750mm bars! sounds like a right laugh :)

second the spd's. Also wiiiiide bars, and if you are really feeling spendy, lock on grips with flanges. All helps with gurning up the steep bits. Have fun!

1996 fiesta 5 door (the 'frowning' one)
-because it was cheap off a mate and i knew it hadn't been driven or looked after daftly. Now looks a total shed! Just about to go round the clock. Hope to replace with a kombi (of the vw flavour) van around MOT time.

I found a book in the library yesterday: "Blackshirts in Devon": I never realised the extent to which fascism was adopted in the late 30's down here.

…and fourthed. You'll need each re-nippled spoke at the same tension (ie musical pitch) as the others fron the same side of the hub before you do the next one. (left and right are usually a little bit different from each other in a correctly tensioned wheel, depending on the difference in 'centre-to-flange' measurement of the hub.) Your wheel won't be straight at this point if it was a crash that bent it in the first place, but if the spokes are all the same tension you minimise the chances of any unexpected extra breakages. (do i sound like i speak form experience?) Then when you have replaced all the offending nipples, you can go about truing it again.

:lol:

The sprockets are the same thickness too, its just the chain plates are thinner and the cassette spacers are narrower.

well I never…-just popped my head in the spares box and learnt something new today. I have an 8 speed bike too: presumably this means I can use one of my pile of sram 9 speeds to replace the chain on that too?

if its definitely funded by direct debit, it will be free to both parties: I do this frequently.

very Aero :D

thanks for clearing that one up JP. (lovely acronym, non?)

I don't believe the mass media either; lordy, if i did my practice would be all over the shop! I am not sure the Nursing and Midwifery Council accepts that reading the Telegraph counts as Continuing Professional Development -I have to go a bit more 'peer reviewed academic journal' than that.

I don't think policy and legislation should be dictated by moral panic either. (at least we agree on something :-) ) I just don't feel this legislation particularly is. Its not so bad in Children's mental health but when I worked with schizoprenia/drug addiction/offending the 'moral panic'/local press factor was frequently quite ludicrous. What people wanted there was really not what would really help overall. However cponversely, you wouldn't believe some of the morally 'wrong' decisions that did not get publicised in health and social care because of purely financial/logistical reasons.

Perhaps we just differ in our 'underestimated danger vs moral panic' measurements then?

jackson-pollock, what educational/professional area are you coming from with your points? Assuming you haven't been on one (you mentioned that you hadn't mentioned you didn't work in the 'field') perhaps you should go on a child protection/"what to do if you suspect a child has been abused" course (just the sort they send teachers on, nothing too heavy) and the trainers will point out all your points above and they will still tell you its worth it. On my last course, I had all these conversations especially the 'moral panic/razors in babyfood' and the teachers' career ruined ones, and a couple more (which are possibly not for a family forum) with a lecturer in social work-turned investigator of child abuse. He had a box full of papers and statistics, but also a far better take on the balance between hard stats and 'fuzzy logic' of policy in this area than I am able to word here. I was undoubtedly the 'un-pc dissenter' in my 'class' (high beard, sandals and conker shoes content in Children's mental health :D ). And I still went away with a somewhat recalibrated (upwards) sense of how much is too much.

Like it or not it is these people not you (unless you have something to raise with the class?) who are experts in the incidence, severity and impact of abuse -did i mention the enormous financial cost to society of the social/health/criminal consequences of sexual abuse? -these aren't just lefty bleeding hearts like me making these decisons you know. We seem to credit the policy-makers with far too much humanity and feeling. They are working in a field that is driven hugely by some often very cruel cost-benefit analyses, many of which upset my liberal sensibilities greatly, and they think this is financially worth it.

Ton, I thought you might have really lost it and nutted one. :D

Cute dogs, folks.

reactionary moral panic.

a percieved threat

lol. Read junkyard's posts again please. Oh and google 'Bill Goad' if you are really wondering how it all works. (the Wilson involved in investigating that case is no relation BTW)

its a form for goodness' sake not a body cavity search. If you don't want to have one done then don't apply for a job. Although quite how that would put anyone off a job (considering the amazing selection processes these days) is beyond me.

lovely service, and slightly amusing that they couldn't just send you a bolt! (if they were feeling that generous would't they have sent both?)

I went to some shops earlier today and they let walk straight in without once asking proof that I'd never been suspected of shoplifting.
We can spend all day producing facile examples to support our points of view

…basic risk assessment Ian: likelihood of occurence plus impact/consequences of it occurring. I think the shop one is at the other end of 'likely/damaging'. Try something a little bit more calamitous than the simple and everyday financial loss of shoplifting and then see how you feel about safety checks.

[edit] I have heard some pretty shocking and underhand cases, but thankfully I have never found the malicious or inept use of C++ to be a factor in child abuse. :-)

Our UK society seems to be getting more and more distrustful of others as a default position, and anything which excerbates this strikes me as a producing a worse environment to bring up happy children in than a better one.

Ian, are you also deeply disillusioned that your employer didn't just take your word about your qualifications and previous excellent work performance? How dare they ask for your education certificates and chase up your references! Or perhaps you run your own business and trust that your prospective employees are who they say they are and can do what they say they can.

Atlaz, the benefits or rather 'reduction in abuse cases' from a change brought in five years ago will not be reliably measurable for at least five years more.

Most childhood sexual abuse goes unreported, at least in an official measurable way that can be presented as easily digestible statistics, which is what you seem to be asking for atlaz. (through my job) I know dozens and dozens of people who were abused as children, and children who have recently been abused. I know this from a variety of sources with varying degrees of measurability or reliability: my own hunches or suspicions (most abused children that we know of at least have some particular traits which are very rarely seen in children who have not been sexually abused), some just tell their friends/family, some also find the strength to tell a doctor, counsellor, mental health worker (which is where i personally fit in), some manage to tell social services and with the support of the last three groups, some even manage to tell the police. The minority actually make it as far as telling the courts and convicting someone with their evidence or statement. Yet however far that person gets with disclosing their abuse to someone who is able to add this to local or national statistics, or do anything about keeping other children safe from this abuser or bringing the abuser to justice, the effects to that person and back to my old point, the cost to society is theoretically the same.

There was a well known case round here of a man who employed and sexually abused teenage boys in a market stall, it wasn't until two or three of his victims came forward that the other fourteen[/] did too. This was some fifteen years after the abuse took place in the case of many of these men. Several of them wer in prison and most of them had comitted numerous offences. (At a great financial cost to society, lest we forget) How do you carry out 'back of a beermat' cost/benefit analyses on that sort of thing with those sorts of variables? Someone is able to calculate a balance of probabilities on this but they will have an expert and national view over entire generations, not five or ten years.

I say again, leave it up to the experts to make this decision and trust that they are not being swayed by anyone with a financial interest in it.

You need to trust in a bunch of people who work in the field to make a balanced judgement on a set of extrememly fuzzy data.

yes atlaz, your sample of one is too small.

What is up for debate is the financial and as you rightly point out practical (company stops offering work experience)cost of this versus the potential benefits in terms of who you might 'spare' from abuse (moral/practical) and how much that will save in real money in terms of society managing the after-effects of that abuse. No one is saying it will be wiped out within a generation, but someone is suggesting that on balance it is worth it.

In layperson's terms, keeping your car tyres at the correct pressure is a bit of a chore if you do it every week (and who here really does?) but it will slow down wear and decrease the chances of losing control of your vehicle. It won't mean you don't replace your worn tyres every so often or will never have a crash but most would aggree that it makes a small but discernible difference if you can be bothered to do it.

In general people that work in the field of child protection and investigation of abuse do have a good perspective of what is worth doing and what is probably not worth doing, just as experts in road safety etc do. The problem with all areas of safety and risk managment is that no individuals will be able to stand up and say "Hey, I wasn't abused/injured/insert-other-misfortune-that-safety-measure-was-brought-in-to-prevent thanks to this marvellous scheme, hurrah!" But plenty of people will have their lives made more difficult by these rules without ever being able to see or meet the beneficiaries of these changes.

The possible fly in the ointment is that the main beneficiaries are in fact those who will be tasked to do the work (ie capita!)and the public relations implications of responding to poor journalism that makes your balanced decisions look a lot dafter than they really are.

In a nutshell, unless the experts are being 'bent' by their own interests or those of capita, then they know what they are doing and we should let them get on with it.

With me, a lot of it is wishful and subjective thinking:
My singlespeeded maxlight hardtail feels waaaaay faster than my x9 geared nrs/xtc team if i use the same wheels and tyres but take 3 litres of water in a camelbak with me. Clearly the whole package (bike plus rider plus kit) weighs a bit more due to 3kg of water and a big all-day pack to hold it in, the rotating weight is the same (same wheels and tyres) and yet I still feel like the bike is lighter and I am faster. That cannot be actually be right though?

Lord knows what either bike actually weighs!

I can hold something between about 50g and 500g in my hand and reliably guess its weight to within 20g (any nurse will identify with this, when you have weighed thousands of pee bottles for peoples' fluid balance charts you get used to it!), but for big things I wouldn't have the foggiest. All i know is that I have light, not so light, heavy and 'of course its heavy its got 66's on it' bikes…

junkyard, do you work in child protection? well raised set of points.

theotherjonv – Member

So, who is paying for it, then?

The government and hence taxpayer.

Yes.

The taxpayer also pays a fortune in managing the wide range of secondary effects of sexual abuse: mental health probems, suicides/inquests, drug addiction, violent crime (you'd be suprised how many inmates were abused as children), the investigation of 'uncovered' peadophiles such as the one in the nursey down here recently. Yes most people are abused by a family member or family friend, but nevertheless it may be a wise investment to screen out a few more abuse cases now and not pay for the knock-on effects of this when these children grow up.

hello Cleveland! hard to believe its that old already.

I have the double dvd and the 2nd disc is almost a whole film's worth of out-takes, like watching it all over again for the first time :D

start with the 'right' sized washer, then cut 4-5mm off each side to make it an oval sort of shape and you could widen the hole into a slot in the same direction as your cuts. Then thread nuts onto rod so that washer 'jangles' between them, and slants sideways through bushing but pulls up behind it when you pull it out. The hard part will be knocking them out as your uppers will be too soft to use a bearing puller or similar: the real tool has something on the end that you can hit with a soft face hammer to yank the whole tool back out of the lowers again.

I think it will be a bit like the football league: once upon a time Man U, Liverpool and Chelsea played in the first division. Which is now played in by some less rich and successful teams.

Soon enough they will bring out an MTV3, or MTV xtreme or somethingorother, which will be just like mtv 20 years ago and mtv2 8 years ago. :-)

Plymouth: see Jam bo's post about Tavistock: pretty much the same here!
iirc Tavi is one of the rainiest places in the yookay. All those clouds off the atlantic bumping into Dartmoor, see?

Simonralli, look us up when you get to Enviro-skool, some ace cheeky stuff round here and a proper quality-and-friendly xc race series all winter.

…oh, and salespeople who try and find a way into a converastion with you by asking after a piece of literaature/survey/brochure they didn't actually send you and may not even exist. :x :x

CaptainFlashheart – Member

Socialists.

Coucou Flashi!

Those crashes are way funny, especially the t-boning near the beginning and the ensuing bike tangle.

The only world cuppy standard course I have ever actually ridden on is newnham and even with the camera flattening out the rail, that course looks waaaaaaaay harder!

I can imagine riding/cleaning those rocky bits once, but in that heat with that climb and goodness knows how many laps… [edit: 7 laps and 42-odd km, zoiks!!]

Depends which bike!

xc bike: -2!
singlespeed: +4 (wiiiide bars innit)
freeridey bike: +15 but i ride it like a girl guide.

(jam bo is right, i should have 2 ponts deducted for the body armour so 11 really.)

BoardinBob – Member

What are they like on wet roots?

:lol:

Depends on the rider and the line you choose ten times more than his/her tyre choice and pressure.

FWIW though, I find them oh so slightly less slidy than 'normal' knobblies. Particularly less so than the trailrakers I had before. That is either due to the soft compound, the little grooves in the top of the knobbles or just that their advertising conditions me to think they are better.

"evening picnic" is a new one on me! :lol:

if they suit your local mud (aren't mud tyres fussy?!) then you can leave them on all year. My mates and I have raced on them in dusty dry conditions too and they are still great fun then. They do wear relatively quickly in my experience, and they seem to be more prone to punctures than many other knobblies, but i suppose if you have them tubless with sealant that won't be an issue. Thed 1.8's are proper skinny though, I would definitely go for 2.0's. If i wasn't such a tyre twiddler then I would leave them on my xc bike all year round too.

[edit] oh and they are inexplicably bastid hard to get on some rims. 717's are fine but putting some on my wife's dt rims was a real excercise in "Darling, I thought you said getting a tyre on with your thumbs was a piece of cake?" shame.

2 pages of moral issues and no one's called anyone else a 'nobhead' yet. There's progress for you! :D

I think I might have left one of my ribs on a root half way down Smith's: (look right just after the lingering smell of cooked brake pads…) if anyone finds it my email is in my profile.

Also I might be up for it if you have a 'slow' group like last time…

painted cyclepaths on roads are also puncture-mungous round here! I much prefer the shared pavement type, or better still where there is also a little kerb between the footway and the cycleway too. But in urban areas they do get a bit silly, yes.

Sometimes sustrans paths are just peachy though! Particularly the railway ones as they get more timid folk into cycling for fun (rather than to go somewhere) you can ride somewhere with your children (rather than just round and round the park) and thanks to the massive compulsory purchases that took place in the railway mania 1850's-90's, they are often much more direct. From my house to Plymbridge Woods by road is 20 minutes and getting on for 100m of climbing by either of the 2 road ways. 8 minutes and about 20m climb by the sustrans railway path.

Bodmin to Wadebridge has a well-silly climb on it by road (never ridden it but overtook a roadie heaving painfully up it in bottom gear recently) or it is ever so slightly downhill and a piece of piddle on the Camel trail.

You did ask him about where the roundabout was. But you also got everyone's backs up telling him it was his wife's fault straight off the bat. Make like Columbo and draw the evidence out gently and charmingly over an hour-long episode with two advertisment breaks. :-)

Glupton, on another slightly tangential but off-the-topic-of-tyres-completely subject, (but since you are still watching) is it right or wrong (or just a little bit right :wink:) to drive over the white bit in the middle of a mini roundabout if there is room to drive round it? Always wondered and dimly remember my driving instructor saying something about it 15 years ago….

Blimey, what a thread.

Driving cannot possibly be black and white!
The only driving you do without accepting some sort of risk is just sitting in your stationary vehicle in your own drive.

The risk of unexpected mechanical failure.
The risk of sneezing and missing something. (yes, you realy can't sneeze with your eyes open!)
The risk of you becoming ill (heart, stroke, epilepsy spring to mind) and losing control of the car.
The risk of someone else driving badly and colliding with you or causing you to alter your impecable standards of driving and say, hit the kerb to avoid a worse collision. Glupton faces all these risks to some extent every time he gets in a vehicle. His expertise may be such that he reduces many of these to lower levels than the rest of us. But he will never be rid of them.

I am not an expert on driving safety but I am 'quite good' at people who are literally too risk-averse to set foot outside their front doors. Those are the people who never take risks. There is no such thing as black and white, and there is no such thing as driving or indeed anything else whilst thinking you have absolutely every last risk covered.

Ultimately glupton is probably right. But the way to establish this whilst retaining some sort of interest from the readers of this thread would be to enquire after a few more details for the benefit of us lesser beings, whet our inquisitive appetites so to speak, and then explain.

Glupton, if you really like black and white, train to be an engineer not a physio! Honestly, as one health bod to another prospective one, you will be frustrated at every turn if you think things will ever be anything like as clear-cut as this in your new job.

Anyway, otherwise some useful points on this thread: I think I'll go and check my tyre pressures now… :D

somebody that wasn't tandemjeremy had his name for a bit iirc.

I am what i always was on the old forum.

I *think* tangobravo was fruit on the old one! (we never did have a 'fruit on this one i think)

It would seem that i share a name with a famous surfer then:

I thought this thread was going to be about NeilSuperstar. :(

I know naff all about sailing; so no comment on the likelihood of this girl making the trip safely.

But I do know a bit about development: any child that age deprived of 'proper' contact for so long will suffer in terms of social skills, self esteem, trust in/reliance on others and emotional regulation. She's not going to hop off the boat and eat someone, but she will be a better socially and emotionally equipped young adult for staying around her family and peers fo a bit longer.

IMHO.

If you don't set your cable stops properly then when your cable stretches it dumps the chain between the cassette and spokes. :oops:

With regards to mud and grit though there was no difference in performance between my xt 'right' and 'wrong' mechs.