….and keep it on its side as 15 or 20cc of oil should fall out the hole otherwise.

good guide on tftuned website if you get stuck.

yes. As far as i know its supposed to be there to keep dust out rather than air in though! You might want to think about trying a new valve core. I've never changed one on a fork or shock before but i guess its like a car one ie screws out with a specific tool. Give TF Tuned Shox a ring, they are very helpful and knowledgabe and if they think that's the problem too they will post you a reliable (ie for high pressures) one for not a lot of money.

there is a tiny o-ring that lives inside the valve cap. If you don't have on in there then that's most likely what it is. …and if you have a leaky valve then maybe the o-ring in the valve cap was previously stopping air leaking any further. Until it fell out.

ahhhh, match made in heaven^^^ :D

Dez, for that same reason (ours are 3 and 5) we booked a pitch in the 'proper' campsite. Yes it was an extra expense but probably quieter (apart from the woman singing Stevie Wonder quite a lot at silly o'clock), next to the kiddies playground and near the loo and shower block. I liked it that the event price was lower and those that wanted a better level of comfort paid a bit more for posh camping or chalet.

Trailer bike race at BBB. 8)

..oh and the trailer bike race was a unique bonus, and hotly contested! Here's a picture (from peterpoddy's photos) of Juan getting his clearances wrong. My daughter descibed her ride as "a bit bumpy", and Juan as "strange". :lol:

…was the rudeboy story the one you were talking about at the start of the short track xc then Peter? If so, dish it!

Great to put faces to names, top ale, great music (especially the band that did all the Sabbath Covers), kids had a great time, and the xc course was proper hilarious. Oh and Juan made my wife blush when he greeted her like a proper frenchman.

Well worth the journey and we have many fond memories. Huuuuuuuuge thanks to WCA and his team of merry bikesters.

I've got a pro-tec ace and its well warm! Winter night ride lid for me cos I get too hot in it if i ride for any length of time and I got a full facer for silly riding. The sxp version is also supposed withstand several crashes: it's sort of expanded polystyrene but a bit spongy at the same time. It also has quite above average 'thin' padding if you are at the larger end of the 2 sizes the dome comes in (ie if you are an M or XL) I would try whatever one you choose on first though as pads are not going to reconcile different shaped head and 'pot.

For the last 2 super dusty courses (I know! Set 2 rise and BBB fwiw) I have had an sb8 on the back and a nobby nic on the front: taller knobbles grab into the dusty corners and back slides round, or back sort of keeps you going up hills (even out of saddle on ss). Great fun.

But yes, other wise sb8's on both wheels otherwise you risk being out-gripped by your back wheel….

errrrr, chaos permitting we will be pitching up in the faaaaamily (really, you don't want our kids singing at you at half past five in the morning) campsite at about 2 or 3 pm.
[edit] loubella, i am coming with my own 3 and 5 year old, and a friend is bringing 20 month and 3 year old. They will all be shouting and falling off balance bikes a lot.

ahhh, big loader…. I've still got one. And a Big Big Loader that links onto it. 8)

I am 32 btw.

I had looooooads of this stuff:

if you have qr fork, merlin are doing a good deal on flow rims/xt qr 6 bolt hubs.

they missed a trick putting a 22.5 mm rim on a qr front hub. That would be a killer wheel with a 20mm xt or slx (not all that uch more expensive than qr) hub on it.
Still, I wonder if this means there are more stan's deals to follow? (opens wallet, brushes aside cobwebs…)

I hide 'the Very Hungry Caterpillar' inside my Gaurdian. :-)

blackburn mars 3.0. A faff to get open to change batteries (you even have to undo three screws) but the upside is that it's very weatherproof indeed.

that's a very black-and-white interpretation of what I said, Bob. Of course all insurers have their checks, loss adjustments and so on. Lord knows there is enough talk of it in terms of house/bike burglaries on here. I seem to remember you contributing significantly to a recent thread on here. My only advice can be to get some sort of serious debilitating illness and then see how much joy you get with your mortgage payment/life insurance, and your private medical insurance. Then imagine you live in the states and multiply that grief by lord knows how much… S'alright though, it'll never happen to you, eh?

In terms of medical insurance however, there is quite a gap betwen 'pre-existing condition' and 'I had a sore throat, I went to my GP and he told me not to worry about it'. And yet this is exactly what American insurers pay people whose job is tatntamount to that of a private investigator to root around and find out about. Often the 'sore throat' example of a pre-existing condition will have nothing to do with the illness that the insurers refuse to pay for treatment for; the insurance is null and void because you 'intentionally defrauded' them.

TBH its very hard explaining to patients that the absolute gold standard medicine or treatment isn't available in their postcode or on NHS generally but at least those decisions are carried out by professionals on a NICE or local PCT board, in the interests of keeping as many people alive as possible, and not by insurance companies whose financial interest is to pay as little as possible to you alive and keep their 5% return up….

I too have had a comedy fork rebound OTB on tarmac. Deeply uncool!
Also I stopped for a snack on my first ever xc race.

I have yet to have a tantrum in the transition at an enduro race however.

a) quite a bit, yes!
b) yes
c) sounds like a right giggle, and my kids are about the age where they should really enjoy themselves too. Bike trailer race really swung it though!

No statistics to hand alas. But then they are almost infinitely manipulable anyway. However I am fairly sure that the UK does not have people who work in the insurance sector purely and exclusively to find reasons for health insurers to wriggle out of paying for life-saving treatment. I think the only answer to these people is for them to get ill and find out that some completely trivial observation (or rather 'undeclared risk') from their GP in their notes from 25 years ago means they will not get heart surgery and now its out of the bag no one else will insure them.

gear ratio and tyre choice reccommendations would be right up some people's street :D

Proper looking forward to it btw!

a mate spoke to Flooks a few months ago about a new coil shock for his heckler, was advised to get a vanilla over a dhx. I've got an even older one and its still ace.

Dr Dolittle, am i missing something?

…s-m has mentioned his job a few times (probably not what i would remember about everyone on here but i know him 'properly' too) when he has replied to other smoking threads on here. I only have a fairly rudimentary understanding of the physiological/neurological rumblings of smoking but I am fairly sure s-m will have some proper science to back up his comments.

fwiw when I smoked, (and i did so regardless of whether or not i had a beer in my hand) I would start to find it a bit nauseating after a certain level of beeriness (usually 3-4 pints depending on my level of 'lightweightness' at the time). I wonder whether that was simple carbon monoxide, me not realising how much harder i was pulling on the cigarette, or some sort of push-me-pull-you of the different effects of beer and fag.

I think that for me, social conditioning was the larger issue in that after I gave up, I only hankered after a fag when I drank lager (as opposed to other alcohol). Surely my 'chemical' brain doesn't know the difference between lager and ale, but my preconscous brain probaly does?

..not right this moment I haven't. Its a bit like the metal one above (which would seem to have been done looking at the same plans as mine) but mine is made of 18mm MDF painted white so you can see better against it.

Just buy the wheelpro book, honestly it is one of the best value bike things I have ever bought.

Dr Dolittle – Member

Sorry Sponging-Machine, but you are wrong.

..you do know what his (s-m's) job is don't you?….. :D

I've done seven or eright wheels using the desiogn in the wheelpro book and its great: I just use a rear skewer for bolt through axles. After painstakingly checking the alignment of the 'jaws' i later realised it doens't matter all that much as its just a way of fixing a point to spin the rim against and see if it moves in and out or not.

In the book Roger reccommends wood as it 'rings' when you pluck the spokes: I made mine of MDF and stand it on a big wooden table on a wooden floor and it certainly is easy to hear the differences in tone on the spokes. Also I made my alignment 'bits' (that you sight the rim against) out of fibreboard painted black to stand out. The unexpected advantage of this being that when the rim gets so close its hard to see it moving in and out a qharter of a mil, then you can hear it rubbing/ringing against it (like a wet finger on a wine glass).

I did get a proper dishing tool though: that is slightly easier to use then the corrugated card one in the book.

fatmuthahubbard off here is white and used to have blond dreads. And he had to beat the ladies away with a stick! That'll be why…

diminishing weight makes for higher prices! If you look for 350g rims you can double the price of a 717! I think SSC are selling a 300g rim for £90ish too…

I've just built up an xm317 for a friend and the finish (ie closeup, eyelets, join etc) on them is just as good as my 717's. I think the idea is they are tougher but much of this will depend on your wheel build really.

yes fittings are reusable: don't cut the hose. Undo one end, yank it out, reassemble and rebleed.

oh in the pilot show of Nathan Barley he as a white inbred hanging up over his stairs. Excellent props person :wink:

Timmy Connerford of RATM is, in fact i think he is in next month's MBUK.

Somewhere in the "I'd like to thank everybody" list at the back of the first Audioslave album, he thanks Shimano XTR…..

Also MCA from the Beastie Boys used to have a stake in Brooklyn Machine Works, and then Pharell Williams bought him out of it.

seems fair enough. I like the picture of 'deadly' cyclists in the article too.
[edit] …actually seven months? If he really was riding like a demon perhaps he should have got more: the article just quotes what the vicim's daughter said about his maner of riding, not any other witnesses.

often cheap deals on old season roadie ones on Prendas Cyclismo.

But they will be very colourful!

CaptainFlashheart – Member

The pathetic so called Hunting Ban. Doesn't help anyone except chippy class warriors like Darcy…. Total waste of parliamentary time and an unnecessary piece of legislation.

Masterpiece/masterstroke of politics, that: it got loads of well meaning lefties (obviously I include myself here) het up about hunting whilst not thinking enough about whatever else was going on. No way it would have made it to parliament had there not been all manner of anti terrorist legislation and a war to push through at ther same time.

fish, chimps and mushy bees.

One of my friends works for VW and almost sold a shiny new van to Silverfish (bike distributors) but then didn't as it was fairly trashed in a freak golf-ball sized hailstorm outside the factory in Wolfsburg that wiped out millions of euros of stock. (*waves to Richie*).

And I work with the mum of up-and-coming xc star Carla Haines.

Tenuous enough? :D

oh and Tinker Juarez once rode past my house (2 miles away from Newnham) whist he was 'loosening up' for the xc worlds years ago.
And I stayed in Bryn Bettws chalets at Afan next door to Rachel Atherton and Tracey Mosely a few years ago. My mates didn't believe it was her so i showed them that month's issue of Dirt which had a big photo of Rachel on the podium as Junoir World Champion at Fort William.

We borrowed a bowl from them. (Ironical 8) )

must be for all those people doing rad street stuntz on fixies: the hookworm being the perfect tyre for that sort of thing. I'd prefer a bmx personally…

just noticed it seems to have a seat tube that goes all the way up to the saddle rails. So niche even your shorter friends can't have a go on it?

The only things I have never done to a bicycle are welding, respraying, facing/reaming, 'proper' damper service for air shock and replacing big seals and bushings on forks. Between my local riding mates we have pretty much all bike tools apart from reamers and cutting tools (which are welllllll expensive: you'd have to use them dozensd and dozens of times bedfor they paid for themselves) and it has collectively saved us quite a few bob in bike shop repairs.
It is often cheaper to buy a custom built wheel for merlin or crc than to buy the bits yourself, but I have built a few of my own and rebuilt a few for my friends.
I had a torque wrench but i lost it. :(

I shared your pain. (fwiw i have hones and xt on other bikes and for mine at least, I find the trivativ (firex) ones easiest to remove and refit and i am not the sort of rider who can tell if one is stiffer than the other.) Then i fitted enduro replacement bearings to my gxp shell and they have outlasted the last 2 lots with no sign or rumbles or play so far. £25is and if you post your dead bb cups to betd they will fit the bearings for you.

Hope do an insert so you can use their vastly superior bb's aswell.