So to summarise, get one of each just in case

😆 that's the way its looking isn't it! Perhaps best to try a couple. IIRC the geometry is the same on the breath, life and soloist so you don't have to be fussy which ones you have a go on. I'm in deepest devon with an 18" if that helps.

I can't seem to find my pdf anywhere now. From what i remember it was without doubt the most disclaimer-tastic piece of bike stuff i've ever seen. Every half a page or so it would say in bigger bolder letters how you will DIE if you get this bit even slightly wrong, yes, DIE!!!, and don't come runnung to us and don't say we never told you etc etc.

Loooooovely brakes when they work though!

I am 5'11" and have 33" indside leg. I liked my mate's 16" 456 with a short stem and looooong inline seatpost, its a 'fun' rather than efficient riding position. I also ride an 18" soloist with a 100mm stem and 350mm post all the way out which is much more 'xc' but just right. I wouldn't want a 16". I suppose i would be wary of seatpost length if you went for a 16" sanderson: if you are proportioned like me you will need a 400mm post about an inch away from max.

jersey sizing is all over the place. Today I tried on a troy lee xc jersey (you know, 3/4 zip and three rear pockets 'proper' jersey) and the small size was (on my trunk at least) in between roadie large and extra large. Yet the small 'neck-holes' on their dh stuff makes me prefer an xl. I believe Royal stuff is also rather generously sized even for mtb sizing.

I take it the morbidly obese person is riding or exercising?

In which case, yay, you've got to start somewhere and stomping up the climbs when you are really really that big is probably quite risky.

But yes i assume ther morbidly obese person who is exercising is doing so with the idea of becoming less obese as well as enjoying him/herself.

Just for the record, in both legal and moral terms, how far away do we think all this malarkey is from digging and riding trails on land you aren't supposed to be on? (guilty a little bit on first count and massively on the second BTW)

What a shame: i hope whoever bought it actually rides it: the real shame will be to see it on Evilbay next week 🙁

I suppose the difference between here and 'normal' (ie local paper classifieds) is how many people never show up: my mrs shifts stuff in the local paper or via freecycle, and people turn up maybe 60% of the time at an optimistic guess. So i suppose from seller's point of view he would be turning away someone else with money in the hope that the first person he spoke to turns up. Perhaps he thought he was shifting a rather less desirable bike!

[edit] or perhaps he explained the list of potential buyers to someone who rang later on today, who then offered him more than his asking price to get it first?

sponging_machine is not, despite his frequent 'wanted' threads, named after sponging in the scrounging sense but he likes a bodyboard and a surf, prederably at silly o'clock in the morning.
Phillips also considers himself a surfer.

I think it does matter. I use RSP ultra slick, (which is different from any of the litium/bearing/automotive greases I've slithered my way through) and i think CRC sell a couple of other versions.

Jamie – Member

I just love the fact the mods, while knowing this is a commerce thread, are leaving it for the pure comedy value.

Not entirely commercial, my loooooovely helpful and very very local bearing supplier[/url] has made lots of money out of me…. thanks to the wizzdom of this thread I can now sleep better knowing the eye-watering money i spent on 8 INA bearings and rock'n'roll grease was all worth it. What I am taking away from this thread is:

-don't buy them one ebay cos they might be 'falsies'.
-so do buy the best you can afford from somewhere trustworthy.
-fill them with expensive grease.

Not particularly bothered about buying from k-tec as I can get a ruler out, measure what i want, pick up the phone or go for a walk there, have a conversation someone about bearings and pick them up the next afternoon. Yay!

It would be worth having a look or starting a thread on SDH too: they love a good seller-hunt as much as this forum does. You may find someone there knows him/her if he/she posts there more often than here.

sell his guitar on the classifie…. oh, beat me to it! 😆

That picture of Absalon getting air off the top of the rocks is ace, especially when you see it next to everyone else pootling over the top. Very rad for someone in white tights and overshoes! Was it Oli Beckingsale also looking like he took off at the top?

How did your shorts get shitty? 😯 I thought only Lemond had been driven enough to do that. 😆

String bags abound in my house: they come wrapped round intense tyres and often body armour, and very useful for laundry IMO.

good point PJay, but nope, feels the same (ie fully 'open') with compression and floodgate fully on or fully off. Actually i wonder if the floodgate is just stuck on/open and over-rides whatever i do with the compression/lockout. Anyone come across that?

On call senior nurse. Until the phone rings and I leap into action like a rather frustrated, errr, leaping thing, your taxes are paying me about 50p an hour for not riding my bike. 😐

trains are ace! We went on a lovely holiday to Belgium and it about 7 1/2 hours from out front door to the hotel room there. Since we live in deepest devon and it takes hours to get to most airports anyway, we hardly ever do. It feels like your holiday starts when you get on the ferry which is 15 minutes away, so i would rather do that than faff about getting to/through airports. Come to think of it i think the last time i got a plane was in 1998. I have however been to europe at least 6 or 7 times since.

The bits that stand out for me (born in 1977 btw) are
-falklands
-miners
-poll tax
-poll tax riots
-Kenneth Baker
-Care In The Community Act
-Student grants phased out in favour of loans.

I didn't like drinking milk as a child and so remember it well and remember being not at all bothered about it. 🙂

My father in law worked from 16 to retirement for british gas/transco. He also loves/fundraises for etc trains and Vulcans (the plane that is). His three favourite things in life fairly well dismantled under conservative governments and still he looooooves them so. 😕

I was that bored on night shift last night that i read the Dail Mail that was lying around: loooooads of negative stuff about both Clegg and Brown, and barely a mention, neither positive or otherwise of Cameron. How very depressing.

In fact his wife got about four more 'inches' than he did! FWIW i would feel equally duboius if the Guardian or Independent were reporting/underreporting similarly for their chosen leaderz.

🙁

He's 'core! 😉

I see him around a lot too anywhere between Mount Gould and St Mary's bridge in Plympton. He is so low to the ground I will be sad but not suprised to hear of him going under an artic or similarly high up vehicle.

Although with regards to the cyclepath bit, I ride it daily and there is at least one bit with railings/road crossing chicane thing that you would have a right old time getting his (2 front wheels) recumbent round/through, and the bit betwwen Laira and Sainsburys is so narrow it would be rather scary for many less gnarly cyclists to pass him.

You, my short-life-expectency-friend, are giving cyclists a bad name.

Not planning on distributing any nichey recumbent parts any time soon then? 😆

I dimly remember in the news a few years ago a teenager was killed by a similar thing whilst (legally!) greenlaning on his mx bike: as i recall the police treated it as a murder investigation.

not voting for them despite here being a pretty safe tory seat.

Does that mean you might vote Tory if it was a marginal??

oh goodness, that came out all wrong. What I meant to say was that it probably doesn't matter who I vote for as the rather popular conservative MP we have will most likely win his seat again. I have worked for the NHS for 11 years, and it would take some kind of 'speedboats for all nurses' manifesto to get me wanting the conservatives back in!

My wife was telling our kids never to talk to strangers, and to be especially wary of ones with blue ribbons. They spotted some in the street and yowled to/pointed at them from the upstairs window as I was starting this thread. I wondered what the noise was about!

hmmm… they seem to be heading away from my end of the street now. Did my hammer and sickle deter them from knocking?

It is a foregone conclusion that Gary Streeter (cons.) will win here, though the way usually fond way people seem to talk about him locally, I wonder how much that has to do with his own popularity rather than the conservative party he represents. Nevertheless I will be voting for the next most popular candiate (irrespective of my leftist views) because that is all you can do in a constituency in this one with the silly system we have over here.

mud!

Used to be that a lot of frames had clearance for a back tyre but not much mud on it. It is frequently argued that a lot of moving parts esp bearings and bushings do not cope so well with mud, grit and their repeated washing off.

More cynically, the inclusion of crud catcher bosses. 😀

Nice, that frame looks well tidy for £150. Nice to see older-skool xtr rear mech too 🙂

Stan_Dingup – Member

Wow, no garage door slagging, no beeing pulled up on the misaligned tyres (only noticed after I posted the pics) and no one has mentioned Halfords?

This place is going soft…!

well, if you really insist….. I would have the grips on the other way up so you grip the raised crisscrossy bits with the ends of your fingers.

do you mean the wedge section ring with a split in it that wedges it all together on the steerer? If so, not really: it has an upper ring with a wedge in it (bit like a crown race but upside down) and a seal. Quite hard to get on right in my experience: I had it on one bike and it was perfect, but I never managed to get it to work without wobbling on 2 frames after. Probably mechanical ineptitiude, since on the frame it did work on it was very smooth and very nicely sealed.

Yep, I've done that before too. Number 26 of the '1000 rookie bike maintenance mistakes' i believe! Happy fixing, you'll be chuffed at how quiet it all is when you've sorted it. 🙂

how are they ever going to unleash that frame's true potential without upgrading to a CCDB? 😉

Quite often contentious ones get reported to moderator and then suddenly vanish. Did your missing thread involve racism/boobs/being properly rude to another forum member/questioning the moderator's decisions/slagging off industry 'partners'/blocking the adverts? If so then yes they probably vanished it. Its their website after all!

Today I am still recovering from sickness but on sunday I might be entering Round 1 of South West Xc series near Truro. And also evening race at haldon next thursday. 🙂

normal qr is just fine on mine. And yes £240 incl headset is a well good deal. Only issue I had with my parts swapover (18" frame fwiw) was the floodgate adjuster on my fork catching the downtube: (there had been loads of room on the old frame with same headset so I had never thought about it until it was built up) -I had to get a slightly 'stackier' headset was all.

Zizou!

Aaaaargh, shimano 20mm hubs!! Be warned, you need a massive cone spanner like this and even more massive normal spanner to get it open. If its anything like my 2, it'll be done up 'bastid tight' too…. Then the balls will be in plastic retaining cages you have to break in two to remove. And with no spanner flats on the other side of the axle its very hard to get it all to stay together properly again afterwards. I have resorted to cutting a small slot in mine so I can hold it still to tighten the cone/lockring properly.

Definitely not one of shimano's better moments!

What a lightning-fast customer service response it was that just 2 weeks ago someone started this thread, and now according to the story on the front page, you can already get a great deal on CCDB upgrades on Chumba frame kits…….. oh.

IGMC.

smell/groan of cooking brakes just before they stop working altogether and you have an unscheduled 'stop'.

[nerd] the 'skwoosh' from an open bath marzocchi fork.

yep, even a few years ago in my NHS lease car for work I used to subsidise them for about £30 a month in fuel. I suspect most car users would just get disciplined if they refused to drive when they could have. I certainly would have!

Pigface, who do you work for?