Most freehubs are serviceable (ie you can strip down and rebuild) one way or another, even throwaway shimano ones ( you need a particular tool or make your own) but usually its such a faff that you are better off buying a new one ( i recenly repaired a shimano-type loose ball one that was out of stock as a replacement and i would have gladly coughed up for a new one instead if i could have, it was a right mission!).

From this pinkbike thread it looks as yours might be one that is a lot easier to do.
Sun ringle demon freehub removal
However removable does not necessarily mean repairable if you have broken pawls, ratchet ring or other gubbins and ey are not available as spares. And failure after 3months would have me fearing something broken rather than it being full of dirt and gummed up after relatively little use. Also worth finding out if the hub is the same as anyone else’s: a lot of nice hubs are still made by the same factory as other brands and share parts and even identical hubs are out there with just different names on them. So some other brands freehub or parts may also fit.

Igm to be fair hardly anyone does rapidfire on 20″ kids bikes. My kids are both on treks which were cheap second hand and local to us rather than choosing them over similar other ones, we couldn’t afford newer bigger islas at the time.

Differences between our kids 20″ treks and same size islabike is the pointless and heavy ‘suspension’ fork, heavy quill stem, less good brake levers and steel bar and seatpost, loose ball massive axle bottom bracket (isla is cartridge), otherwise excellent quality. Also trek apparently have a patent on cranks with 2 holes in them to make them shorter or longer (so says craig our excellent local trek dealer) and the huge adjustable quill stem does mean you can grow the bike a bit with your kid. But yes i can definteley see where the money goes on an islabike and obvious when you have a close look at one why they are so much lighter. I think that is more important the smaller you are: would you rather pedal or push a bike a quarter your body weight or a third?

This is fun. Fifty pence says despite his reservations about monster lefty argu-threads, solo can’t leave this one alone. (He left the thread twice in ten minutes just up there :D )

I don’t know about tax hikes, but from his posts It looks like what solo’s educated hard working folk need is is cuts in tuition fees and reintroduction of grants, as well as proper legislation about hours worked for people paid per year not per hour, and proper overtime payments. 8O

Also consider that the rationalisation of public sector has its impact on income tax take as so much of its overall expenditure is on the salaries of the people that do stuff. You spend less on your public service then yes you take less income tax but you save even more on salaries, but you need to make sure the impact is not taken up in a more costly way by failings and reliance on another public service (eg gp services and ambulance/a&e), or stored up for later stings in the tail eg pfi projects.

You spend the same money on a firm that provides same service but makes a profit and you need to make sure that the profit is taxed as effectively as the wages they are no longer paying (whether that is cuts in staff numbers or what you pay them).

And you need to make sure that the firm in question is not going to need to bailed out by the local authority or similar who commissioned them to do the job and still has the ultimate responsibility to provide the service, and that by working so narrowly ‘to brief’ that the company doing the job does not cause extra costs to other areas. (This has been a problem in health and social care since as long as i can remember to be fair to the present government though)

Solo, I am not suggesting higher taxes. I am responding to your posts about overtime ( i even quoted those bits in case you forgot what it was you said) then i was suggesting that it is unwise of you to expect staff to do overtime at flat rate, and foolish to think that the employees’ poor understanding of tax is the only barrier to them agreeing to do overtime. I also pointed a business that had no problem getting overtime by paying extra for it (and presumably passing those costs on to the customer in some way eg “priority order” rate or in my case it would have been cost to the wholesaler and customer of each individual unit) . I don’t really have an opinion on raising the tax take by paying staff more in the first place, sorry if it sounded if i did.

Tbf your posts made it sound like if it was not your business then you at least held a position that led you to ask (unsuccessfully) the shop floor workers to do overtime. What was it you were doing job-wise whilst asking them this?

I’m quoting the folk I’ve dealt with.
This translates into “Throwing away a Saturday, on flat rate, which is still subject to tax, doesn’t give me any incentive to work O/T[/i]“
So, obviously, if they do work O/T, they get a little extra, but in my view, these are line workers, shop floor staff. They ain’t on massive incomes as it is. Now making them go claim back some WTC is almost a slap in the face.

Sounds like your business needs to increase its flexibility and ability to respond to big orders or clear backlog by incentivising its/your staff with a proper overtime rate.

Overtime, on a weekend at flat rate? That’s the problem not the tax. I’d be thinking a third on top for saturday and another third for it being overtime might make your shop floor workers less inclined to worry about still paying the same rate of income tax on it.

[edit] qute a few years since I worked in overalls on a factory floor but even the agency scum got proper overtime rates ( at least 50% on top) when they went over 40 hours and that really was a hard offer to turn down!

Two pages and no one has mentioned:

Loads of palmerston follies round our way, some still in some sort of military use and others are council depot, library/community centre, garden centre, reclamation yard and so on…
Best kept one open to public (some open days and a few businesses including a bike/fitness coaching one) near us is Crownhill Fort:

Of course folklore fans and scientologists will love Tntagel Castle which is pretty lovely if not a lot of the actual castle left!

My favourite overall is Fort Libéria, in Villefranche-en-Conflent, Pyrenees. [/url]

It is sooooo cool, it even has an underground staircase all the way back down into the fortified town. And you can get to it on the coolest mountain railway EVER.

As one of the organisers of this event from its birth, I’ve never really understood why the numbers don’t increase more each year? Having said that with a high percentage of tight twisting singletrack 500+ riders would make it interesting in places!

I have missed the last couple through it being the lad’s birthday and associated festivities. Which comes first of course, although I tell everyone else to get on and do it, it is still one of if not my favourite races ever. Well, the 6pm till 6am version was actually my favourite, though I realise why it was moved to more convetional hours.
I think low riders-per-km also helps though, as does it not being very ‘corporate’ and the frankly excellent prizes-to-entrants-to-entry fee ratio. My favourite being that lad one year who won the 12hr solo singlespeed and could hardly walk to the podium let alone lift up his enormous prize. :D
Have a great race everyone!

Day before yesterday in exeter i saw a young man in preppy summery h&m sort of clothes, riding a nicely specced specialized tarmac, with toeclips ( you know the plasticcy ones you get on new road bikes) and putting the power down through flip flops. I think he wins.

kimbers – Member

Cynics conspiracy theorists might suggest that she was a Tory plant.

I think that in 15 years’ time we will find out that Farage was a tory plant all along, making this loony party in order to make the conservatives look less right wing and more credible/voteworthy.

Guitar shops
Electricals
Cars, especially since I had a tour of the forecourt on a quiet day with a mate who sold Fords and I found out what the bottom lines were compared to the prices on the windscreens. 8O (although tbf he said that in his experience they were larger margins than most other brands)
Antiques
Collectables

Not haggled in a bike shop since I bought an ex demo bike about 10 years ago though. Assuming that we are not counting producing your membership card and asking for the local club discount. That is a far nicer way to get a few bob off and encourages you to join a local club (or two…)

The one in font-romeu also has a lovely retro-futuristic feel to it.if you ever visited the Atomium in brussels/heysel before they did it up a few years ago, its like that.

Backwards/forwards compatibility is worse these days than say 6 or 7 years ago: time was loads more stuff worked with loads more stuff and all you seemed to worry about was steerer length.

Now you have mutiple headtube, bb, wheel and axle ‘standards’ which mean that your frame only works for someone that has the right back wheel and fork. I would imagine that it is more straightforward to sell a whole bike in some cases as if you are changing frame chances are you have to change quite a few other major parts as well. :?

Whatever happened to AVA shocks? Wife has one on her rad bike but at 8 1/2 stone she doesn’t really notice any difference between different sleeve settings/volumes.

mattsccm – Member

Ours leaves the gall bladder, a pale thing that’s vaguely kidney shaped, and the muzzle with teeth. Eats the lot otherwise.

Same with ours.

clubby – Member

Glad ours isn’t the only one. Definitely look like kidneys to me.

Pick it up in a bit of kitchen roll and give it a little squeeze before you throw it out. Kidneys 1) are remarkably solid/unsqeezable, (there is a proper sciency reason for this but it escapes me) and 2) do not leak some icky light coloured paste if you squeeze them a bit too hard. 3) come in pairs. If you cat really leaves them because it dislikes them it will leave both.

TomB – Member

Some ‘carbon’ seat posts are just wrapped alloy.

Oh yes, i was amused to point this out on a friend’s brand new full carbon road bike recently. :D

I find riding in the drops seems to make a difference on mine (carbon fork blades but not steerer, alloy everything else, 25c tyres @ 100psi)

Also it is amazing what difference the tarmac can make to your comfort and indeed speed when you have skinny tyres. I am thinking of a well-ridden-on section near me (betweeen Ermington and the main kingsbridge-plymouth road) where the comfort and rolling resistance change dramatically where the ‘grade’ of tarmac changes. (if that is the correct term: the road is in fine condition ie no holes or cracks but the size of the stones the tarmac is made of is a lot bigger). I had never really noticed or felt this lolloping along on my 60psi 1.75″ ‘city tyre’ crap commuter bike but its like night and day on the road bike.

Oh yes I still would, ie if you told me that however much i train from now on i will still put a stone or two on this year and never lose it again i still would.
It’s fun. Even road riding is, albeit a rather different ‘fun’ from an uplift day at gawton/cwmcarn etc.
And despite spending lots on bikey stuff, it has still saved me lots of money over the years in changing from my wife and I having 2 cars and both driving to work, to having one car which mostly lives at home and is mostly for transporting big stuff/large amounts of shopping/the children longer distances.

I expect there may be many like me who mitigate the heath benefits of cycling by feeling as though we have earnt the cakes, fried food, pies and beer afterwards. We would all be the fittest skinniest people ever if all this cycling we did for was part of a wider lifestyle of being super healthy and slim. I see one if its benefits as a means to enjoy eating more. On that note, for lunch today I am having a masala spicy vegetable pizza that i found in the halal bit of tesco. Curry and pizza, nom nom! 8)

How much will the proprietary tool to remove/service the damper cost on top of that? And the hub/wheel of course.

Way far off the far fetched-ness of both Labour and conservatives billboards war around general election time.

And various “fire up the quattro” 80’s gags that backfired somewhat on labour iirc.
Oh and the little britain ones, both sides had a go at that too.

mtb disc rims didn’t suddenly get lighter once they lost braking surfaces…the profile might be a little different but the basic shape is pretty similar – even moreso with a decent rim depth a la aero rim.

Off the top of my head, Xc717 disc rim is about 6% lighter in disc version than it is rim brake. I expect some roadies would really care if you could take off 25g rotating weight from an open pro. Well, that would be more like 30g once you scaled that weight saving up to 700c. But given the size and weight of aero rims you might be getting into diminishing returns of weight saving engineering out the braking surface on something that massive in the first place.

Oh and in terms of standardisation for racing, if you can machine a hub to precisely accept a cartridge bearing made by another factory with a tight but not too tight fit, then you can machine a standard thickness of disc rotor and a standard distance of outside of disc tabs from centre of the hub to within tiny fractions of a mm surely?
And yes if you have to faff with lawyer tabs and unscrewing locknuts enough to get the open qr to clear them and remove the wheel, then a maxle is a faster way to remove and refit a wheel.

Lazy journalism for a more outrageous headline, innit. Of course its fast leaflet employing the latvians, what political party would go through the bother and HR cost of employing their own deliverers of leaflets for such a short length of time when they could purchase these services from someone who specialises in this work.

Gavin Barwell, Tory MP for Croydon Central, told HuffPost UK: “Ukip’s hypocrisy knows no bounds. They say they are against Europeans taking our jobs and then, when they have a chance to offer some British people work delivering their leaflets because they can’t find volunteers to do it, they employ European workers. You couldn’t make it up!”

Though this mp doesn’t exactly help clarify this arrangement with his use of “employ”, he does seem to have a point.

You guys :roll: poor dude is trying to give us a chronology of the hard times he’s been through, he is now strapped for cash and all you lot do is band together in synchronisation and crown around with poorly timed puns. This forum has really taken a dive, can’t you see(master)?

It is fair to say that as a half french person raised mostly in the yookay i speak it correctly (give or take the occasional gender agreement, grammar fans) but with an obviously english accent. When i dream in french my accent is always smooth as silk like someone off a chat show or something, and i usually manage some kind of pun or play on words i would never have been able to think of when i was awake.

Also as a vegetarian of 15 years i have a recurring dream where i eat a chickenburger on the way home from the pub. Ffs, a chickenburger. Thats like the daewoo nexia of meat isn’t it? If you are going to dream-cheat, do it properly!

Where did the politicians get the idea for such highly technical and overly complex legislation in the first place ninfan? Generally since they are so rarely experienced in any way in the departments they end up running (to find the last health secretary with any background in health or social care prior to their appointment for example and you go back 20 years or so), politicians simply cannot understand the subtleties of the departments they try and run, and either do what the civil servants tell them, or try and run them with blunt instruments and policies that sound good in press releases, surely? The level of complexity you so eloquently describe sounds decidedly unlike the creative thoughts of any of the governments of the last 20 years.

But since you seem to feel the need to politicise this, I note that this has been a clearly hot topic almost since the last general election, and it puzzles me that in the midst of so much other fiscal reform, and so many other unmandated and somewhat idealogical pieces of legislation that voters for neither blue nor yellow parties knew about, the present government has not found the time to do anything about tidying these rules up a bit.

Then since when was saying or thinking things a crime? Oh yes I remember now, since the last bout of left wing governmental influence.

I thought McCarthy was right wing republican? I seem to remember some rather worrying bits from my history lessons about his considerable impact of freedom of speech only 2 generations ago. Or perhaps my teachers were all lefties trying to warp us.

The old single pivot 26″ heckler was indeed £900 with the less posh shock just 2 years ago, iirc the upgrade to rp23 was £70 so think of it as £970 if you want to make a better comparison. Although tbf, heckler, bullit and SL had all dropped in price a little when they started making more pivotey ones, and when they stopped making them in america so it had previously been a bit more expensive.

Otherwise, i think most reviewers will offer a company not to publish a bad review, and then just write something good about someone elses bike that actually is good. Perhaps Ed Oxley has been on and/or been offered a load of crap bikes and just elected not to tell us about them.

.That would be a very cynical outlook

.

Where you quoted me you missed off the first part of the sentence:

Though from your post it sounds like we should not blame thatcher, but blame hmrc

…so yes if you say so; it still sounds as though you really want to blame hmrc then, and it looks as though you think they might have ‘form’ for this: poor advice leading to poor legislation and then their own poor interpretation of the laws they poorly advised on in the first place. At great confusion to politicians, press and (actual! ;) ) taxpayers.

No point in bringing the present government, the previous one or thatcher into it.

ninfan – Member

Someone tell derekfish that the balance is being restored.
Tbf ninfan that is a way better argument than my effort. Though from your post it sounds like we should not blame thatcher, but blame hmrc for either advising the then government in this way on this law, or wasting time and taxpayers money investigating and not realising sooner that bernie was not behaving as unlawfully as they thought he was, being as they so very recently advised on those very rules.

MSP – Member
Bernie is a national institution who has brought untold millions into the country of Lichtenstein
There, that’s much more accurate now.

Doh, failed at the first hurdle! This ‘not being a lefty’ and ‘arbitrarily oppositional stance’ business is maybe harder than i first thought. :?

Apparently there is an overrepresentation of leftist big hitters on here at the moment, (so sayeth the ukip bus thread).

So without pretending to be big or a hitter, I am helping out today switching sides for a bit.

So:

Bernie is a national institution who has brought untold millions into the country. HMRC need to be understanding of the risk of him fleeing the UK and taking his ball with him, so need to cut him some serous slack like they have done with all those other institutions and people that have helped make our country what it is today. Vodaphone, Starbucks, Amazon, Cameron’s dad, where would we be without them all? So give Bernie a break and be thankful for his hard work you bunch of bleeding-heart handwringers.

Oooh that was nice. How did I do?

I wish you’d point them out to me, I can’t say I’ve noticed that many..

You are looking on the wrong threads then derekfish.

Perhaps you start with some easy search terms like “Gove”, “privatisation” and “Thatcher”. On that note whatever happened to farmer john? (he used to enter and exit political threads with excellent comedy rightwing one-liners) Also interesting that a couple of the best/funniest stw arguers-for-the-right are still well-loved and very active on here, but just rarely if ever on politics threads. Also a couple of the right-ish regulars here don’t seem to like being told they sound conservative or right wing despite making excellent and well-formed arguments in favour of right-ist political decisions.

I am not going to start pointing political fingers at anyone except me -3/4 of the way to the left, and about a quarter of the way up ( 8O ) last time I plotted myself on the political compass.

derekfish – Member

Anyone vaguely right wing on this forum is automatically racist/troll/fascist
no, just you seem to be the only one posting on this thread. There are several regulars (or ‘big hitters’ if you insist) that argue for rigt wing agendas in a civilised fashion with the jy’s, ernies and binners’ on here and are not accused of racism/facism or trolling.

binners – Member

I have to say that UKIP are a good thing in the respect that less people will now vote Tory. And as they’ve no real chance of getting into power (at a general election), it’ll just split the Tory vote in marginal seats. Less chance of them getting a majority. So thats a win/win really

I fear binners is wrong about splitting the tory vote: I reckon that Farrage is actually working under deep cover for all three main parties, to make their own ‘three cheeks of the same arse’ policies look more serious and credible, by the next most popular alternative being so unpalatable. ;)

Find a skinny flat pedal and a thicker one.. solved.

Only of you swap them over at the top and bottom of each pedal stroke. One fatter pedal will make the shorter crank effectively a few mm longer at the top of the stroke, and then same distance shorter at the bottom.

iirc it was simonfbarnes who also said he had mismatched crank lengths on his bike for ages and only noticed when there was a thread on here about it.

mrs had a secondhand cranks on a frame she bought, with one arm bent inwards about 10mm, she said that was dead weird to pedal as the pedal itself sort of rocked up and down/in and out as the crank went round. She still rode them for a bit though, straight-but-shorter can’t be any worse than that can it?

jam bo -yes.
Although now i think about it, it has gone a bit quiet since they finished consulting on it in Plympton (library) a couple of summers ago. Lots of the other smaller improvements have happened or are happening like the legs of the main line railway bridge over the Plym being done up, those funny heritage trail signs and the flood defences towards the campsite, much of the site is now cleared (other side of the railway from old step-ups and current dirt ‘jumps’) but on reflection that might have been for works access when they were fixing the railway bridge: no trail digging there yet.

A few years back now they tried to get permission for a skatepark & trails/jumps near us. Despite the site being directly under a 70mph flyover, adjacent to a large sewage works and a main line railway and no less than 150m and four lanes of 40mph traffic away from the nearest dwelling, somehow the plans were objected to by ‘local’ residents on grounds of noise. :lol:

That was way back though, similar (no, bigger and better) plans for same location are progressing nicely now. :D

Oh and the residents of a new and ‘a bit’ nice (ie houses sell for 30% more than equivalent size houses nearby but not exactly posh) estate, built a full thirty years after the primary school it is situated next to are always complaining about the noise and parking of the school that was clearly there before anyone put a spade in the ground let alone when they moved in. In fact two or three of them went there as children.

2, 3, 5, 7 & 10 on the car insurance thread. Although i am responsible for a couple of those!

Actually would threads not just die on their arses with no one bothered to justify each point with a spread of peer-reviewed randomised double blind trials because it was more fun to post silly pictures of narwhals etc?

I’m confused. You leave your car at home during the day and cycle to work so I’m guessing when you get to the bit on the form where it says “where to you keep your car during the day?” you answer at home? I also assume in the class of insurance section you tick “Social, domestic and pleasure” not “Social, domestic and pleasure and commuting”? In which case you are getting a discount ya muppet!

Insurers ask about business use, not all of them (about half in the mere fifteen or so times I have shopped around) ask about how you get to and from work. Many also ask where your car is kept overnight not during the day. I could park it in my garage overnight, but in the busy road outside my child’s nursery whilst I am at work during the day for all they know. (I couldn’t fit my car in my garage and my kids are too old for nursery but you get the point…)

As above, if you have told them how, when, and how much you use your vehicle, then you have been “discounted” accordingly for the bits that make you low risk.

Except that no insurer asks you if you ever park your car in supermarkets or our of town shopping centres, as it is obvious that almost every domestic (ie not company, pool or works) car will do regularly. And then the ones that are unlucky enough to get pranged in such a car park, (and lucky enough to get the responsible person’s insurer to pay for it) the rules of probability are suddenly bent in the underwriters’ favour as you somehow become statistically more likely than all the other cars in the same car park to get hit a second or third time.

My point is that a circa 10% increase in premium for such a statistically insignificant increase in risk is (or even more than 10% considering some of the super-low premiums people talk of on insurance threads on here) disproportionate to any possible increase in risk supposedly demonstrated by an unlikely incident that happens too infrequently to be able to be a reliable predictor of above-average risky car park use.
That is if there is a risk at all that has not already been covered by the understanding that we all go shopping with our cars sometimes and sometimes bad stuff happens to even really careful people.

More likely this is part of the economies of underwriting -it is not worth the extra effort and therefore expenditure for underwriters to distinguish between any associated risk factors in various different non-fault parties incidents and adjust accordingly so they just don’t bother and apply the same increase in premium to all.
It also risks disincentivising people to declare small incidents settled ‘in cash’ (ie guilty driver pays out of own pocket) since there is now a financial incentive for both drivers not to declare an incident if it small enough to be settled between them.

I like within easy walking distance of a supermarket and go there on foot more often than in the car. I also leave my car at home and cycle to work and so never my works car park which i could otherwise ‘risk’ parking in ( in reality no collisions between anyone/thing in my works car park in the three years it has existed but there you go) . So where is my discount please oh insurance underwriters blessed with incomprehensible wisdom, insight and foresight? Ah yes, thought not.

Besides, compared to the premium cost increases for other actually statistically significant changes to risk like speeding points and own fault accidents, the £40+ it seems to be costing people is obviously disproportionate to the possible increased risk and cost to underwriter.

Turner guy, its nonsense isn’t it. If you are a driver who doesn’t pay as much attention, brakes suddenly etc then it is possible to argue that a non fault accident might reveal that your driving habits might make you slighly more likely to get shunted by a similarly dozy driver in future.

But saying one supermarket car park accident (assuming you park correctly!) makes you more likely to have another is as statistically sound as saying that that if you have survived one train crash then you are garuanteed never to be in another one ever again.

Drab, you could knock on the door (actually buzz entryphone on gate 2 miles from actual house more likely) and ask them and ask what colour their wee is.

It would be fun to try wouldn’t it? Especially if your/wife’s policy and the other drivers are with the same underwriter.

Exact same happened here: because my car has been “in an accident” it is statistically more likely to be in another one even though it was unoccupied and parked correctly at the time. I can only guess that it is not worth the time for underwriters to distinguish between the non-fault claims that possibly had something to do with the habits, locations or times of day that the driver uses, and those like the op’s which are nothing but pure bad luck.

I did wonder if promising never to park in a supermarket car park again might get me my £45 back, since nothing else has blemished my driving in the last 18 years, that must be the terribly risky habit my underwriters (and the ones i tried at renewal time) need me to stop in order to be the otherwise staitstically very safe driver i was before my wife drove our car to the supermarket. :evil: