How many hung parliaments will we need in the uk before they reconsider ftpt again? This is not a rhetorical question. I recall during the massive AV referendum argu-threads on here many people saying how great it was that ftpt (usually!) returns majority govenrmnents who are able to get on with the business of governing and legislating, largely free of the multi-party wranglings and massive compromises on policy common to coalition governments around the world. (See ‘Borgen’ for a simple to digest example, albeit one where everything looks much more slanted to the left).

Toby. Slow, square, out of date “standards”.

T’wife bought a set of the black dragon cx wheels the other day, they seem pretty good value for what looks like it will be £100 with the discount code.: double butted spokes, brass nipples, 28 holes and usual adaptability of the switch hubs. 15mm (inside) rim width so too skinny for 29er but fine for proper cx or road tyres. I didn’t weigh them before fitting tyres etc but seem pretty light for spoke count, chunky mtb hubs and so on… The spoke tensions were all tight and pretty even out of the box, been fine for 100 miles so far. Only drawback i could find was the supplied rim tape is a tiny bit too narrow, so it is a faff getting it to stay put and cover all the spoke holes properly unless you glue it in place.

Wow.
Small production run of bespoke stuff, made by people paid a living wage in the uk. .
Robust/stainless parts and idiot-proof multi valve pump head.
Theft-resistant installation hardware and costs.
Still can’t see £2k in all that though. I wonder if there is some maintainance/ repair service included in all that.
Fwiw HTS, there is one in front if Exeter central station and its lasted a year so far. I wonder how much theirs cost?

Unless you actually will be working in torquay then i would move somewhere near but not in it, traffic is pretty horrible in torbay area and although there are trails and BWs around, its no better than most of the rest of Devon.
Bovey Tracey is widely accepted by devon folk as one of the best if not the best place to live in the county for xc and road riding on account of the fabulous roads, climbs and natural singletrack right on your doorstep: it will make surrey hill look like surrey ‘gentle slopes’! Not actually that far from torbay/newton abbott/exeter for work/commuting purposes and its a lovely little town to live in. I would also reccommend Exeter and Tavistock for local xc riding. Some good little dh spots in torbay, teign valley and the other side of Haldon hill from the trailcentre if thats your thing but for proper dh, Gawton and Tavi Woodlands are just fantastic year-round difficult fun.

Slugwash of this forum will know all the best trails round torquay proper (but haven’t seen him on here for a bit) if you did want a look there in particular. But look up one of the many routed online incorporating lustleigh cleave (near bovey tracey), do it when it hasn’t rained for a week or so, and then your next six months’ xc riding will be a disappointment in comparison. :D

I am right in thinking this was to allow fitting of non-ISCG chain devices (i.e. BB mounted or ISCG adapter under BB cup) without potential damage to BB shell threads?

I don’t think so or if it was it was ill-conceived -Bb mounted chainguides and e-typre front derailleurs replaced 1 of the 2 drive side spacers on all shimano external bb’s, so that even if you have a 73mm bb shell you could have a bb mounted chainguide and keep the correct overall width for the crank spindle. so a narrower cup (eg xtr) is no more or less likely to damage the threads whether you have a bb mounted chainguide or the correct number of spacers. A saint cup is less likely to damage your threads but more depends on bb shell width (ie 73mm) becasue it engages with the same number of threads whether you use corrct number of spacers or replace on with a bb mount for something.

Agled drops makes for Elbows out and better control on difficult downhills, at the expense of aero position which is i suppose why they are a compromise not usually seen on road bikes. They sort of are on some cross bikes, even my wife’s giant cx bike has a bif of flare on the drops. Have you tried them btw?

Take the spring off’ refit the shock and sit (gently!!!) on the bike to compress the shock, that way you will see in a less ‘breaky’ way of you have enough clearance for the shock.
Also download the manual for the shock from the fox website and pay attention to setup epspecially the air pressure and settings in the boost valve (that sticky outy bit on the top) as you will break the innards if presure inside it drops too low.
As above, 888’s are really tall for their travel compared to other dual crown forks, but also they are just excellent forks considering their age and how cheap they are to buy now: those look like 2004/5/6 rc’s which have delightfully long service intervals and easy to set up / hard to set up really badly. So yes flat crowns should be on your wantlist.
Oh and any simple single ring dh chainguide lke the superstar plasma ones (or the same guide woth someone else’s name on it) will be good too.

And yes brake rotor direction is important -heavy braking the wrong way round will make it want to comress in on itself resulting in picture in first page.
Oh and hello/welcome/happy christmas! :D

Sparks -Kimono My House. Every so often i find an album or band that i can’t believe i never heard before. This one was made 3 years before i was born!

How can you purport to be a serious bike shop when you resort to sports direct/officers club/shite furniture shop pricing shenanigans. I hope no one actually paid 659 for that!

Distance: 2431 miles
Time: 183h 59
Elevation 153 117
Rides: 117
That’s probably four fifths of total i think as i don’t record everything especially little blats around the woods, but nevertheless pretty modest.

My rather ace and fast wife on the other hand:

5886 miles
431 hours
374567 ft climbing
439 rides.
She is going for 6000 miles by the end of the year. Not bad for a mum with 2 kids and a 30-40 hour working week, she is pretty nails!

some really good thoughts up there eg internal combustion engine/cars, alcohol, glass, pets.

Also:

Working tax credits (by that i mean as a way of helping businesses keep their staff costs down).
PFI or LIFT projects.
Paracetemol in its current tablet/freely available form.
FPTP and an upper house or whatever it is in the furure with hereditary peers in it.
Paper books. :cry:
Landfill refuse on the scale we have it now (replaced by better recycling and burning of refuse for energy).
Oh and the Citizen’s Band. I am sure that will be sold off too chepaly so we can watch more lolcats on our iphone mk 66’s or something.

As above, looks fine as an advert. I don’t want a bronson or have that sort of money but if i did i wouldn’t be
put off by that ad. Re first post: I suppose if i was going to drop an exta grand on a new frame that was a bit lighter than the alloy version then i would wonder of the money was better spent on saving more weight in the wheels and cranks etc, but thats not always how bike builds come about: mine never stay withthe same parts for all that long so i am sure at times I have too nice a frame for the parts or too nice parts for the frame. For me usually i am vastly over-forked compared to the poshness/performance of the rest of the bike.

Just a thought, but is ther anything mechanically wrong with using an angleset to steepen a head angle?
The parkwood is pretty slack and a pn angelset would give you the chance to try it steeper or indeed ridiculously slack.

Also, voodoo bikes have sensible geometry and some ‘headline’ parts on them (as well as very average but functional cockpit/’finishing kit’): could you buy one new for a few hundred and sell the brakes/fork/wheels/groupset as ‘fitted but not used’ and come in under budget?

carlphillips – Member
Sweet! You got that salsa built yet Jules?

Last part for it arrived today so pretty much done bar the indexing. And a cautiously long fork steerer in case it rides like a bag of shit and i want a different frame/taller headtube.

^+1 curiosity about going back to square one.
although with me its upgrade from promax renders to bb7s that makes for front wheel/hub delfection. I’ve fitted 2 other sets of moutain bb7s to qr forks with no surprises or problems, but i was suprised to have to put a bolt up halo skewer in to keep it still on my cyclocross bike, given that i have never needed to ditch even crap qr skewers with hydraulic brakes and same size 160mm) rotors. Wondered if it is to do with wheel size/leverage as well as that of the outside of the rotor, but iirc there’s not much in it between outside diameter of a 25c road tyre and a 2.3″ 26″ tyre. Not a problem really, it’s lighter than a qr after all, just suprised and wondering if i missed something daft setting them up.

^^ Oooh i’ll be there if we are planning to be back/finished early enough- i’m working afternoon and evening. (Yay 24 hour services!!)

Juan, I like ‘K7’ :D

Also, Paul’s do a nice minimalist chain guide that sits over the top of a single chainring. Or the n-guard one, but that’s only good for dropping it on the inside of the ring.

ymmv. I am sure there are horst link bikes that ride like crap just as there are plenty of simple high-ish pivot swingarm bikes with no linkages that are also a right giggle to ride. There is quite some science to predict this, and there are also people who think they know the science and think they know exactly how it will ride without having a go on one. For example gt force/sanction and maverick monolink frames should ride like a bag of spanners according to the wisdom on here but are actually rather good fun.
But yes jcl will be along soon and put us all straight. ;)

http://bargaincycling.com uk seller, (found him after he spammed posted his great and toally legit deals on or local cycling fb pages) had a load of those giro knockoffs a while back, for just twice as much as you could have bought one from aliexpress.
The website keeps crashing on my tablet but from what i can see the business model seems to be the same now. :?

I had to google SOH, i thought it was some sort of code I had not learnt through being at the wrong dinner parties DP’s.

These people you have little in common with thm, they are the ones with the red ties, right? :D

[edit] last dinner party i went to had five nationalities and five different first languages present (no mean feat in the south west, i tell thee), amongst who were two teachers, a carpenter, a plumber, a data entry drone, two drug reps and a podiatrist. But no politicians. Oh i did drink in a pub with David Jamieson once but peanuts and pork scratchings maketh not a dinner party?

Don’t hide your lamp under a bushel thm, iirc from the political threads you dine with all sorts of politicians and well-connected folk. (In the evening)

Where does “inviting a couple of mates over for food and some kind of alcoholic drink” stop and “dinner party” start? Is there a clear indicator we can use as a benchmark? Napkins? (Subdivided into kitchen roll, paper and cloth) Amuse-bouches? Staff?

I have the thick and thin wool socks. They both true to size out of the packet. Thick ones are just fine in with everything else at 40deg. The thin ones whilst being really lovely socks out the packet, objected to 40 degrees on their first wash and shrunk to a lovely snug size 8 or so. I stretched them back out again but now even though they only ever go in 30degree wool cycle with other wool stuff they still come out looking like my childrens’ socks. No wonder they were so cheap!
I have 2 pairs of sos wool socks (more like the thinnys innterms of thickness/warmth) and they are great though, seem to get fluffier after the first couple of washed (in a good way!) and stay the same size, these also are true to size.

We have a cheapish memory foam one (silentnight? Its got a hippo in pyjamas on the label anyway, and yes made me wonder about the markup on the ones that cost four times as much) and massive improvment in aches/ stiffness for me in the mornings. I suppose you get used to your bed whatever it is and sleep best in what you are used to (after spending a year in a shack in africa on her gap yah, my cousin coudn’t sleep on any mattress at all!) but i never feel like i sleep as well on sprung mattresses now, the odd hotel with a memory foam mattress or topper (and the guest room at my dads) are much better. But yes perhaps thats what i am now used to.
Downsides as above, very very heavy and hot in the summer. And our kids can’t bounce on it quite like i used to on my mum and dad’s bed :D

No seatpost will get your saddle rails anywhere lower than a few mm over the top of the seatpost clamp. But yes thomson (not the layback one cos it bends of course) and the on-one twelvty both sit about as low as you can get.

But yes get a dropper!

Fwiw i had a thomson on my size L bullit which i bought in that size for same reasons as you op ie found the medium too short in the top tube (objectively it was, mind!) and so had a 19″ seat tube but kinked top tube. In the end i didn’t drop the seatpost all the way in, actually found more control of the bike (i guess with the inside of my manly singlespeeding thighs) on really steep tight twisty rooty etc (Gawton and tavi woodlanss so proper stupidly steep downhill race tracks as well as more fun stuff) with about 3″ of post out of the frame, as opposed to seat right out of the way. Never got round to trying a dropper in it ( it pretty much stayed down all the time anyway) but i guess a dropper with the collar about an inch and a half to two inches out of the frame would have achieved the same position. I still don’t have one myself but it does sound like trying a few runs of your steepest local trails with 3″ or so of post showing would be a good way to see if it is worth the expense.

Fried and a tiny bit of soy sauce here. One of the only truly reliable ways to get green stuff into my kids all year round.

Short wheelbases help on all them ridiculously tight uphill switchbacks cut into the side of the hill that you find in trailcentres. (Runs for cover ;) )

As in complaining about the derogatory use of the term pleb (and swearing) while using toff in exactly the same manner. Quite. Plain to see and breathtaking.

Thm it’s equally plain to see that ‘toff’ from a position of relative powerlessness (no offence ernie) is quite a different thing from ‘pleb’ from a position of quite considerable power, both in terms of being so obviously an establishment figure, and in terms of the job he does/did. Imagine if you used ‘BS’ in your powerful professional position to explain to your students or their parents how off the mark they were. Yet its ok (and it really is!) to use that language on this forum discussing what politicians say.

The party that gets the most a slighly-less crap-than-the-others minority of what is already a rather depressing voter turnout can run the country act like they won by a landslide and bin or u-turn on various manifesto promises within less than a year of being elected, before legislating against lobbying by charities and launching a war on basically everyone who didn’t vote for them in order to sidestep the mistakes and financial misseeds of their party donors!

Fify

If you care about that sort of thing unison are a bit more ‘campaigny’ whereas ime rcn have often been the first union to cave in over things affecting nurses.
You could also consider gmb and unite, who certainly ‘do’ qualified nurses where i work.
But what i would really do is have a look at who your local staff-sid reps are and work from that -for me the biggest reason to stay with unison (apart from a purple tabard being clearly the best colour for me on the picket line ;) ) is that the 2 reps nearest my department are really solid but not ‘over-the-top zealot’ people to have fighting your corner should it ever come to that.

Evans have a ‘shop soiled’ sale on with lots of pannier bags etc, found it via the ‘PSA cheap racks’ thread today.
But yes my wife has appropriated my hi-viz alpkitngoudron and abandoned her camelbak plus rain cover for the winter. She thinks its good.

THM/chewkw, our hr are now called “workforce development”. There is no ‘hollow laugh’ emoticon available to reflect the massive (negative) difference in what development looks like today compared to 15 years ago when they were just called ‘personnel’. (Edit) tbf though their department is almost exactly half the size it was 15 or even 5 years ago for almost the same size workforce.

Also i see the collective despondency about the application forms. At the other end it is not always much fun either.

there is something about the nhs jobs website and appications process that also means that as the shortlister i typically experience a 50% ‘spam’ rate. These are real people i have no doubt who really want *a* job, but just paste the same personal statement into every application with (in the case of my fairly specialist niche-of-a-niche service) without any thought to the job description or in many cases even the minimum mandatory professional qualifications required for the post let alone relevant experience or post-reg/postgrad qualifications
….and yet i have to go through a longer process to not shortlist the spammy or just not-quite-good-enough appications than i do for the ones we actually want to interview. :?

He is ace.
i think his music may be even better than his comedy. -singing voice v different from the Bainbridge/Sanchez/Renholm voice and some proper bonkers folky-prog wigouts to be found if you look him up on soundcloud.

Also, sponging_machine of this parish sounds quite a lot like him on the phone, especially the way he says words beginning with a ‘wh’.

Kids bikes are often so heavy all over anyway, imho the advantages of a quill stem outweigh the weight increase. (Did you see what i did there;) ) Trek kids bikes used to come with one with an adjustable angle too, again adding more weight but great for altering the reach as well as bar height.

Bottom pic looks like David St Hubbins. :mrgreen:

If you post something with royal mail it is in europe too (as ooposed to ‘rest of world zones 1&2’) actually no its not. Oops.

I am sure the public are well used to high street clothing retailers like officers club, sports direct, madhouse etc doing this ie: “was (in about 10% of our shops right at the back for twenty days earlier this year on display for) twice as much money, we didn’t actually expect anyone with half a brain to buy it for that much but amazingly someone actually did!!”

Rather disappointing to see Halfords/BH who are on one hand stocking better brands and trying to be a proper bike retailer (my local one is certainly much improved over last few years), yet still with their own brands they are resorting to this at this scale though. Certainly not the only major UK bike retailer to do this with their own brands or brands owned by the distributor that owns their shop, but in terms of the scale of “discounting” they seem to be the worst. :(

Julian as I said,

Prefer the local sports shop though.
But not open when you need them, hence….sports direct..

Indeed.

And I was careful to point out that this would still be a sunday afternoon you would be visiting them, and that for the sake of some improvment in the quality of life and financial stability of the poor souls who served you today, regulation of some aspects of Zhc would cost you personally say 50p more for the convenience of being able to buy your studs from sports direct on a Sunday. THM you are no doubt in a better position than me to judge what if any impact regulation on zhc might also have on you as a taxpayer subsidising sports direct through their zhc employees’ tax credits.

Well said.

Out of interest what % of the workforce would choose a zero hours contract over an alternative contract?
Have you chosen one for yourself?

As i mentioned earlier i had what amounted to a zhc with nhs inthe 90’s. Advantages were being able to have whatever time iff i wanted when it suited me, and if a shift was cancelled within a certain time before it started (only 12 hours i think) i still got paid for it. Oh and i was allowed in the pension scheme.

But when i got the opportunity for the exact same job on a proper full time contract i bit their arm off, because
-i had a predictable income which meant i could (and did) get mortgage rather than renting (which had also been a struggle convincing landlords the the “likelihood” was that i would be able to pay the rent each month since i had no garuanteed hours and the odd really short/quiet month)
-i also got paid holidays,
– sick pay and
-injury/death benefits.
-when i did over 37.5 hours a week i got proper overtime payments at a third my hourly rate on top.
-annual pay increments.
-length of service increases in annual leave.
-looooads of free in-service training useful for other jobs too not just the one i did.

So for the sake of having to accept one weekend in two and not getting exactly the holiday i wanted, it was an easy decision to make and not one i can imagine regretting under any circumstances.

As others note most employers use it as leverage to force/compel employees to work what they [ the employer] want and to send you home, without pay, when you have already turned up.

This is the worst aspect of it and what should be legislated against. And if that happened, Plenty of ambulance chasing legal firms out there could get lots of business supporting people who were managed out, discrimninated against or sacked through that sort of behaviour. Of course the nhs permanent employees versus zhc is nothing like the difference between them at Sports Direct, but Nevertheless, still on a sunday thm could buy his studs from a slightly less gloomy and slightly more financially secure shop assistant, for probably fifty pence more than he would have paid this afternoon.

iirc the biggest difference between ZHC at sports direct and the ZHC that deviant seems to enjoy is the compusion to work. Deviant gets whatever weekends and holidays he wants. (Fwiw i did this for the nhs too in the 90’s and it was not bad at all) but at sports direct if you don’t change your plans and cancel stuff often at very short notice to fit in with them asking telling you to come into work you get sacked. Imho this is an impossible way of life if you have children or dependents or even if you don’t -effectively it means it is impossible to have a second job in shop/business hours alongside as the first one requires you to be available all the time and yet means you have no way of garuanteeing a baseline monthly income. Try renting somewhere to live or god forbid getting a mortgage with that!