There's a VegiAlex posting/selling actively on southerndownhill. Noticed him whilst trawling their classifieds. It would be a bit harsh posting up details on a public forum if its not the same Alex, but if you can't get into the searchy bits on SDH (i think you have to be a member) you could always drop me an email and I'll have a stalk, errr, look for you.

I managed to find a socket that fitted just inside the threaded side of the bb cup and a much larger one (this is hard to find, I was lucky enough to find a socket that just fitted inside, and an old car radiator hose spring clip that fitted exactly on the outside of the bb cup) then pushed it out in a vice. this only works with gxp ones as you can't get a 'step' inside shimano ones to press on. You get a little ring thing with the bearing kit from betd anyway so you shouldn't need to press it out of the dead bearing but its easy to do if you need to.

The bearings are sort of 'glued' in with bearing fit compound on gxp bb's so it really is a bit of a mission getting them out too.

Alternatively BETD sell a tool for it for about £20-30. A mate got one free when he bought 5 sets of bearings. I was an 'early adopter' of sorts (hence the sockets and vice) in my group of bike friends and then later on we bought a job lot between us and its way easier having the proper tool.

And alternatively again BETD always used to install them for free if you post them your dead bb cups for them to do.

I did my dropouts with a 10mm drill bit for the shap and then cutting out and taking the sharp edges off the sides to make a 'u' with a dremel. It took aaaaaaaaages! Almost as long as it took to rougly cut out the rest of it. I suppose you could use nice hard wood for the dropouts but might be worth making up a few replaceable ones as I am not sure how long a wooden one would stand up to repeated fitting and removal of axles.

But this design is pretty flexible in that you can fit all sizes of hub in it and do offset 'dishing' ie for downhill bikes with offset rear swingarms.

I have never used a metal one but one of the things the Musson book says is that a wooden one mans its easier to hear the spokes when you 'tune' them. (hard to explain but I ping early in the build to start off with roughly even tension, and then quite a lot later on as sometimes a bit of 'wonk' will be because the adjacent spokes are too slack rather than the one you think it is being too tight).

buy an cheap ailvio/deore sqare taper or splined one, grind the inner bits off the granny ring (it won't fitround the bb cups otherwise) and you have a longer lasting steel set for cheap. You might even be able to sell the crank arms on afterwards.

sorry, stoopid double post.

Or cutting open plastic bottles of milk that was so old it has gone solid, and hosing it down the drain.

..yeah, i did that too. Some of it went back into the 'system' and into 'fresh' milk. The (long since closed, demolished and built over) dairy got in quite a bit of trouble about that.

For a little while I did the 'housekeeping' on royal navy frigates when they were in port. The sailors were decent and very appreciative that someone else was doing it for a bit I think. It was great when you popped out on deck after a morning cleaning bathrooms and 'heads' only to find you were a mile out in Plymouth Sound, and had to wait for a little boat to take you back.

spesh concept store/certini in Plymouth/saltash have some super-skinny houffalize mud tyres in the sale bin. Not in the web shop but you could phone them and ask nicely.

someone else on here has sold a couple of ex-atherton bikes too. I had heard they sell their old bikes on, and there are three of them so potentially three times as many 'works' buikes as you would imagine.

If it was me I would ring the seller (has provided mobile number) and see if they talked like they knew what they were selling. And pick it up from their house if at all possible.

yes, that's the fella. The tartan and lepoardskin ones look bang on but the other three don't.

there was another saddle (Gusset IIRC) in an MBUK grouptest that looked absolutely identical to the spoon, just with some wierd tartan trim on it. I think it may have scored better than the spoon despite being the same price and looking funny….

Which one have you got already? The TC1 (red and black) was a bit unreliable apparently, the yellow and black tc2 is way better. Also the pull shock from some of the 'fx' full sus bikes may fit: (I can't remember if the eye-to-eye and shock stroke was the same for the mc, rc and fx versions) this is like tc2 shock (pull shock) with less gubbins in and no traction control setting.

riding my xc bike in an xc race this time. Soggy Bottom Series Round one at Newnham. And perhaps coming in slightly better than second to last this week. (I managed 40th out of 60 last time, woo!)

20cc of 15wt oil in each lower leg, innit.

the mini-review in last ST mag suggests the skink is waterproof. Yay, I thought and bought one. It really isn't. I did clean up the battery connections, get the mud/grit out of the inside of the microswitch and solder the incredibly tiny-wired dead connection back together 8) but little point in popping it on the back of my xc bike for big wet night rides. :(

This similar thread a few weeks ago had someone saying that despite the great sealing everywhere else, the switch on the Mars lets in water. Mine lives under the saddle over a full mudguard on my work bike, so gets little or no spray or rain in that direction.

on julians login.

cheers, i didn't think of looking that up!!! :oops:

Goan – Member

JW – if it was like steel I wouldn't be able to walk.

Braided kevlar then? :wink:

I must admit, old people swearing has a special charm all of its own. You sort of expect them to have forgotten all the rude words they used to use in their twenties and then whoosh!
Wait until you start bending them around! (errr, I mean in his capacity as a student physio BTW)

from my five year old:
-What do cats like in their drinks?
-Mice cubes.

rupture your achilles?? What were they driving, a shopping trolley or a forklift?

You achilleses (no idea how to pluralise that one!) must be like steel surely, all that gnarl-core singlespeeding and race-winning you do? Man up! :lol:

the xcracer.com forum is terribly polite and sensible. But has lots of members very local to me and so I look in it every so often.
No nichemieisters or arguments about fox seals or EBB's though. :(

I seem to remember there being no minimum concentration/PPM of holiness in holy water. ie if it has a trace of 'holy' it is still holy.

I used to live near Lourdes (St Bernadette saw Virgin Mary who found her a nice spring of healing holy water etc etc), and the little trickle you see by the bit where poorly people go and pray is nothing compared to the bath houses to the right of it and the row of taps to the left. They must be 'allowed' to water it down.

I think some kind of race is in order; like the boxxer world champs but with the above posters and a load of frames and headsets.

You want to get yourself a polished solid obsidian headbadge on that.

I have just done the opposite: keeping most of the bits, and beloved 'old' frame is going for sale. Realised how long it is since I rode it (and how much I want a singular hummingbird!) so had a little 'moment' as i dismantled 'Swiss Tony' (the last of my bikes to have a name) this morning.

Oh if it was me, i would keep the Switch until I broke it and leave the meta for another year.

my mate Daz is a RN officer and he sounds well 'artforshire, innit!
A few lads from my (local secondary) school are also army officers, one in particular is proper Devonshire and he was a captain last time I met him a few years ago.

it used to be a class thing in the 17-1800's though didn't it? Ie you purchased your commission and then bought your way out of it if you didn't like it?

If he's putting fallen logs and branches across a trail, he's likely to be a jobsworth.

…that is the impression I get. A close friend works for the FC at Great Wood in the 'tox and when they wanted rid of some dangerous trails they did it within about ten days IIRC, and they did it 'properly' ie big holes and earth moving equipment etc. Same has happened more recently with the old red trail at Haldon.

Although he did tell me a rather worrying tale of a horserider injured when someone apparently mis-timed a road gap over the public bridleway she was using. Apparently she is suing (not sure if its the FC or the Dirt-Merchant who collided with her). That must be putting the wind up them.

Cheeky Monkey, you haven't read the op wrong. Log man also seems to work in an unpaid capacity for the FC. Not sure if he is responsible for the most life-threatening logs but has admitted to burying/logging a couple of classic trails I was well fond of/may have err, not impeded the building of (not that I mentioned that bit). He had a few things to say about use of the woods which i was not entirely convinced upon.

FWIW, I think he was a little bit suprised to hear that we also walk dogs and our children in the woods, are well into our thirties and pick up litter.

…ummm, its on a 100 year lease to the FC from another local (private) estate. Does that make a difference?

One of my mates met Bruce Dickinson at a fencing competition and thought he was well charming!
Another mate worked in HMV in oxford circus and says most of the celebrities he met in there were a bit unreasonable. Apart from Brian May who came in (just shopping) and tidied up the Queen section.

geetee1972 – Member

What about defence against a man armed with a banana?

What would you do if someone attacked you with a dildo?

Or 2 dildos?

My second cousin is Sam Salt who was the captain of HMS Sheffield in the falklands.

Slightly more cheerfully, I sort of know the daughter of Reg from welsh language enormo-soap Pobol y Cwm.

if its the c shaped one not a socket type one then yes; I have both shimano and truv bb's, and found the cyclo/lifu socket one doesn't fit on the non drive side but any spanner shaped one will.

remember when we all used to go out nightriding with 10w halogens?
It will be ok (on your helmet!) if you know your trails, you don't go too fast and there isn't someone behind you with a zillion lumens.

The lights arms race is getting quite comical amongst my regular night rides: loads of exposure maxx d's etc and then fatmuthahubbard turns up with his uprated troutlight :lol: Truly, it is a beast.

No point in riding in front of that, all you can see is your own shadow. I just ride at the back with my paltry 390 hat and 240 bars. :(

Oh, the other great memory for my first cross race was a dog walking past a couple of cross bikes lying about in the grass/swamp to have a pee on my NRS. Very well trained, I thought!

there was a breath on sale on classified the other day I think. Looks looooovely……

Simon, you beat two finishers (including me) and 3 dnf's.
See race report here.

will there be more hills next time? :-)

Oliver/Dawson Saxon?! :lol:

Biff's a reet stout northener isn't he? I would loooooove to hear his Stories of Rawk over a few jars with him but he'd probably get fed up as I am both from the South and quite French.

this has to be my favourite 'Author portrait' photo ever. Great big brompton-lovin' article too if you click on the photo:

Saxon truly were the closest you would ever get to seeing The Real Spinal Tap. Real legends, they are/were. :D

I heard the bass player interviewed, saying he liked bass lines that could be played on open (ie unfretted) strings as this left his fretboard hand free to 'point'.

I saw them in about 1992 and the guitarist:
a) Played a 5 minute solo. And I mean 'all on his own' solo.
b) Had a special harness/strap arangment that mean he could spin his guitar right round like a windmill.
c) Would every so often lift his guitar to his shoulder like a rifle and 'shoot' pretty ladies in the audience.

Not one of my top ten gigs, but still a Rock Rite Of Passage of sorts…

Well i did one. Rolled across the line dead last!! (though I think I might have clocked up one more lap than another fella on an fs with biiig tyres)
Lord, it was muddy! I wasn't really expecting it to be largely on wet playing fields, with 4 granny-ring banks to get up (1 unrideable for me by the end) and 200m of hugely entertaining off camber grass and mud. Oh and those funny hurdle things were a bit random. It was fun in a way, but requiring some rather 'different' skills to xc racing, (i touched my brakes about ten times a lap if that, and steered with the back wheel much to my delight) and shocking how much the course deteriorated in an hour.

Of course I will do it again though.

Next question: will I be able to fit 700c rim plus cx tyre plus mud through a reba and the back end of an NRS?

4 of my mates 07/08 specialized bikes have had spokes break frequently. These are all folk with more than one bike who rarely if ever break spokes on anyone other wheels.

Oddly, their wheels (on £1800-£2500 bikes) all came with dt rims and hubs (very expensive to buy) but not dt spokes or nipples (much more reasonable to buy.) I suppose it looks good on the spec list, and over several zillion sets of wheels saves specialized a fortune.