I have some silver xm317's with silver sapim spokes but black deore hubs from merlin, they were about £60 and are just fine. Not the best merlin build (ie I've actually had to go near these ones with a spoke key once or twice!) but at that price you can't really grumble. I couldn't have bought the bits myself for less than £90.

I'l bet SFB would be chuffed to bits with a saddle like that. Someone paid fifteen quid for it!

Oh, I have just worked out who the seller is! Friend of a friend of a friend. Not exactly a celeb but he has made 2 appearances avec photos in Dirt mag in recent months. *waves*

…not to mention normal, semi or fully integrated headset, length of head tube (watch out if it is much longer on the new one and you don't have many spacers on the steerer), bottom bracket width if your cranks are isis/square taper, cable routing (might need more or different lengths of outer and inner), seat clamp size and rear brake hose/cable routing/length. Some frames have bottle bosses or shock mounts in the way so you have to have either high or low band front mechs too. It seems as though most shimano and sram ones these days take both top and bottom cable pull thankfully.

And if top tube length is different you may want a different size stem though that is a fit rather than build compatibility one…

About eight years ago I snapped one of the knobbly bits off the end of my humerus, sling only for 6 weeks by which time my tendons shrank so i was 30 degrees off straight (the physio had this cool protractor thing to measure it before and after each 'session'. By 'session, I mean quarter hour of my mind battling with 'how can such a nice pretty lady make me hurt so much?!?')

I still can't straighten mine fully though it has improved by 2 or 3 degrees a year since i did it. Mine ached at odd points for a long while after, definitely remember it aching in pulling things (for me it was hospital beds and 'manual handling' old folk). Oh and it did click every so often for the first six months.

there was somebody on the how many bikes thread a month ago who broke 3!

-broke in half mid gnarly move, or cracked and discovered at the next bike wash? I mean isn't the CEN safety stuff primarily about preventing catastrophic failure of the frame whilst it is still moving? And yes, it did sound a bit like a 'Royal We' didn't it?
The lovely thing about steel inbreds being that if it is the creak/crack discovered during/after ride, you can just get it welded for not much money and carry on. Or buy a new one.

huge sickly celebrity love in I thought. The low points for me were:

-Boy George singing about being in prison (quite liked him as an artist for a long time but :roll: really, my heart bleeds!)

-Florence (of 'and the manchine') likening being there in the studio to "being in a giant box of quality street".

I was really looking forward to Rodrigo y Gabriela. They have sounded better however, and I am not convinced by the new 'effects pedal' direction. (there is a wah wah pedal on the latest album 8O ) They do not profess to be flamenco and apparently delight in telling people they were kicked out of the academy/conservatory/whatever its called in mexico for being too unconventional and using a plectrum.

Mr Woppit, do you play? Most people I know who really rate RyG are musicians or proper jazz beard types. (FWIW i have a beard, some 'entry level' jazz cd's and i would put myself just inside the upper 30% of guitar radness based on the stratobiker-STW- blues-youtube-medley-thingy-rating-scale, and I think they are rather unconventional, clearly huge metalheads at the weekends, but basically very accomplished)

just for the record, we don't know anyone who has in the line of sensible trail/xc riding ever folded the downtube or broke the headtube off an inbred do we? What a shame to have to monkey about with that and i guess quite a few other great frames. :(

I have fatmuthahubbard's shiny new green inbred in my dining room until his mother in law goes home :lol: and it looks just lovely for how little he spent on it.

hmmmmm, what a conundrum… weather, midges, motorway delays, houses that look the same, tories, wrexham, access laws, xenophobes, the right to dress how you like, access laws, stunning scenery and trails.

If only there was somewhere waaaay better than all three options, taking into account the above. And quite a bit closer to many of us.

Oh yes, France. :)

fatmuthahubbard – Member

done it on my dh bike…didnt make a bit of difference.

the hell they didn't! fmh's are lime green and now his bike looks even dafter!

iirc it was formula or avid who didn't make braided hoses on their top end brakes when they it all the rage because it spoilt the feel of the brakes.

:oops: the fork nerd in me observes that they are dropoffs not 888's.

Since they do come with headset bars and stem, it makes me wonder if they were fitted to a bike and ridden minus the top crown. 8O You'd have thought that would have been far easier to get off than the headset!

For all I like Shimano brakes in terms of performance, their absolute non-serviceability rules them out for me. I don't ever want to have to fix my brakes, but I always want to be able to.

Not my favourite brakes ever, but they certainly seem to be reliable: between my mates and I we have had 6 sets of shimano hydraulics run between 6 months and 6 years, and of those 6 only one set has ever even needed bleeding (cos i needed a longer front hose when they went on a new bike).

European OS sunline carbon bars had a recall. Americans and 25.4 luddites need not worry though.

Fork and tyres otherwise. You'd get a few quid selling your revs, and 2009 SIDs aren't ridiculously expensive. If you are feeling really spendy then posh cranks and formula r1 brakes i suppose. If you spend a lot of time out of the saddle you could go for a charge knife or an sdg ti fly. But that is well into the territory of diminishing returns!

fwiw my policy with budget for the caravelle lets me drive other cars 3rd party with owner's permission. Although a couple of policies I've had in recent years haven't. I think it was Tesco whose blurb said it was only ever meant for emergencies, and that if you have phone reception and its the right time of day its pretty easy to arrange on the spot anyway though, its just your extra driver is covered by the vehicle they are driving, not their own insurance.

with the lever and skewer bit gone it should be plenty loose enough (don't ride it if this is the case!) to put an appropriately sized ring spaner in the space where the lever was, and then use the 'arm' of the spanner in the slot to unscrew the maxle. I think you can get just the lever, skewer and cone bits as spares rather than shell out for a whole new one.

they were pretty understanding about our wonky printer we got from them, gave us a different one instead. Which 8 months later they don't stock any printer cartridges for!

not sure there is always any rhyme or reason to pad wear.

I am no expert at bike/brake setup neither am i particularly dilligent about bedding pads in properly. Nevertheless:

-i had a set of juicy fives for a year and i never changed the pads they came new with. That includes a couple of wet rides in the quantocks and dozens of filthy ones in the woods.

-Mrs julian is also still hardly into the pads that came new on her juicy 3's after 8 months and rides/races in all weathers. And she has never changed the ads on her bb7's which unlike our other juicy brakes howl like crazy (but stop as well as the other avids)

-my mates who ride far better and brake far less go through juicy pads all the time though.

-I have however demolished stock formula pads in a gritty ride with a sticky piston on the back one whilst the non-stuck-pistoned front one went on for months after the back one was freed up and pads replaced.

I read terrible things in bike press about early shimano resin pads, but always got loads of life out of shimano's own resin ones on my old 525's (which are still doing fine age 6 and bled once, never serviced on a mate's bike)

i think that a lot of tyre performance is down to hype, and folk law

dunno about bike tyres but i remember reading in the q&a slot in New Scientist once, there was a reply from someone who worked in car tyre design talking about what makes a good car tyre and that all new designs went through marketing people before production as the tread needed to 'look good'. On a car tyre! Lordy! I wonder how many great designs got binned because they looked funny?

funny to hear reccommendations for co-op/CIS. I was with CIS but I must have got a real jobsworth on the phone when i got our utterly standard unmodified VW caravelle as they 'could not insure vans' (acording to v5 and tax its a large CAR ffs!) so i went with budget, who it turns out used the same underwriter and the same postal addres as CIS. :roll:

I have heard from other van friends that adrian flux are rather more understanding about modified vans but none have ever had to claim with them. T4 forum would be a good place to look for advice, several threads of advice/experiences about insurance for modded vans on there iirc.

I use an older ht2 xt. Its fine.
If it was me I would bin the alivio, sell or keep the bb for a rainy day, buy the lx, use the ring you already have and sell the new lx rings on classifieds. You'll have only spent about £35 by then!

both crank bolts undo anticlockwise, its just pedal threads and bb cups that go the wrong way round sometimes.

a few of them are on this one courtesy of stratobiker. I believe he has a few of himself on thgere, as has the legend that is simonralli.

do you mean the bosses or the clamps that go round the fork legs to mount the bosses on?

Anil and Mistry both being pretty common names, i don't see why both of you wouldn't have met different ones. To non western-corrupted ears I'm sure that sounds like a perfectly nice name. Or perhaps you just met and remembered the same memorable one!

When I was a St John's ambulance cadet many years ago ('proper' paramedics lurk on here, ssshhhhhh!) one of the top bods in SJA was James Bond.

In my NHS trust, our medical director is Dr Payne. :D

Millie says she'll help you part with it when you get the bug and trade it in for a scandal. :lol:

i have heard via wife's colleague who lived there that stoke gabriel has a very, err, 'vibrant' middle-age swinging scene. 8O 8O

Enjoy your stay!

links to service guides for 07 08 and 09 forks here: http://www.sram.com/en/service/rockshox/tech_manuals.php

merry servicing! :-)

Humility? :?

Yessir,
-from 9am on call and then if i haven't been called in by then, 8pm-8am at work.
-Because I am a nurse and mental unwellness does not stop for Christmas.

yes, the huuuuuge rockshox service manual says you want 5wt just for the motion control (upper right leg) bit. 15wt for everywhere else. Silkolene motorbike 5wt fork oil is a good, affordable and easily get-hold-of-able alternative. as a bonus you can dunk your nipples in it when you build wheels. :D

I've got what is supposed to be a one day long Coroner's court in february. It better not be more than that as I am having a long weekend in wales starting that evening!

I have worked in and around our local mental health services for 9 years so am a little worried I might know either the deceased or any doctors/social workers etc involved. Should I mention this before I turn up or just wait and see who it is and who is involved?

Colin Hunt it is!

i am not convinced that 'redwin' sram X0 will actually make me win anything….

write to your MP (seriously and more so if they're a tory), this whole student loans thing is quite big politically at the moment.

…and if he/she is Conservative, don't forget to mention which government it was that ended housing benefit for students and oversaw the creation of the SLC in the first place in order to phase out LEA grants.

Granted, you got your loan in a simple and timely manner in Major's day but there are still graduates out there under the 'old' loans system (particularly anyone working in environment/ecology fields) who still don't earn enough to have to pay them back, and will have them written off in a few years. :lol:

I graduated in 1999 and didn't start paying mine until 2007.

leftist swipe over now. igmc.

rear end is the same size whatever size or 'number' (ie mc20, 30, 40 etc). So i would get a second hand one and keep it for spares. The ti hardware is also hugely expensive to replace and the seatclam and post are funny sizes too, so if you are looking at £117 just for one bit of it you might as well have a donor frameset. As a guide, i sold my 2005 mc50 frame and bits on here for about £150 recently.

They might be the most 'looked at' rather than 'responded to' threads, as there seems to be no mention in the top 10 of the 'IWL ripoff' thread, which went over 1000 replies IIRC.

As long as its not a sunday, go into Dartmoor Cycles and pay a fiver for a day pass. It won't be busy like a welsh trail centre, especially not in thr morning. We go up early on sundays and sometimes don't see anyone else until 10.30.

You will have great fun on the HSD track but I wouldn't reccommend the other 2 unless your hardtail has a silly slack head angle. There are a couple of locals who do the other 2 tracks on HT's but they really are quite excellent riders.

Sanderson soloist or Genesis io cos you won't have cable stops or any means of attaching a mech hanger therefore you have to go expensive hub gears if you change your mind. (and then you won't!).

saddle angle is all wrong!
Other than that, it looks like someone [edit: from Devon but studenting in Edinburgh or the other way round] who never really got nerdy about biking giving up and inexpertly selling his bike on ebay because he asked too much in the local paper for it.

I've just got the new fox ones from stif (they had 10% off the other day if that helps). Boy are they hot!! Mind you, its still pretty mild down here. They are suprisingly 'proper glove' like in terms of ease/range of movement though the ends of te fingers have 2 seams and so are a bit wierd, unavoidable I suppose. They also have a pittards palm which despite feeling quite thin, has held up pretty well on a different pair of gloves (Troy Lee SE).
They haven't been rained on properly yet though, the waterproof liners are just stitched normally so i suppose they will start to wet through eventually. Thing is your hands will be so hot by that point (did i mention they are warm?) they will then just be hot and wet.

thankyou for your advice. Happily I have since stumbled upon (and very quickly bought!) a nice very boringly/basically specced but clean and totally unmolested/unmodified Caravelle. Kids are well happy with it. As is the way with new cars, I have seen/noticed about six or seven similar ones on the way home with it!