal and a few seconds later – clunk.

I once got halfway round a ride when my Time Atac seized and the pedal fell off.

The idea of reverse thread on the left crank was to stop a seized pedal on a fixie (using clips & straps) from ripping your foot off.

No it isn't. That is just completely wrong. Please don't anyone read that post and believe it, you'll end up with broken cranks / injuries from your pedals falling off or in the worst case you might fall and damage your bike!

If the bearings are not seized (which they typically aren't), then the effect of pedalling screws the pedals in tighter. It is totally different from the situation where the bearings seize, and also different to the situation when you stick a pedal spanner on it. It is hard to understand, but it is very much the case.

Someone will always say 'the pedals will tend to unscrew themselves on normal setups'. They are just plain wrong. These are people who have never experimented with pedals on the wrong way round. Anyone who has actually tried this knows that if you switch the cranks over, the pedals unscrew when you pedal.

There is a reason that BMX people use special left-side drive cranks and hubs, and it isn't because they are really bad engineers and don't understand the situation at all, it is because when they tried doing what you're suggesting, their pedals fell off, and they didn't like the sudden fall onto the downtube that you get as this inevitably happens when you're standing up and putting a lot of power in.

I know about this from experience, because I've ridden a lot on unicycles. It is easy to fit a wheel backwards on a unicycle, leaving the cranks on the wrong side. When you do that, the pedals unscrew. Loads of people accidentally do this, and damage cranks / pedals. It's one of those things that everybody does once, and then they learn to check. The same thing happens if you learn to ride backwards – you need to keep riding forwards much more than you ride backwards, so as to tighten the pedals up again.

If you want an engineering description of why you're wrong, look on Sheldonbrown.com, he explains it – something to do with precession.

Joe

You could do it with a disc hub on the back – get one of those cogs that fit onto a disc brake mount – then no worries about that end.

You'd still want tandem cranks or bmx cranks to avoid your pedals breaking things though.

Joe

The pedal unscrewing thing can be very sudden, the moment you notice that it is loose, if it happens when you're going fast, you can destroy the cranks in a few seconds just trying to slow down. If you really want to do this, I'd use the strongest loctite (the permanent one) to fix the pedals in. I've had it a few times when learning to ride backwards – sometimes it'd hold for a few days, other times I'd crank the pedals up tight and it seemed to go loose after 50 metres of backwards riding.

Same goes for reverse threading a cog – I know quite a few people who've had track hubs fail on a unicycle, and there isn't such massive back pressure there compared to a deliberately fitted backwards cog. You're basically relying on a tiny lockring rather than a great big cog thread. People often get broken bones after lockring failures like this, it's a real sudden complete loss of power that comes as a bit of a surprise.

Joe

That "guide" to Barry Knows Best is utter pish!

I was wondering how easy it would be to find it given that description? It didn't really describe how I would go there. I'm not convinced you'd even find Summer Lightning let alone get on to the next bits?

not even the whole of Cambridgeshire's flat as anyone who's ridden over the Gogs can tell you.

Surely when describing places as 'flat', most mountain bikers would include in that places with a massive 30m as it's biggest ascent, that tops out at a massive 100m above sea level? Otherwise you'd be saying that somewhere isn't flat because it has a hump backed bridge, or because you can ride up to the top of a multi story car park.

Joe

We were told that doing anything like this would cost way more than buying an equivalent sized house in the first place, so was a waste of time, particularly at the moment.

Joe

Isn't truffle oil just a big old con, just a bunch of random chemicals with a funny smell, with basically no link to real truffles except smelling vaguely like them. It's just something dirt cheap that people put in dishes to make them sound expensive, without having to actually use an expensive ingredient like truffles. Similarly aged parmesan – unless they tell you what it is, it could be cheap stuff that cost em 5p.

Truffles on the other hand, they are jolly nice. I went to a restaurant in Como that specialises in truffles and mushrooms, at the height of the mushroom season once, and had their special truffle menu – white truffle and chestnut or something soup, black truffle and mushroom pasta. That was a very memorable meal.

Joe

I hired a bike from Bothy Bikes a couple of years back. It wasn't anything fancy, but it seemed to be in good working order, and to survive being ridden by someone very fit but with very very poor bike handling, quite fast over rocky downhills.

Joe