Even if you do put pics in your advert, people will ask you for close-ups etc – and then often fail to respond after you’ve sent them.

I have advertised and sold five frames on the stw classifsieds and about as many forks and put closeups in the albums linked in the adverts, never once been asked for more closeups. Any email messing (and not a great deal come to think of it) has been about price or pulling out once sale agreed. If you can put four or five pics of a frame etc on flickr, it is not a great deal more faff to take three times as many closeups of scratches/tears/whatever and upload them at the same time.

maxtorque to the thread please!

Mine is most unspectacular. Only 2 of the following had electic windows and none have had aircon.
1982 mg metro
1990 clio 1.2
2004 mini one (lease car not really mine)
1994 fiesta 1.25 ghia (zetec engine, velour, pretend walnut, beigey grey leather steering wheel, it was ace!)
1998 t4 caravelle

Portillo is taking red/salmon trousers to the next level innit.
lots of establishment types in red trews

I wonder what the ‘assistance’ is like compared to an old velo-solex or even a derny bike? I think i would like more than v brakes and a larger contact patch on my front tyre to be slowing that lot down…

Erlestoke 12 is a properly excellent event, even when it rains its brilliant.

chakaping – Member

The warranty is worth at least half the RRP of any ti frame.

+1

American-made titanium xc frames do not have the greatest reputation for longevity. (cba to google but i am assuming hummers still are made by the people who made all the ones that cracked). Cove/the distributor only warranty it to original purchaser/owner. A grand is a lot to pay for a frame that you might have to spend a couple of hundred more on getting repaired and have an even worse resale value because of this. I would sooner pay £1300 on a brand-new-to-me one and get it repaired for no unexpected extra cost, or even replaced with a shiny new one. [edit] actually £1600 is significantly more than i have ever paid for a whole bike not a hardtail frame, sod that. [/edit]

On the other hand a new-but-secondhand nicolai (for example both in failure rate and warranty) with whatever was left of the transferrable warranty since date of purchase, now that would be a different thing altogether.

ze germans have a special shelf moulded into their toilet bowls for this sort of thing iirc.

Imagine an elected meritocracy, dividing it up by ‘discipline’ rather than political party grounds. You could have four votes and choose from a list of things into which candidates for the HOL were placed and then picked out at random depending on the share of the votes.

The choices to the forelock-tuggIng citizen could be things like like Establishment/nobility, armed forces (retired), churches/organised religion, medicine/health, social science, judiciary/police, civil service, education, voluntary sector, performing arts, errr, arty/painting arts, sport, economics and so on. That would be fun, until we ended up with a house of lords full of television has-beens. :lol:

I like the principle, but I would like to see voter turnout significantly increased before that happened. Chicken and egg i know because the idea that ‘whoever you vote for the establishment get in’ would seem to put some people off voting, but if it happened tomorrow the lords would end up full of a second layer of the same sort of stuff that makes mp’s ignore their own consciences and contituents and vote with their parties. Which does not feel like progress either.

Unlikely but if its new cranks on already fitted but ok bb, it would be worth checking your chainring bolts and pedal threads too.
Also see if the clicking changes if you pedal hard on one foot and soft on the other (clicing more on left pedal stroke than right would suggest the crank/bb spindle fitting) and stood up or sat down. I have in the past chased clicky pedalling back to the bit where the rails enter the saddle, which was cured by a couple of nights drippling chain lube into the holes.
Oh and also rear qr or whatever fixes the back wheel on. (I have even heard people saying they traced their clicky pedalling back to bars/stem, i suppose particularly if you are hauling out of the saddle. My singlespeed does this a bit but it sounds like it comes from the stem not the bb though)

Personally i am of the ‘no grease on square taper’ opinion, but some under the crank bolt (shimano square tapers come new with four little blobs of grease around the top of the sqare hole in the cranks but none on the actual taper part, so i surmise that their torque settings are made with this in mind. Oh that and their torque settings are not as tight as i could actually comfortably go with the leverage on my average sized torque wrench – does anyone know if it possible to ruin a set by doing them up too tight? )

Slightly off topic but i serviced the old man’s 2004ish judy xc the other day and was amused to see it’s damping (oil and port, no adjuster) was on a par with my car. Except you can drain the oil and replace it with thinner/thicker far more easily on the fork!

Oooh, i’ve been to praze-an-beeble. Nice it is. Also in cornwall is the famous Brown Willy, a little hamlet called Talskiddy, and other pleasant sounding places like landulph, catchfrench and zennor. Oh, and Hatt.

I can’t imagine that this is not the sort of conversation that goes on all over the range low-paid employees, particularly where physical strength and resilience is seen as a factor. I have in mind an ‘industrial’ bakery i worked at in the 90’s where men and women worked in different parts of the production chain but paid based on technical complexity or supervising others as opposed to how hot or heavy your work was.

I expect there is something in it for this to have got so far in such a notoriously anti-union employer. Also iirc my sister in law was paid very well in the warehouse side when she worked for them, stacking, sorting, order picking whatever you call kt but hardly in a position of seniority or responsibility: perhaps my s-i-l was not a unique example, and maybe there are already other women doing these jobs and managing fine and getting paid more.

Btw, ‘every little helps’ is the strapline of tesco, non? But that patting your jeans pocket thingy probably sounds less sardonic given the story. OP should be taking comfort in the idea that minimum wage earners in asda are a not inconsiderable part of the welfare bill in the uk via tax credits and so on, so the more they get paid the less his taxes supplement their wages (and asda’s profits for that matter).

Hope trials hub is even louder IME. And has twice as many engagment points as the pro2 though i think that is about engagment points for proepr trials nadgeriness rather than the strength or durability of the mechanism. And yes you can put 6 sprockets of a 9 speed cassette on it if you want. And the trials one is steel so less worry of chewing up the splines with your power-thighs OP (you can retrofit a steel freehub to pro2 at a cost).

I remember them being a bit expensive but just googled prices this morning. 8O 8O

No rules imho.
I have a friend with a similar story to many on this thread (very sudden and unexpected loss rather than prolonged illness or time to say goodbye if that makes any difference) and nothing has exploded, fallen apart or gone wrong with him, new wife, inlaws, late in laws etc in the eight years since then, they are a lovely happy family. Fwiw he is is also still close to his late wife’s family even though there are no children ‘tying’ them together. In fact he lurks on here sometimes (*waves*)

Drac did you read the bio/details for the journalist in the bottom of that article? Or Indeed any other articles on empirenews? :lol:

Mavic hi viz orang/reflective armwarmers. £12 from crc. I was the glowingest person in south devon last week.

The question was whether I need to inform my insurance even though they will have no involvement.

In that case the small print in your policy will more than likely say that you do have to tell your insurer. They will want to know because statistics says that your car is more likely to be involved in further accidents now so they or whoever you switch to need to charge you more for it next year (when i did it online about a year ago, every quote i had went up about fifty quid as soon as i mentioned a very similar car park scrape paid for by other driver’s insurer) . And at renewal time they will find out anyway through the database thingy, as the other bloke will have to tell his insurer who he bumped into.

[edit] The drink/speeding comment above is ref: the other thread with loddrik argiung how much he was speeding by, and the arising troll thread about how drunk is drunk. But rest assured that if your whole family was squashed flat in your parked car by a speeding drunk truck driver, assuming you weren’t in the car and so seeking car insurance the next year, as a consolation and to assist with the grieving process your premium would still go up fifty quid as that accident makes your next car more likely to get squashed flat by another drunk truck driver a second time. Aren’t statistic great?

If there was no note and no witnesses how upset would you be? Be aware that having it repaired through insurance will cost you an increase in your premium regardless of it being nothing to do with the way the car was driven or parked, and pretending you never found a note and then living with a scrape on your bumper will cost you nothing. ( unless car is new-ish and you are planning on selling soon. )

Not for charity, no but the other day i realised i hadn’t had a drink since the 19th or so, so i thought i might as well carry on everything else as normal (ie food, sugar in coffee, riding to work etc) and see if anything fantastic happens to my muffin-top. Not expecting much, i suppose even if i switch off my ‘GP and helath screening forms’ filter i suppose it wasn’t more than 15 units a week and usually less. I would find it much harder to go without cheese than booze!

Tramadol really doesn’t agree with everyone, though more commonly young men and old ladies IME.

My most unpleasant was having 10 wound drain pulled out of my shin. Not painful as such but definitely wierd and unpleasant. It was a great piece of surgery and a nice tidy wound, but nevertheless the sensation it being dragged along under my skin was still (as a nurse) one of the yuckest things ever.

CTBM/salsa import/distribution arrangment would be just lovely. 2 of my favourite bikey things, innit.

I’d chop up old tubes but I like to use a syringe though the valve to get the sealant in.

Continental presta tubes have removable cores. iirc there is another brand that does too but i forget which. (scwalbe maybe?)

I hear the 2.4″ woods valve version in ano turquoise is a real hit with the yeti kru. :D

Alexsimon, i am sure peaty, athertons and hannah are all reading this feeling all sour about their world cup wins and podiums with the newly-acquired wisdom that they were only on inferior semi suspended bikes too.
Which reminds me i would love a go on one of them too.

wonder what sort of difference it makes to the suspension? Might make a big difference to pedal bob etc.?

Good question. Hopehully the haterz from the maverick thread yesterday will come along soon and explain why it will/won’t. And what will happen if you fit one to an ml7. :lol:

I am getting Christopher Lambert being chased through the paris metro by someone on rollerskates. In a not particularly horrific way. I would mske it a lot slower and keep the same drum pattern all the way through.

…not hearing that jcl and cgg have actually had a go on one yet…
Neither have i but fwiw the sc32 rides a lot better than it looks like it should, the mud clearance is fantastic, the whole system (ie including the hub) is still light by today’s standards, and it is delightfully serviceable with normal tools. What other fork manual encourages you to get in and fiddle with oil weights and swap round the shim stacks? Oh and pop a couple of spacers in and your 26″ fork becomes a fatty, 650b or 29er. What a great fork, wish it was on my bike not the wife’s.

Yeah, fully.

I thought it was officially a thing 6 years ago. (I works wiv da yoof, innit).

Just5minutes, what has mid staffs got to do with privately run hosptals not improving on standards of care on services they took over? I was providing a little balance to your suggestion that private companies contracts have turned around failing services or improved on standards of already successful ones. I also suggested that since the main cost component is staff, that they will have a hard job to improve anything major and turn a profit at the same time without making some considerable efficiencies with both working arrangments and salaries of frontline/clinical staff, which under tupe arrangments will not happen overnight.

i wasn’t aware that mid staffs had been contracted over to private enterprise. ;) If and when that happens, before you judge it an example of the success of the health and social care act, you will also need to factor in whether the funding remains the same, whether the whole or part of the hospital’s services are taken over and whether the new hospital managers are chasing the same byzantine set of targets/kpi’s that the old managers there were several years ago.

Molko has that pan-european accent common to many peeps that went to international schools. He was at international skool in Luxembourg and a good mate of my cousin (half french half english) who also features a funny unplaceable accent. According to my aunt he was a “sweet young man” in his pre-rascally teenage sex-midget years.

Just5minutes, the 3 local (to me) examples of newly-private run services are not proving any more successful than previous nhs providers either in financial or outcome/satisfaction terms so far. And that is me being very tactful given my username being my actual name, what i do for a job and who pays my wages. Perhaps it is different elsewhere in the country? I also wonder about the likes of circle and virgin playing the long game, ie maybe it’s ok for them to suck up a loss for the first few years. Given that staff costs are the major component of most branches of health provision (essentially they are the materials, means of production and product) and given the magic of unions and tupe, maybe the real savings in operating costs are yet to be made. If this were to be the case, however, what is interesting is recruitment issues ( ie supply and demand of the main resource ie health professionals) leading to many private providers affering to match/honour pension holiday and pay arrangments for people leaving the nhs to work for them.

Links please …

for real?!

About two clicks away fro the video posted by the OP, but hey I can save you one whole click:

https://www.youtube.com/user/cassetteboy/videos

[edit] ah i see you found some ^^^ [/edit]

Given the recent change in the law and the publicity generated for him, the conservative party conference couldn’t have come at a better time for Cassetteboy. :D (granted, the copyright/legal issue is about TV/film rights rather than news or speeches but is certainly boosting his profile).

@chewkw, he has ripped it out of various other people including Clegg and Milliband. I am sure he has Farrage in his sights.

My bullit has done 0 miles this year. I should probably find a new home for it.

Mudguards on caadx disc are a funny fit. Eyelets on the back are in the conventional place, but you need to clear the disc brake which is right next to it: i used a bolt from a v-brake block as a spacer but that is only good for the mudguard stay, i wouldn’t mount a rack like that for fear of too much leverage on one m5 bolt and 10mm or so of spacers…. You would need a rack made to clear disc brakes and then have a good long think about how to mount both that and a mudguard stay into the same hole at the same time. Cannondale could of course have avoided all this by mounting the brake on the chainstay instead. Surprised that a company this size has not thought of this in the third year of production whilst lots of others already do….

Fork mudguard eyelets are halfway up the inside of the fork legs, so you need to bend and trim the mudguard stays to fit. This is actually pretty neat though, i am quite pleased the way mine turned out.

My bb30 went after about 600 miles and was replaced under warranty. But that was about the bearing rather than the frame/bb shell and so wouldn’t necessarily put me off. The frames themselves are really well finished and ride lovely (i went down a couple of cm on top tube for mine and am glad i did) but yes if the wheels this year are the same then they are a bit rubbish.

http://www.bricklink.com
but don’t expect to pay much less than new prices for secondhand (but otherwise unavailable) stuff. Lots of crater baseplates for sale there.

My dad has just sold his 10 year old ‘poshest on the estate’ Barratt house, which is literally twice the square footage of my 30’s 3 bed semi and has a double garage and three loos. But it still has squeaky floors which we discovered are down to the joins in the flooring upstairs rubbing together, being wherever one board stops and the next one starts as opposed to trimming and fixing both edges to a floor/ceiling joist. I can only imagine that this is what happens when you are building dozens of similar or identical houses at once and you want to save a fifty quid per house on materials by fewer offcuts/fewer boards used. Please tell me this is not how to properly lay a floor! I wouldn’t even do my loft like that.