Work and back twice. Livin’ the dreeeeam!

@danielgroves, there is a big segment (big as in 15 miles long) on strava which will show you some of the several rather cheeky but twiddly ways back to Plymouth from Wembury without retracing your cheeky coastpath way out there. Woods behind reddicliff close have some lovely little lines in them, a few different ways to get from one side to the other, and even some proper doubles in there somewhere, and they hold up pretty well in bad weather too.

Ben_H, topeak do a disc rack for 29ers which has l-shaped bits at the bottom that clear most disc brakes: am looking at this for the caadx (if it ever turns up at the shop!), and salsa do lovely seatclamps with top rack mounts welded on the back. M-part/madison do too but not sure of the range of sizes.
rack
Salsa rack-lock

Allo Juan,

No ‘own’ photos of ours yet (mine still hasn’t arrived either :evil: ) but I am getting this billboard for canondale bike:

and if you want smaller and pinker to match your gloves, Millie has been raving about this (and ignored her road and mountain bikes altogether) since she got it:
-much more upright than a road bike but still rides fast enough, nice spec, fully mudgard/rack-able and has lovely tiagra-equivalent shorter reach sti’s and road bb7’s.

But I would definitely look at a Salsa Vaya. Some bike shop or other on ebay is selling a complete build brand new one in orange for £800, 56 cm iirc. put a shorter stem on that and it would be just the job for you. :D

I agree with brakes on both points ^^
but back along i got lucky and bought a couple of ust ‘evo’/triple compounds at 50% off, so rather hard to get on and off, a bit heavier i suppose but durable and sidewalls don’t rip like the racier schwalbe tyres of yore, even at comedy lower pressures. They have worn pretty well and grip fine on the front; in our local mud and the quantocks, I find very little difference between my 2.1 triple compound NN on the front and a 2.0 mud x or a spesh captain in similar size. Never tried one on the back mind, always gone for lower profile tread.

avid v-brake levers always used to be the same either way up (including being able to reverse the bolt and have it facing upwards). So you’d only need 25 pairs of them…

Come back here under a different alias.
And deny it when pointed out. (the two lovable bighitter/master trolls i have in mind have had at least four each and not even through being banned iirc).

As nurses/health workers so generally healthy but also excellent ‘pathogen vectors’, we get it for free each year. HR/occy health are of course at pains to remind us how safe it is, but seeming to be belt and braces about the alleged risk (which they hotly deny) of it making you poorly the next day, they also always schedule all the ‘drop in and get jabbed’ on a friday. :lol:

How true.
I have no dog but I know a bike shop dog called Sprocket. :lol:

Aztec black ones are pretty good for the money.

I found clean rims also made a difference. Then googling a bit more I found that cleaning them really thoroughly with brake cleaner (impressive how much black stuff still keeps coming off what look like really clean rims with repeated scrubbing of blue workshop towel and brake cleaner) made an even better difference, but only lasts until your next wet ride :(

If i were Woppit I would be keeping quiet about all this best deal business: the reason his deal is able to be so good is because too few other people are on it, and too many people are paying over the odds. The non-switchers subsidise the switchers. (after all, the electricity and gas is the same and according to one of Stoner’s rare-these-days funky graphs, the quality of service when you phone them up cannot make that big a diference to the overall bill).

If every customer switches to that or a comparable and competitive (actually only genuinely competitive in terms of keepng your business running medium-term as long as few enough people use it) four year fixed rate deal tomorrow, imagine the bailout from the government they will be looking for rise in prices for everyone (including Woppit!) at the end of those four years as the ‘slow subsidise the savvy’ model collapses.

^^ makes you wonder why no one tried it before! (looks?) iirc DVO claim that even though the ‘carbon torsion arch’ in the stanchion protectors is relatively insubstantial/light, it still makes a significant difference to stiffness/twistiness of the fork. They said this was the case for years on upside down forks on some high end motorcycles which have a mudguard that links the stanchion guards, and that was why they tried it for a bicycle (albeit without mudgard).

£1800 quid for the fork, mind 8O 8O

I can’t believe there is a three page thread on stw about vitamins and no one has yet suggested:

Kalium Kalzium
Eisen Magnesium
Mineral Biotin
Zink Selen L-Carnitin
Adrenalin Endorphin
Elektrolyt Co-Enzym
Carbo-Hydrat Protein
A-B-C-D Vitamin

:D

troy lee ones are a bit garish in some “colorways” :evil: but are gripping and lasting very well on gurn/death-grip-tastic singlespeed, and doing that nice thing that ODI-made grips do (and superstar/cheaper ones don’t so much) where the rubber seems to get grippier with age (last couple of non-odi ones went hard and shiny :? )

bikeneil – Member

These:

http://www.odigrips.com/yetilock-ongrips130mm-1.aspx

I have some turquoise/’aqua’ ones of those waiting in a drawer for when the crosstrainers on the yeti finally die. Once you get the aqua colour a bit grubby, it is a really good match for older yeti turquoise. :D

Only shoes I don’t get laughed at by my (non-cycling) colleagues are my old shimano ‘casual’ spd’s (grey/black, laces and single velcro strap). My boss thought my defrosters were rugby boots! (I really do not have the physique of a rugby player!)

I have 2 two different ones, and only the black marzocchi branded one works on my 66’s: the hole in it is drilled offset so it pushes the pin in the valve in when you connect it, and then blows air just to the side of it, rather than the pin going up inside the adapter and not unblocking the valve. It is also longer than the sks one.

I’ve read the book a couple of times years ago.Not seen the film yet. I wonder how they will get the talking tapeworm into it… Oh and the finer details of Bruce’s intimate hygiene and his efforts at DIY grot moviemaking 8O

If the above aren’t in the film, then the book is also worth a read, somehow Irvine Welsh still made all that disgusting stuff into a funny book…

Oakley fixing your m-frames time and time again over 18 years is a great story but does not help for models that they discontinue and run out of spares for. Thusly when i snapped a hinge on my not-actually-that-old ‘sideways’ and emailed european customer services as per website, I was told politely “sorry nothing we can do”. I suppose could have gone for a discount on a replacement equivalent pair, but a) they didn’t even offer, and b) a few other pairs of someone else’s glasses still seemed better value as I seem to be a frequent scratcher, snapper and loser of glasses.

singletrackmind – Member

Did it start at your house ?
Did it drop you at your final destination?

I have a bus stop and double yellows right outside my house, so i am actually closer to the bus than I am to my car. And if I go shopping in town (or indeed to my very part time ‘other’ job at the university) I am certainly closer to where I want to go than if i parked a car. Oh and £3 return on bus versus fuel and parking (£1.20 to £1.40 per hour depending on which car park) is a winner for fewer than three people sharing the car. Unless some are kids, in which case a family of four on the bus is still cheaper.

Buses are ace! :D

I do all sorts of bits to people’s bikes/forks and especially wheels/wheelbuilds, but never for money. But then that is the lefty utopianist in me ;) I have accepted (but often not even in direct exchange for work) bike parts, fork oil/lube, bike loans, lifts out to big/far away rides, booze, cake and (by proxy, a mate in training as a therapist ‘helped’ me) academic supervision of beardy therapy work.

This thread needs Houns. And a photo of his Oakley branded display cabinet full of Oakleys.

£75 for a cubic metre or so of nice seasoned, dry, long-burning non-spitty hardwood, and cheaper if you buy twice as much (but we haven’t got the storage sorted out for that much yet). The guy that delivers it has a lovely rugged lwb landy pickup and looks like Ben Fogle so mrs is burning it like its going out of fashion!

i sometimes pedal mine through some of my local xc trails to get to the steeper/jumpier stuff: it pedals pretty well for an old 7″ travel frame, but makes trails that are fun and interesting on a short travel hardtail into very easy and less interesting ways through the woods. Sure is a workout up hill too but perhaps that is the tyres/pressures more than the weight and suspension squish.

The ragley one is fine too, but I would buy salsa (again!) if it was my money.

Great news for locals and those with birthdays that weekend. 8)

“Taste my austerity!” :lol:

I thought this was going to be another thread about our cabinet of millionaires.

My 5.5k ride to work includes going up a 12% 1km hill in amongst the other hills. Occasionally in the middle of winter I don’t arrive in a red-faced sweaty heap!

Just managing sickness absence in the worst performing Trusts to the mean that some of the best performing Trusts already achieve year on year would save the NHS £1.5B a year (possibly more depending how sickness absence is covered)

Oh and finally, there is little point in looking at figures and making public/private comparisons now or in the next few years as there will be tupe arrangments for tendered-out ex-nhs services that cover sick pay for ex-nhs staff, but you will have a devil of a job in 5 years time getting private healthcare to publish reliable figures (actually any figures at all!!) on how much taxpayers money is still being spent on sickness and absence now that they are having their slice providing a better VFM service. :lol:

Northwind makes an interesting point above and suggests that staff dealing with sick patients are more likely to be sick as a result but the data doesn’t support this – Hospital Doctors typically work the longest hours yet statistically take significantly less sickness absence than colleagues.

The point about hospital doctors being less sick than other staff is an interesting one well known to hospital staff and sometimes debated at the nursing station in the small hours between turning patients and cleaning up poop. I use this analogy as most nurses will tell you this is why doctors are less sick less often than nurses: they are involved in far less manual handling (so fewer injuries despite also in my experience taking the biggest risks with their backs compared to nurses, porters, physios, OT’s, ambulance crew and ODA’s), and total per-week duration of close proximity to and physical contact with breath, vomit, wee and poo is hugely less.

The NHSBSA do not alas break down assaults on staff by professional group, only by acute/pct/mental health trusts which all of course have a range of professional groups within them (although most incident reporting systems do record professional groups in their many drop down menus; it would be interesting to see if nurses are right in claiming that they get physically assaulted and harassed/abused more per head than doctors or receptionists).

robdixon, again, what proportion of the ‘attacked’ nhs staff you spoke of in your earlier post get these £70k clinical merit awards? Since you seem so well informed in such matters you mihgt like to help the less informed casual reader out by expressing this as a percentage of the workforce in total, and for a bit of proper non-daily-mail-outrage, you could add the minimum and average annual salaries of nhs employees too. Oh and tell us what proportion/percentage of the total NHS wage bill is paid out as clinical merit awards (my hunch is that it will start with at least two zeroes and a decimal point ;) )

PS even nurses in private sector care often can and often do get real money bonuses, either just for christmas, as a share of their manager’s performance bonus, or skilfully/correctly dealing with ‘mystery shoppers’ (typically a telephone enquiry or referral, or someone posing as a snooping journalist ) I don’t think this is necessarily a bad thing but the nhs is most certainly not about to introduce this practice already widespread in private healthcare.

Yes. I have three mates who I just would not know at all if i had never been on stw. But they are well outnumbered by riding mates who I knew already or have met without the aid of the internetz.

I love free inner tubes -if that was a bit nearer me I’d be riding out there to see if they are still there. :D

Robdixon,
job security? Yet another incredibly costly restructuring means that even existing nhs trust have made redundancies across all sectors including nursing, that’s before your get into the realm of areas that are being privatised put out to tender and then restructured further still.

– “clinical merit awards” or to use naughty private sector language “bonuses”, for some clinical staff that can exceed £70K and are not performance based and ARE taken into account for pension calculations

cousultants only of course. The average wage in the nhs is not even near the £70k you quoted. Exactly what proportion of these nhs workers do you think these performance related bonuses apply to?

– up to 16 days sick leave on average for some roles that is never actively managed and never goes down

-and which roles would they be? -and which dinosaur of a trust does not actively manage sickness these days? When I worked in acute respiratory care you would be sent home for the sorts of coughs and splutters we all get because the risk you presented to the patients we had there outweighed the benefit of you staying and working. The same is certainly true for those in intensive care/hdu too ie your stay home sick threshhold is a lot lower than elsewhere. And we nearly all caught (inhaled) an airborne Norwalk-Like-Virus that nothing short of bunking off work would have protected us from and cost us all a few days off sick each. There are many places where through poor resources and poor support of staff, or just sheer bad luck, the job makes you ill whether it is managed by an NHS trust or a private company. If it makes you feel any better, I haven’t had a day off sick or parental leave for three years, my couple of illnesses have had the good grace to occur during my 33 days annual leave. As for my colleages, my manager would be ‘managed’ about this and I would nevertheless be subject to a formal interview with HR if I was off sick (even for a day at a time) more than twice this year.

Good advice up there: I bought a huge lot of new spokes (for the price of a wheel and a half’s worth at crc) from the classifieds, which came in useful sizes and made it much more worth it. As is swapping rims or unsuitable hubs and repairing pringled or wonky wheels.

It is even worth learning to build just so that when you get almost totally untensioned wheels on your bargain bike purchase (yes you Kona) or one of the ‘friday-afteroon-job’ but un-match-ably cheap superstar components wheel ‘builds’ you can slacken the whole wheel off and build it properly.

TCX was high on my list too, until I realised that (unlike the ladies ‘liv’ equaivalent model) it features the new overdrive steerer ‘standard’, which at the moment ties you into giant only for replacement fork, headset and stem.[edit -and the seatpost and clamp so it would seem from above post] -Sorry Giant, great value bike compared to the current competition but I am too chicken about new stuff and would wait for a couple of years for other manufacturers to adopt or make parts for it. :?

fwiw i ordered a caadx because besides bb30 (this will be my first one but I am encouraged by that screw-in collet thingy if it realy gets silly) everything else on it is ‘normal’, (including 27.2 seatpost, 135mm rear disc hub), one of my lbs’ does it and you can fully ruin it with proper mudguards and a rack. :lol:

wrightyson – Member

The mrs had a quorn one
I quickly looked thro the 50 quids worth of tat that we had bought to see if we’d purchased anything that resembled a pair of bombers

At least you have some idea of what’s in the quorn one! Somehow my kids prefer them to ‘real’ (ie animal lucky dip) hot dogs.

I suppose I am richer in time and poorer in money so yes I would consider it if it was really cheaper in the real world. I already drive the t4 at 60 rather than 70 most of the time. The difference in consumption between 60 and 70, (and particularly between 70 and 80!) on a brick like that versus how much I am not usually in a hurry and how much that fuel saved is worth to me usually/often makes it feel worth it.

It would be even more worth it if car cost and insurance was significantly cheaper. However in the real world, car manufacturers/dealers and insurers still want to make money. No car manufacturer would willingly take a hit on the profits of a car for the hassle of fitting it with a limiter so you would need to get it funded ultimately from the taxpayer whether that was through direct per-vehicle subsidy or tax breaks as encouragement for manufacturers who made such vehicles (guffaws at motorists hearing their taxes were being invested in encouraging them to drive more slowly!)

I have no doubt that an underwriter predicting, for example’s sake a 40% saving in payouts from the ‘safer’/slower driving of a speed limited car would somehow get nibbled back to a 15% at best saving in money to the policy holder after everyone else had their slice. :?

If you want to train all winter for riding your mountain bike in the summer, get don’t get a normal road bike, get something with brakes that work well-ish in the wet and full mudguards. Disc equipped road/touring or cyclocross bike or even *shudders* a flat barred road bike. It really is a surprise how wet you don’t get and how much less dirty your road bike gets with proper mudguards. And it really is a surprise when it is raining how long any rim brakes (ie v’s cantis or road brakes) take to start slowing you down if you are used to disc brakes.

Stoner – Member

on our long European tour it took over 2,000 miles to get Mrs Stoner to stick to my rear wheel when it was my turn in front. She would be wafting around 10 yards down the road, rather than get a drag.

Same here! my wife is small, light and a great climber (has about a 30% share of road QOM’s and most of the mountainbike ones round here) but seems uninterested in saving her legs when she has 13st of windblocker gurning away at 25mph in front of her. :?

Appolinaire: Le Pont Mirabeau

Sous le pont Mirabeau coule la Seine
Et nos amours
Faut-il qu’il m’en souvienne
La joie venait toujours après la peine

Vienne la nuit sonne l’heure
Les jours s’en vont je demeure

Les mains dans les mains restons face à face
Tandis que sous
Le pont de nos bras passe
Des éternels regards l’onde si lasse

Vienne la nuit sonne l’heure
Les jours s’en vont je demeure

L’amour s’en va comme cette eau courante
L’amour s’en va
Comme la vie est lente
Et comme l’Espérance est violente

Vienne la nuit sonne l’heure
Les jours s’en vont je demeure

Passent les jours et passent les semaines
Ni temps passé
Ni les amours reviennent
Sous le pont Mirabeau coule la Seine

Vienne la nuit sonne l’heure
Les jours s’en vont je demeure