You’ll have to buy a whole new compression damper (ie not just the top bit -although it used to be possible to get the spring out of a poploc damper when converting from pop/pushloc to fork top, you can’t do it the other way). However plenty of people out there fed up with pushloc so you will not find it hard to sell on the fork top damper if it is a motion control/threshold one.

:(

As a vaguely on-topic thread-title-answwering aside, one of my old long-gone cats used to watch the toaster in the mornings- clearly expecting the toast to pop up at some point, and then always jumped a foot in the air in suprise when it finally did. :) OP i am sure in time you will enjoy lots of happy memories without the sadness you have now.

Var tyre fitting tool from sjs. A bit too long for saddle pack but ok for jersey pocket.
And tacx tyre levers (99p from px) have a nice fine hook on the end to get them off again. Pedros are my favourite (all four colours on various saddlebags and riding packs, but they too rounded for getting under the bead of some stupidly tight combinations to remove them.

‘Cyclist’ in German is ‘radfaher’, which also means sycophant or brown-noser.

strava tells me my most ridden bike last year is my 15 year old commuter. although only the frame, seatclamp, brakes and sti’s are original.
‘Main’ (ie the one i would keep over the others) is 9 years old altogether and 4 years old to me, with slightly less ancient parts. but tbf the newest non-wearing drivetrainy part is still at best 2010.

In that case consider it £10 invested in better rotating weight. Pbk are a sound company, shop away i say! :D

Good shop +1

But merlin have an extra discount on at the moment so should come out as £135 from them.

Squirrelking, Devonport Dockyard is between 50 and 100 yards from Cornwall depending on which part of the yard you are in. There is a river in the way but i doubt that is a problem for a Bear, which could pootle over there from St Mawgan/Newquay Airport in about 12 minutes if it was already ‘im the area’ or 6 minutes if the driver puts his foot down. :P

But yes i take your point about google maps. I have a couple of old (60’s by the amount of railways and stations still marked on them) os maps where the dockyard is just a massive blank slab alongside the river with nothing in it. I wonder if besides posturing, there is some strategic value in seeing what happens to communications etc and how long it takes to get escorted off the airspace.

2nd most popular story on Graun website: http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/feb/19/russian-bomber-flew-inland-cornwall-uk-airspace-witness

Btw how do you fly to Cornwall without going into uk airspace? Presumably the long/top way round?
Still, there’s only gchq bude listening station, devonport dockyard and that mysterious american place under newquay airport: i don’t suppse they will be back any time soon.

Cakefacesmallblock, even with everything i have spent on it bar the fuel, were i to try and sell it tomorrow, i am theoretically still about a grand up on mine. :D

Astonishing how expensive t4’s are now. Apparently mine is worth substantially more today than when i bought it 40k and 4 years ago. Especially in the south west. (Where there seems to be a style tax on all things vw :lol: )
140k is not high mileage on the tdi, not sure about the normal deisel or petrol. A friend works in a vw van dealership, they had a customer a few years back who looked after his 88bhp 2.5tdi properly and had 500k on it last time it came in for (main dealer) service. I wonder if it’s still going now?

But yes with regards to price, if it was 5 years ago and your 140k t4 was going for £3-4k then i’d have said proceed with usual mechanical caution. But blimey, £6k buys you a lot of not very old not-a-vw these days.

1) its not about the till, its about getting out of the shop having paid. Does that help?

2) i’m notverygood, there a couple of good explanations about the impact on the length of a queue (as opposed to the number of vehicles queueing 2 abreast) on the other roads nearby when that queue interrupts junctions and roundabouts. I am not sure what else you need to understand. Perhaps you would feel better if the op explained where the nearest junction was behind him at the time of the incident, and how many cars were or weren’t backed up over it.

Or spend time queuing 2 abreast for several changes of lights only to find that there is 200 yards of right hand carriageway empty just after them because people are moving over to the left sooner than they could.
Try and imagine how many changes of lights sooner you could have got through, and whether you would have got to the bit where it goes back to one lane any sooner (hint: yes you would).

That oooks bleddy lovely, but I missed the memo when shimano did di2 on hub gears. For me the selling points for di2 would have been more reliable shifting over cables, particularly with exposed cable runs, and the lovely auto-trim front derailleur. Since a selling point of hub gears would also be more reliable shifting compared to derailleurs and no front mech to need ‘trimming’ in the first place, i am not sure di2 would be worth it for me over just a really nice cable hub gear.

There a couple of big junctions near me that have been widened to 2 lanes in the middle and merge back to one later. The idea is to stop queues backing up over the junction, and also lets more cars through the lights for a given time since its slightly faster overall for 2 cars pulling away next to each other to negotiate merging further down the road than it is for those same 2 cars to go one behind the other through the same lights.

On this basis perhaps we should be encouraged to use the whole of both lanes and merge in turn at the end, rather than taking the LH lane as soon as we realise the road shrinks to one lane 100+ yards later, so as to make traffic flow faster through junctions for everyone.

the 10 speed links, were they powerlinks/similar? In which case how did you get them to link up? 10 speed powerlink’s pins being shorter than 6/7/8speed, and so you can’t get them through the inner plates of the chain and locked properly.

Otherwise, iirc the space between the inner plates on a 10 speed chain is also narrower so if you used a few bits of 10speed to lengthen the chain, you might find that the 10speed bit jumps on the smaller sprockets under heavy load as it doesn’t sit all the way into the teeth as well.

Finally i don’t have great experience of rejoining ‘geared’ chains for derailleur systems (ie ones that aren’t bmx chains with massive outer plates and wide pins) without using proper joining pins or quicklinks/powerlinks; they tend to fail after a while at the point you pushed the pin back into the outer plate. Fine to get you home if you break a chain, but will break again later on at most inconvenient moment.

Ernie, spending cuts, clamping down on benefits, forcing sick and disabled back to work. All clear examples of saint David continuing (as he so claimed) the work that Jesus started. Perhaps Osborne and IDS snuck a few extra pages into his bible. :lol:

Aracer, the watch and private banking adverts would suggest that the advertising analysis-bots would say stw has drifted to the right ;)

Fwiw conservative party political broadcast on itv at the moment. No bishops involved so far.

I think the posturing and rebuttals from westminster are as good/informative a read as the 52 page letter, in terms of how interested the 3 main parties seem to be in being called out by the church of england and wales on their duties toward the little people.
I would also be interested to see where Justin Welby is on this. So far so good, he is not talking (in public at least) like ine might fear that an eton-educated former oil indistry chief would talk.

Also will be listning out for my own mp who is a rather charismatic christian (in the falling-over spiritual healing sense) but still grabbed his 10-second soundbite on national news laying into Rowan Williams the time-before-last that the church questioned the christian values of the government.

I would be getting myself a big shoulder-padded officers uniform, plenty of gold bits on it and loads of medals for that time i basically bunked off even being in the national guard instead of going to vietnam.

But more seriously, buy out the market for that rare earth stuff they make magnets and iphones out of. Relatively cheap way to make a real geopolitical difference.

They forgot to mention the other parrallel whereby just as Enfield forgets himself, Tim Nice But Dim’s estalishment vowel sounds revert back to enfields normal voice, a tired or stressed out Osborne reverts back to RP. skip to 4:38 for the ‘orrible results of his elocution lessons. :D

I would just like to say to the lloyds private banking people that have popped up 4 times today that with a combined household income of less than £40k and about, ooooh, £600 in savings and many times more in unsecured debts, i am probably a waste of that ‘high value’ advertising slot!
Watch advert has given up on me, mind.

Not really my thing (found a nice catlike in the bargain bin instead) but fwiw just now Plymouth Marsh Mills had 2 left in med/large size. They also a few bell roadie helmets that looked a lot better than the £20 on the ticket. Loads of clothes in the sale rail too including a shopsoiled gore hiviz road jersey inn xl for £9!

Yes i knew a straightup nice guy who disappeared one day: now in prison for child pornography but police moved in when he arranged to meet up with a child he groomed online who was really a police/ceops officer.

Also knew someone who it turns out had disappeared from his old job as care worker for young adults with learning difficulties after he got one of the residents pregnant. He seemed the nicest guy ever, I and friends who knew him would never have guessed until by chance seone from his ‘old life’ hundreds of miles away bumped into him and blew the whistle on him still doing similar work.

Psychopathology of paedophiles is most interesting if worrying stuff. I can well see how people would never guess in many cases.

My french familiy are mosty rather right wing with the exception of my excellent railway working allotment tending step-grand-pere. Very difficult to discuss politics with them.

My english family were Tory upper-middle class (grandparents ran their own prep school in Tunbridge Wells no less) and they produced three kids with three political outlooks, my dad being the middle child and the liberal party voter/member. I felt mostly lib dem by the time i was of voting age (the lib dems if the 90’s that is!) but objectively, i am probably quite far left of that point many years on, and even further left if you consider where the lib dems are now compared to 20 years ago.
As mentioned earlier though the parties have changed. i would have been comfy with 80’s or even John Smith labour and find myself horrified by them now. I still giggle a bit at single-issue parties, yet find the greens and even the nhsa the least unappealing in many ways.

At least 2 big hitterz on this thread on their 4th or 5th login names. That i even know of, i haven’t even been here that long or paying that much attention. i still don’t really get what was wrong with their old names.

I do seem to remember that Al coined the ‘big hitter’ expression on here though.

I love the way that
a)the renewal letter is worded as if they have done all the work for you already, no need to bother shopping around, and b)the salesperson on the phone when you cancel/change insurers always has some spiel about “wait, news just in, the picture is always changing etc etc and it just so happens that today we can beat our own renewal quote by a fat wedge of cash after all!!”
These are such crap lies, why even bother? Yet every year i get some version of this rather than ‘nice one for shopping around, lets see what we in the spirit of competition we can do you for for you.

Frankly, for an industry that has a fantastic database to check against ‘irregularities’ and (possibly rightly) hangs its customers out to dry for being less than honest, it is a bit sad the way insurance, (which you cannot choose not to have unless you don’t have a vehicle, and yet is provided in a fantastically free-market way) is sold to people using so many econmies of truth in the language that the brokers themselves seem allowed to use.

Of course this forum is not the place we will find serial renewal-quote-accepters or other forms of customer service mugs, but nevertheless these people are out there, and it grates a bit that something you ‘have to have’ (if we take motoring as a given not a luxury) is sold in such a way to so many relatively vulnerable people.

Happy by way of supporting said companies with my custom?
Afraid not.

You previous posts would suggests that if you did go somewhere where the staff seemeed overworked and underpaid, and there was a mechanism to do so, you would tip the underpaid front-of-house worker as their employer was paying them insufficiently.
But you are a uk taxpayer i take it? So in effect some of your taxes top up the low wages of these people regardless of whether you shop there. But as someone to the left of what you describe as the ‘champagne socialists’ on this forum, and definitely not a thatcherite i am sure you are just fine with how you support these companies with your taxes.

they also need to be tamper proof to avoid the footage being lost.

Definitely this. All very well having a dash cam to prove its not your fault and you were cut up, but you should be prepared to have your own driving judged too. Can’t imagine that in this day and age it is that much more costly to link it to speed/cornering telemetry too. It would be an interesting study to compare ‘optional’ and ‘mandatory not switch-offable’ camera users to see if there was a difference in their own standards of driving and incidence of, er, incidents.

Bigbutslimmerbloke, tipping of public officials is the mark of a second-world country. :)
“Great job, constable, i knew my speedo was more accurate than yours!” “Hey councillor, thanks for smoothing over my planning application. High-five!”

sbob – Member

You go out and eat a cheap meal which is made possible by the low wages paid to staff.
So you either spend more at a restaurant that pays its staff a liveable wage, or you are content to spend less knowing that the staff are supplementing your budget dining habits.

I take it you are happy also with the way uk plc indirectly subsidises amazon, tesco, sportsworld, wetherspoons and so on through the tax credit system. Only you are supposed to be more left that the lefties on here and all that…

Disclosure: i have had all manner of crap jobs as a young-un but never in pub, hotel or restaurant trade. I always tip in restaurants and taxis. And i share thm’s discomfort at sharing a table with insufficient tipppers (also my in-laws!!)

Thm +1

Also I am used to surprise ads being remotely based upon my browsing history. Are these two based on the overall likelhood of stw visitors being interested?? 8O

Now if they were for tofu pasties and a ‘canoe your kids to school’ scheme… [edit] then i would be well interested at least [\edit]

I last physically saw him at the bontrager 24/12 where it rained a lot and everyone went home early. (2012?) He was not going home but standing ankle deep in the water in the team bullheart compound. :lol:
He posts regularly on facebook under a not dissimilar name and a quick stalk reveals he is still interested in bicycles. He used to ‘admin’ a fb page called stw:argue or somthing like that.

Its supposed to be quite hard to get the mount inside a brand new bushing -not necessarily doable by hand especially if its one that presses all the way through the bush rather than 2-part ‘top hat’ mounts.

I press mine in with gentle application of the vice.. It should feel hard to get in and feel like it will never rotate, but actually when its all nipped up tight in the frame, the mount will rotate just enough inside the new bushing rather than anything else rotating (and wearing out) that shouldn’t be.

Are you talking about the bushing itself (the little ‘lining’ in the eyelet at the end of the shock -they look like a little metal hula hoop crisp before you press them in, and are a standard size for fox bike shocks nowadays) or the mount? (machined metal bit that plugs into it and goes between the shock and the frame -often referred to as a bushing as people talk about ‘offset bushings’ when they really mean offset mount kit)
could you post up a picture?

I wondered why more manufacturers don’t change seat tube angle with larger and smaller frames. iirc kona do for largest sizes but if you don’t (and all other things are equal ie length of chainstays, exposed seatpost, saddle rails), do you not end up with more weight over the rear wheel (when seated on climbs) than smaller sizes?

@benp1 -tapered/pointy airbed inlating adapter on end of trackpump, pump away. Moistened paper towel bit makes its own seal with the tube and the increasing air pressure shoots it out the other end in a most childish and amusing manner. Tighter the fit, the harder you have to pump and the more childish and amusing the result is. Forgot to say you need to take the hose off the bladder and fittings for this (but you might want to do this anyway to to get a good scrub in the corners if it was that mouldy.
Molgrips method posted just after you is undoubtedly easier of course.

Well its prettier than that spesh diverge at least ;)

Indie bands Delgado, and Campag Velocet (their spelling not mine!)
Kraftwerk!
There is an on-one inbred in Nathan Barley’s flat, in the pilot episode iirc.

Diluted fruit juice and a pinch of lo-salt for ghetto kind-of-isotonic energy drink. lo-salt has potassium chloride as well as sodium salt so tastes funny on your chips but in the right doses better than normal salt in your drinks imho.

+1 for poundshop dustpan brush, see also poundshop kitchen/scrubbing brushes and toothbrushes.

Plumbers silicon grease for disc brake pistons, and the pointy end of a slender ziptie to apply it: even a little pot for a fiver will last you forever.

Milton for camelbaks, and a track pump and wodges of kitchen roll pumped through if you ever need a fun way to de-mould a camelbak tube (but sterilise it afterwrds too)

Sugru and shoe-goo for a multitude of bodges and repairs.

Duct tape wrapped many times round a credit-card sized card, makes a tyre boot and also useful first aid for helping keep anything really gapey closed on your way to hospital.

Napisan as sports wash.

Babywipes clean all sorts really quickly.

Not really a non-bike product, but disc brake cleaner is also great for getting your rim brake rims even cleaner than you though they were when you washed your bike, improves braking performance ime.