If you get the formula one, try and get hold of some hose clamps (from aquarium or medical suppliers?) as I find it makes the bleed better. Then use the avid guide on the internet or Mr Nutt’s rather funnier version on here.

theoretically yes, though it is more about reduced leverage than overlap as such; the bushings in the lowers will be the same length whatever you do. There are other variables in the stiffness of the fork such as the arch, type of dropout/axle, size of disc rotor…. I dropped my reba’s from 115mm to 100mm and i can’t say they feel radically stiffer, they just climb better.

i have wondered this for bikes past and found most of them on individual manufacturers’ websites. Bit labourious and ‘clicky’ though….

“xc-jeyboy” originated as a misspelled dig at XC riders on (I think) MBUK’s forum.

:lol: that is funny for a couple of reasons…
cheers Chipps.

…so it is alright to embrace my own ‘jeyness’ then?

Honest non-trolly question here:

Are ‘jeyboys’ reclaiming the word then? (like ‘queer’ or ‘****’ which you generally only say if you are either homphobic/racist or gay/black) I always thought (but not sure whether i read this or summised it myself…) that it was adapted from ‘gay’ as a way of sidestepping sounding homophobic, and basically had its roots in gnarlier riders slagging off lycra-clad xc riders with some fairly low-common denominator ‘humour’.

Please enlighten?

singeltraquois… Merde… Didn’t even new this word existed…

ça n’éxistait pas: je l’ai inventé. (what is the mot juste for singletrack anyway?) …sort of makes me think of the Maquis. But with brighter clothes.

if he can play already he ought to try a few and choose it: i don’t get on so well the way some of my friends’ cherished guitars play and vice versa. ‘Guitar geometry’ particularly at the neck/fretboard is far more subjective and variable than a bike’s!

And possibly factor in some nice new strings too: some guitars still come with rubbish ones (although many high volume acoustic makers have changed this since they realised that a couple of quid extra on a bright sounding set will sell a guitar over duller-sounding ones. A while back I bought a cheap electro for drinky pub nights and it had looovely strings on it.)

Does this mean you get all you organising done easily and your phone talks to your computer about it? Like a filofax but cleverererer?

I am thinking of breaking my ‘late adopter’ stance on technology and investing in one of these new-fangled ‘camera phones’:

After having broken my elbow, my right arm doesn’t straighten out. It is a lot better than it was a few years ago. I (very!) briefly tried having my bars on the wonk but it was too wierd having the bars not perpendicular to the front wheel, felt as though i was trying to turn all the time. In fact having to lean forward on my recovering arm with the bars n the right place was probably good training for it.

50%
but they didn’t ask about my record collection, toys as a child or amazing flapping body language.

Who, or what are “Singletrackers”?

in France we call them ‘Singletraquois’ :wink:

Oh, and I have some assos bibshorts but no road bike. In fact sometimes I wear them underneath my downhill kit. Is that allowed?

…and the centre of the ellpise won’t be the centre of the beam proper as it were. Imagine cutting a cone at a slant. The centre line of the cone will not be exactly half way between the 2 ‘ends’ of the cut.

try shining a torch at different angles on a wall in the dark and looking at the bright spot in the centre in relation to the edge of the beam.

Is it important that the light is 30m away from the centre of the ellipse. This makes a difference to the calculation. Although it might be easier that way…

before i get a pencil and paper and start scribbling, you won’t just be tilting the light if the centre of the ellipse remains at 30m: you would actually have to rotate the light ‘over and down’ ever so slightly.

But i guess this is a theoretical rather then practical stage lighting question?

un 73 is discontinued now :(

shimano make the un54 in all the usual sizes but its a bit heavier and not reported to last as long (commuting bike is on its 2nd in three years as opposed to the original which went on for aaaaages!)

you might find a un73 on the retrobike forum. Or ebay but the bidding gets a bit silly there.

Or you could go posh and look at expensive ’boutique’ ones if you want lighter weight and longevity.

I’ll be waiting
with a gun and a pack of sandwiches

[double entendre] your tool is too wide for my requirements [/double entendre]

yours is 12mm and i would need a 10mm one according to the nice man on the phone at TFtuned.

Bleddy spindly xc lightweight nonsense…

original source (of tasty shampoo and shower gels) would appear to be sponsoring mountain mayhem this year.

wait for the air bubbles to get to the top, flick the lever to ‘pop’ them. then release the vacuum. And do it again and again…..

i did a mountain bike race on saturday like this:

somewhat suprisingly no one laughed or pointed. And there was a long grassy descent where i ran out of gears and ‘aero tucked’ and was very glad not to be ‘billowing about’.

Fair point though r-r, Nick Craig used to stir it up just by road racing in spd’s with a peak on his helmet…

i’ve got an sl-k and it is really quite nicely finished. Single 5mm allen bolt with that ‘ratchet’ style angle adjustment (I am sure there is a proper term for that but you know what i mean…) and nice crisp casting/machining on the head gubbins. Definitely a right bargain for the money they are asking.

…oh and of course scrapping all vat on bikes and bike parts? Oh and train and bus fares?
(it would be easy to dodge and hard to police cycling clothes or bags/packs as every man and his dog would start producing ‘cycling specific’ gear to undercut their competitors…)

MicArms – Member

Anybody actually know how much the govt make in taxes from smoking/ drinking? Is it more than they then pay out via the NHS for smoking/ drink related treatment?

A quick tootle round google says the government makes around the £10b mark for fags and about the same for booze. Obviously the figure vary slightly according to who you ask. Expenditure on public health stuff in 2007 (as opposed to people’s private/BUPA etc) was about 82 billion. I cannot imagine that a) alcohol and smoking related illnesses count for a quarter of the health service’s business. b)that the government put £20b of alcohol and tobacco excise duty into health.

so yes, probably many times more. Again, the statistics will be nice and vague and the industries concerned will try and say the government is unfairly taxing their wares and produce damning statistics to support this, whereas the government will try and bamboozle the reader with meaningless figures about how thay put so many percent more than last year. Very difficult to find out what money comes from where though, and given how little it probably is it would be foolish of the government to let us know exacly how little….

Corn Exchange, Newbury 08/05/2009 OCD sufferers should be employed as cleaners in the NHS, to get rid of MRSA.

Anecdotes/gossip in the health service suggests that mild-to-moderate OCD sufferers have been keeping operating theatres super-clean for many years already. :-) However OCD is a changing and wily illness and it is not always quite as simple as channeling all the obsessions and compulsions into a clean hospital.

I would like all alcohol and cigarette tax over and above the level of normal VAT put directly into health promotion, cessation/alcoholism services and good old fashioned healthcare. I am struggling a bit with my ‘million to billion’ ratio but it looks as though the revenue in tax and excise on booze and fags is not that far off the total running costs of the whole NHS.

So much of this is spent on other things that you can’t help but wonder how difficult the governmants’ books would be to balance if we all quit smoking and drinking overnight.

I always thought the idea with an ss rear hub was more space between hub flanges therefore (theoretically at least) stronger wheel build? But yes, a whole freehub means you can use spacers to move your chainline in and out. Didn’t Hope do one with a ‘mini’ sized freehub for this reason?

errrm ,yes that too! Easy way to screen for this will be that when it drops down at the bottom of a downhill, yiou either have to wind the fork back out, or it comes back up reeeeeeaaaalllly sloooowly. If you get to the bottom and then turn the rebound knob off and the fork pops back up, then that’s what it was.

Thanks for your replies,

haha, sounds like it was ‘Friday afternoon’ for all of 2008 for one of spesh’s wheel builders!

I shall advise my mate to return to the shop and ask for new build. He is hoping to go no-tubes but pointless and very expensive if he replaces spokes every 2 weeks. He bought the bike as a discounted ‘last year’ model but brand new from a very very large and reputable specialized dealer last september so i would hope they will be understanding…

presumably it is physically winding itself down so you have to physically wind them back up again. I can’t see how else that happens.

Since there will be a tiny amount of play engineered into the spring helix (just so it can be turned by hand) then then the spring would wind itself back down the helix (which in u-turn forks is fixed: the whole spring rotates with the u-turn knob) on long bumpy descents if there is nothing else to oppose that rotaion, of if there is too much play between the spring and the helix.

So:

I would first check underneath the u-turn knob: have a look at the excellent guides from tftuned or sram on what it should look like if heralthy and how to do it all back up: you need to see if you have three springs with three little ball bearings on them (and one or two might not be enough to oppose any rotation of the spring), also check the condition of the underside of the knob itself which should have several individual circular indentations which make the ‘clicks’ as you turn the knob. If these indentations are knackered ie worn into each other it may be that as the spring compresses and extends, the lack of springs/ball bearings or lack of ‘clicks’ allows the knob and therefore the whole spring to rotate and creep downwards. At which point i would have thought you needed a new u-turn knob.

If it is all clean and ‘crisp’ then grease the srings, balls and underside of the u-turn knob and do it all back up (there is a torque setting somewhere iirc) then have another go downhill. If it still winds down, it may be that the helix is worn to the point that the spring moves up and down it too easily (and overcomes the spring/ball bits in the u-turn knob): you would then need a whole new spring (which comes with the helix and rod to the bottom of the lower leg and the top cap).

Hope that helps!

everyone on the course had a really positive approach to moving out the way if you were coming through because it only happened probably one or two times per lap.

agreed! I found plenty of places to get off the singletrack in time for faster riders and I found the new-to-me experience of actually overtaking people on downhills equally straightforward. If it is only the second best cours I have ever ridden, it definitely had the best atmosphere on the trails themselves in terms of chat and suport to-from other racers.

I realy look forward to next year’s.

it was rockin’! The last event of a similar length i did was cheddar, which cost me twice as much (with camping), lasted 2 hours less and was literally 10 times more crowded. 230 riders (many in teams/pairs) spread out over a fast course = bags of room!
And yes it is probably a bit hairy if it is wet but last night it was an absolute hoot. Big respect to the trail pixies there, the singletrack was hilarious.

Oh and the dj played kraftwerk at one point. Ausgezeichnet!

amything that takes a pounding in spite of a boingy rear end maybe, cos you go faster and take sillier lines through rough bits. So headset/bars/stem, front hub/rim, brake pads and seals, tyres. I wonder if rear mechs moving back and forth with the movement of the suspension shortens their life?

very easy. As above, Tftuned guide is excellent. Horizontal is best: if you have time removing the fork from the bike makes this infinitely easier and if you are at all cack-handed the brake calliper too as the pads are close to where oil comes out… You will need a syringe or a funnel and a steady hand if you do lose the oil on the garage floor (do i sound like i speak from experience?) and any 15w motorbike fork oil will do if you need it. You will also find plenty of people willing to buy your firm spring on classifieds if you sell it for reasonably less than the £40 from tftuned. (*wishes he was light enough for a medium spring….*)

I have used all three of the above cables; I would say that if the fibrax is the same as it was 6 years ago it is ace: I still have a set of fibrax outers that have lasted that long; 4 years on a mountain bike and 2 when i turned it into my commuter. Nice metal ferrules with rubber grommets inside and very tough.

Xtr is the nuts if you have lots of cable stops esp top tube cable routing and does come with enough ferrules fot this. My xtr cablles have been well filthy and are still shifting very nicely.

Goodridge is also very nice and has that blue plastic stuff for sealed cable runs but as mentioned, will only fit if you have down-tube cables (or only one mech as on my dh bike) -it is 2 ferrules short for top tube routing. Oh and you have to like blue as the plastic tube is very blue indeed. It is very tough though and you can buy more outer from crc for uninterrupted cable runs, or a couple of extra ferrules and gubbins for more cable stops.

what pasta for set2rise? I like a good fusilli, me.
(of course i will be bringing a ridicuous selection of tyres too and then settling for the ones that are already on the bike…)

sponging_machine and fatmuthahubbard (errr, Rich and Carl) off here are on my team too.

It is unlikely we will be troubling the podium.

I did the same as dr j here and have monolingual kids :(. And my uncle and aunt did french parent/english parent very successfully on the other hand. In fact when they had an italian nanny, one of their kids managed three languages for a bit. It seems simplest to have a parent in each language. Do be aware that your child will be less good at speaking english for his/her age until about 4 years old. This is just because their little brains will only have room for so many new words a day and quite normal for bilingual toddlers to seem a bit behind. I’m not so sure they have any trouble understanding either language though will inevitably have a go at playing one parent off against the other by feigning not understanding one parent. But then that’s what kids do.

Weather looks good for the weekend :)
See you at the back!

LOL at the <<<<<((((((((****BUSTED***)))))))>>>>> thread !

lol, never underestimate the ‘lurking on classifieds’ that goes on here. Its a wonder we get anything done in the day….

I’m with tps already but i get plenty of calls from our banks for ‘surveys’ selling us stuff we don’t want or need. And plenty of overseas calls.
Trouble is most of the family are French so caller display says ‘international’ whether its my nan or someone teling me i have won a free laptop.

Pointless question to ask here, as the regulars are also the same people who hate superstar….

This is the first time I have posted anything less than favourable about SSC. Or anything resembling an octopus.

Their brake pads are fine (errr, well 9 of the 10 so far anyway but i would still buy more) and the aerozine headset i have is well nice! And reliable too. But when you can post your bb cups to betd and get fantastic long lasting bearings (and really good seals) fitted and sent back to you for about £4 more than a new ssc one, i think its a bit of a no-brainer.
And yes my ssc bb lasted about eight muddy rides cleaned with a bucket and brush, whereas my shimano one lasted two winters. My mate’s lasted 3 muddy rides but he has poor bike hygiene.