There are a few shared use paths near me where there is a proper kerb in the middle, where the pavement is supposed to be the pavement, and the lower level half is the ‘road’. By and large both cyclists and pedestrians seem to get this. i walk and ride these at least twice a day i seldom see anyone on the ‘wrong’ side, but the other one nearby where there is a sort of kerb between sides but both paths are the same level as each other seems not to have the same level of ‘lane discipline’ from both sets of users.

Salsa mamasita (the red one, stillavailable and heavily discounted) with pf30 eccentric bb converter cups from ebay.

Teasel, when i said “replacement”, i meant like when Tommy the Green power ranger was replaced by, errr, Tommy the white ranger. :D

I have a superstar tapertech headset and it just has 2 different crown races to fit taper or normal steerer, but the rest of it is the same whichever fork you have in. Just had a look though, and superstar seem to be out of stock of spare 1.5″ crown races at the moment.

Teasel, this forum has had a vacancy for a ‘thread-ruining alpha male with rad skillz from back in the day’ ever since GW and his rugged no-nonsense, no-gloves and no-helmet shtick left us a couple of years ago.

What we seem to have here is his long overdue ‘replacement’. :D :D :D

Skylines rest in glyncorrwg was always cheap and spacious with chunky/secure looking bike storage, (much bigger inside than it looks from streetview/map or indeed their own website) -stayed there a few times. Website doesn’t seem to be running any more though, i wonder if they are still in business?

Bryn bettws bunhouse and lodges are both lovely too but the far end from skyline trail: you’d need to factor in most of the wall trail too in order to ride out, do skyline and get back again.

In addition to the above: Potty helmet or one of those fancy ones with the extra shell that blocks up the vents. I have a protec skate helmet and its lovely in really cold but too hot for xc otherwise.
Plenty of wiggle room for toes? I have some winter boots which leave my feet slightly warmer with my not-thickest socks because the thickest ones make my boots that little bit too tight i think.
Blood cools down on the way down your shins/calves to your feet when its really cold, again with the same boots and socks i notice real difference between 3/4, full tights and tights with windproof panels but much more so on the road where windchill seems to make much more if a difference than at xc bimble or twidlling round the woods speeds. Baggies over whatever else your are wearing attracts divided opinions on here it seems but i find definite warmer nads/arse especially on the road. (Awaits knock on door from roadie police)
Finally, little steel thermos of coffee for half way round. Probably makes more of a ‘spiritual’ difference than a physiological one!

Lots of good points up there. Only thing i have to add is to ask if mtbel is actually GW returned from the backcountry.

Last house before i moved in with mrs wilson: doll parts. 8O

With all those lovely pictures I was hoping for the last one to be a topless Putin holding a dead bear.

On the subject of personalities winning elections, i present you John Major and indeed Dubbya. :D

Chewkw, actually off the top if my head with their %age share in 2010 the conservatives would have squeaked in an overall majority with about 2 seats to spare*. Unless you are implying that without Cable putting the brakes on, a wholly conservative government would have had us carrying monopoly money just to get a basket of shopping by now. :lol:

{*Not adjusting for tactical voting, of course. Far too many variables and unmeasurables to imagine whether that would have made their share go up or down. I am sure plenty of folk in safe labour seats voted tory as the next best party cos they wanted Brown out. But i am sure panty of folk voted lib dem against their better judgment because they wanted to topple the incumbent conservative too. (Coughs). }

Currently prediction (as i type) is that they will be one seat short of an overall majority. “Reinforced proprtionality” is a rather interesting system, no idea what this means in terms working backwards to guesstimate of their actual share of the vote.

[edit] also just for fun i will be trying to work out what our parliament would have looked like if (even with the misrepresentation of views and political wishes we get through tactical voting in fptp) if we had the same system in 2010 and all voted exactly the same way. [\edit]

Given how terrible things have been there for the poorest people in Greece, i will also be interested to see if they have had a bigger than usual voter turnout.

Re:unchambering pistols: Iirc there was a story a few series back where someone in custody got hold of Laure’s sidearm. Not sure how realistic that was ie does/could this ever really happen? – I wonder if it is just them making the point that in real life police officers are a bit more careful about what they do with their firearms.
That said many years ago i used to know a gendarme who just popped his on the dresser in the hall when he got in from work (home was a flat in a rather secure Caserne, but still…..)

My dab radio in the kitchen started breaking up when i turned the cold tap on the other day. (It lives on the window sill just over the sink). Doesn’t often break up, but the tap on/radio scrambled, tap/off radio fine worked a number of times for that mad 5 minutes. Wtf?

to put another slant on it, in the world of fancy pants c&c hubs eg dura ace/xtr, its definitely about the grade and matched sizes as well as the material.

If you put a poorly matched set of balls in a cartridge bearing will the biggest ones wear prematurely, speeding up the failure of the whole lot? This is certainly the case for using cheap (100 grade) balls in a posh c&c hub. All other things being equal a set of 25 grade or even 10’s will last longer. Perhaps kael’s bearings use better matched balls?

How embarrasing that whatever kael does to his bearing seems to outlast INA stainless in the real world then.

Fwiw INA and FAG are both parts/brands of the schaeffler parent group. My brother was a design/evelopment engineer for schaeffler group too but moved on to more racing-car-shaped things recently. I am not sure if such things are below his radar (last bearings he designed were for turbochargers so different shape, cleaner environment and massively higher rotating speed, but longevity and reliability critical if you have ever seen the inside of a failed turbo…) but i will ask him next time i see him. I would imagine it will be something to do with the hardness of both materials, grade of ball bearing used as well as the lube and sealing, i do wonder whether whatever Kael does could be done to stainless bearings too and whether that would be a help or hindrance.

Given the size of individial unit and relatively low cost, i can see hope being a big customer to INA but the way the industry works it is unlikely that in terms of money they are the biggest customer to the factories that produce bearings for schaeffler that end up with INA written on the box. Schaeffler as a whole sell bearings to industry that cost hundreds of pounds each!

Love how ninfan pretends to be curious about it before pretending to find out it is all a big plot by those evil scummy unions protecting their own interests over the public’s.

If it helps you come to terms with what unions do, (although i realise that you are well aware of the differences and similarities already), you might in this case consider Unite as a poorly-skilled lobbyist that is not a patch on those true professionals lobbying in secret over £500-a-plate dinners for ttip a better deal for the honest hardworking taxpayers.

Re: rapha repair service, the blurb says that (because it is too delicate or something) that they don’t do repairs on merino. Doesn’t specify if sportwool counts or not. Anyone know?

[list]Senor j, I was just thinking Mark Strong too. He even steals the show from op’s show-stealer Paul Bettany and Brian bleddy Cox in “Blood”.

Also but in a much funnier way, Jemaine Clement.

My kids have both been to the same £15.95 format party at same (local to us) “ski” “slope” (having “skied” there i use both terms cautiously) -they reckon they were brilliant fun parties.
Fwiw knowing the leisure centre and other parents who have held parties there, they will usually provide extra food or goes on snotubes/toboggan o the pther partygoers in lieu of kids that have not shown up, if mum had asked she could have got some more value out of her day. Apparently JNL are not best pleased with the ‘publicity’. :(

Getting 29,095 brits back and shipping out 64,830 europeans would likely be seen as somewhat of a success……..

More complicated than that IMHO Age and social/healthcare needs spring to mind, and no statistics are provided for how much more the 9000-odd retirees on benefits in spain, france and italy would cost us compared to the 18000 people they displaced were that to happen.

Jambalaya yes we are a net importer of benefit claimants as individual ‘heads’, but the article claims that british clamiants abroad as a group would seem to be costing the rest of europe more in actual money than we are paying out. The article needs links to sources though.

Gobuchul, did you read the article? If you did you will realise that it is not about the total number of people, its about the total number of, errr, actual money. (And the distribution of our benefit claimants in europe bpcompared to the corresponding nationalities of those claimng benefits over here) And that is what 9/10 of the article goes on to explain, as well as the complexity in quantifying this.

I would not like to be a british retiree in spain or france right now.

That’s not true.

tbf the article cites many cases where it might be:
n Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany, Austria, France and Ireland the number of Britons banking unemployment cheques is almost three times as high as the nationals of those countries receiving parallel UK benefits – 23,011 Britons to 8,720 nationals of those nine countries in the UK.
…and the number of brits claiming benefits in countries with lower cost of living and paying lower rates of benefits is very low indeed, whereas we seem to be higher numbers of claimants in what might be considered more generous countries…
…but as far as i can see no one has managed to calculate a total. This is difficult to achieve in reality, in that it is complicated by other things that are not strictly benefits but nevertheless brits being a drain on the country’s public purse eg the amount of retirement age brits in spain.

Those figures show that there a lot more Foreign Nationals are claiming benefits in the UK than the number of UK nationals claiming benefits abroad.

…is missing the point of 90% of the text of the artcle linked to rather than the funky graph.

Great psa drlex. Not sure i will look quite as hipsterish as that man up there though^^.

I think the cx pro only comes in 1.3 ish size in 26″, and only with wire bead. They are my emergency boggy-race tyre and I raced cross once with them on a ss hardtail, they were pretty good even on the hard packed bits.

[edit] here they are, 1.35″ and £26 delivered for a pair.
tyres

The ‘original’ (haven’t they already updated it three times?) mucky nutz fender bender.
Fox antifreeze gloves.
Specialized defroster boots.
On-one merino armwarmers if you only paid a fiver for them.
On-one smorgasbords, even the single compound wire ones.
New slx brakes.

Kenn ward (old folks acute medicine at Royal Devon And Exeter)
Sparks (the band)
Oh and Lidl in general.

at this rate Farage will be losing Thanet to a fictional pub landlord.

Oh and whilst we are on tired overused stuff on stw…. Wunnundred! :D

Chiefgrooveguru, IANAB*, but i have some family/inlaws who work in refuse/recycling in brighton, from what they tell me it would seem to be more a case of Brighton&Hove being a lot more honest about what they can and do genuinely recycle than we hear from more optimistic local authorities.
(*I Am Not A Binman)

Downieville, innit.

Xt and saint are better sealed, have a higher grade of balls (iirc) than deore bb52. Shimano spec the same bb for slx and xt fwiw, and having had all of them at one point or another, only difference i could tell between the bb70 (xt/slx) and bb80 (saint) is the colour, more threads/longer shell on driveside and a very few grams in weight. Oh and its £4 more at crc.

Thanks for the advice.
Yes indeed, mrs needs to know she could fix a flat even if they seem mercifully few and far between in the wilds of devon. Long levers not really the issue here, the fit of the bead in the too-shallow centre of this rim is so tight thatto remove it you need a really fine tip to get under the bead at all, park and pedros (my favourites) are just too blunt to get under and lever it up, succeded when i dug out a tacx one which has a much more pronounced hook at the business end (as well as the usual hook for spokes at the other).
Will try some duranos and a mounting tool. iirc there is a workshop size one also a saddlebag size one with a little tyre lever in it.

Deinfitely choose the superlight over something with a rigid fork if you are riding it for 12 hours!
Dropper post not necessary if you are into lightening the bike, the hairiest bits of newnham usually don’t feature in the 24/12 (i have done all of them and plenty of normal xc racing in between), i guess because it has lots more people new to racing and lots of very tired and unco-ordinated riders by the end!
Also if it rains(i think we are overdue a rainy one this year!) you will be laughing as the superlight has fantastic mud clearance at the back. Team that back end up with maverick sc32 like my wife’s and on a really muddy race you will gain 5 minutes a lap not stopping all the time to unclog your bike.

Depends who is rebuilding the wheel! Not sure every professional wheelbuilder or shop will want to use used spokes but if its a new rim rather than a crash/pringled wheel repair then its a pretty normal job.

If the wheel was sound before you unlace it then fine to reuse spokes imho. But be sure to undo the tension in the spokes evenly, ie go round the wheel a few times slacking off each spoke just a turn at a time rather than just undoing each one completely. In fact if you are keeping the hub and swapping the rim its a case of then taping the new rim to the old one (valve holes lined up) to swap them across one by one. (When i do it like this i like to dunk each nipple in oil as I go to help get a good tension -wheelpro book reccommends light oil for this, but if you are building from scratch its tidier to use a cotton bud to wipe inside of spoke hole and dip the ends of the spokes in oil -this way is a bit messy and requires much cleaning a couple of layers of electrical tape afterwards to stop excess oil seeping through cloth rim tape and eating your inner tubes.)
Re length: this is only a little over a mm in terms of distance from the hub plus spokes go into hub at an angle so potentially not a great change. Have a look inside the current rim as it is built now, and see how close the tops of the spokes are to the top (slotted bit inside the rim) of the nipples. You are going to see each spoke go further into the nipple but not by masses with that difference in ERD so if they aren’t poking out the tops of the nipples already you should be fine.
And get yourself a good wheelbuilding guide and take your time!

I like how mr Hurtmore’s economics class (and by that i mean us in here) are being taught that manipulating the budget defecit (a lie so blatant and contrary to such basic economics that even i spotted it before it made the news) is just cheeky, but the ‘scaremongering’ about the nhs is ‘blx”.
Context is everything, kids! ;)

Btw who else is feeling like the job creation bits are also a bit, well, ‘cheeky’?

It won’t be a reversed thread as otherwise tightening up canti bosses on installation would risk looseningthe reverse threaded boss and starting the slow process of it winding itself out of the frame with the back and forth rotation of canti arms.
8.5mm is a silly width. I reckon dremel or file it down bit by bit to make good straight 7 or 8mm flats and a tight fit in a good quality proper spanner (ie not adjustable, i guess that didn’t work already)

Also wondering bearing in mind the strange 8.5mm bit if its possible they are indeed not threaded at all but bonded into the frame or something daft like that.

No such thing as christmas off where i work (our team even had six poeple on duty christmas eve night shift!) but now i am still sat up in bed on first of fourteen days leave. Contemplating a list if jobs to do, helping my mum move house and a 29er to clean up, split up and sell. Lovely.

Heh.

Fwiw in ze motherland we sometimes refer to a week as ‘huit jours’ and perhaps more often/more recognised is a fortnight being ‘quinze jours’. In fact the second example is considered a more accurate translation than ‘deux semaines’ despite being one day bigger. :lol:

Wysiwyg, collectors market innit. Fwiw you can get one for “only” £750 on ebay atm, and the set retailed for $100 when it came out in the ‘real’ shops years ago.

Without googling and including party leaders past, I’m going for IDS. :mrgreen:
his life experience living on the dole in that hovel of a girlfriend’s cottage on her parents’ vast estate lends him a unique and realistic perspective on this, of course.

Having googled it, i am going to repeat to thm his own wisdom from threads passim, about the utterly critical importance of taking into account context and bias.

It would be interesting to research opinions on ftpt relative to which constituency you live in and who you voted for or what your political leanings are (of course 2 different things under ftpt as so many people vote tactically.) i wonder if it is easier to appreciate ftpt when you live in a constituency where your vote got your favourite mp in, or at least was a close run race.

I live in a constituency so ‘safe’ that a gibbon would get in as long as it wore the right colour rosette. No one from the incumbent party bothers campaigning locally as they just don’t need to. Many vote for the next biggest polling candidate (in our case lib dem) because they see it as a very slim chance of getting the incumbent mp/party out not because they want a lib dem government. When you live in a safe seat and your voting and interests happen not to be those of the incumbent mp, and your mp or even his PA replies to correspondence with cut and pasted party press releases and internal memos, it is very hard to feel like your vote counts, that your local mp represents the local interests of his constituents (well, only the constituents that want what the party wants) or indeed that we live in a democracy.