^^ Bell it is then! :D

^ :lol: @ Mrs Toast -I was reading through the thread and thinking just the same thing. :D

Do Bell have a crash replacement discount thingy in the UK?
Only reason I ask is that a recent thread on Poc on ere revealed that they don’t (in the UK that is) -for that sort of money there is no way I would buy any helmet unless I thought I could get a new one discounted if I broke it. (*coughs*Giro!*)

With the salaries you can still pay yourself and your mates staff and the awesumz tax breaks, you would be foolish not to run a private school as a charity.

I was in Exeter the other day and outside the office of a big emplyment agecy (I forget which one, but sort of opposite house of Fraser if you know it) there were those charity salespeople with clipboards, except that this time they weren’t collecting direct debit signup commission payments money this tme: they were recruiting even more charity direct debit signup people. They are replicating! 8O

Road bike for £500. But the seller was a real regular on retrobike (although it was for sale on both forums i supose i bought it through this one), and by all accounts on there (they have seller feedback threads) he is an all round nice bloke. Fwiw even from people I didn’t know much about I have had better ‘as described’ experiences from here than on ebay.

Wife and I are both nurses. So without even thinking about pension contributions and retirement age, our £3.85 pw tax break will go a tiny fraction of the distance towards offsetting the real term losses of our pay freeze of the last 4 financial years. Cheers Dave. :evil:

Troll. Good one though. :D

Surely its only a matter of time before someone tries to flog a ‘1×10 narrow/wide specific’ chain for 60% more than the cost of a normal one. 29er specific saddle with that too sir? :lol:

Cheapest will be the textro levers and bar end shifters, and waaaaay cheaper than new mini-v’s and half decent sti’s!

one of my favourite bike purchases ever. Paid for itself almost immediately in not buying a wheel jig and nipple driver (in fact for his prescribed technique you would need to grind a bit off a ‘proper’ one too so I made one out of a cheap screwdriver) and I have built 20 or so wheels for me/wife/mates from scratch, and rebuilt (totally slackened off and retensioned properly) another half dozen (yes you, Kona and Superstar :evil: )

Because rather than fixed gauges atached to the stand, it relies on you frequently checking the dishing (the stand desogn allows you to do this without taking the wheel out of the stand) and sighting the rim against a two floating gauges (ie you just stand the two gauges on the base of the stand and spin the wheel), and you can move the right hand leg in and out and use a 10mm hex key for through-axles, I have built/bodged the stand to acommodate and build on every axle ‘standard’ out there including maverick 24mm front hubs.

I have had a new computer since I bought it so as an old customer I have just downloaded the newest one onto new (well, ‘less old’) computer for nowt. Ace! :D

I’m a bit confused about brakes which have a separate bleed point at the lever to the one at the reservoir/master cylinder,

I break all those rules of mechanical correctness I posted as well as cog/sprocket. I have two rubbish “toolzone” quality adustacle wrenches as well as a stilson for big/stubborn ones. :oops:

FWIW the brake lever is the bendy bit your finger(s) move to make the brake work, which uses a cuple of pivits and other gubbins to pump the master cylinder. So in shermer’s correct world, his lever should be the simple mechanical bit of the assembly, the master cylinder or reservoir will be where he gets to pump in or drain out brake fluid.
A lever.
A master cylinder.

Of course if I referred to it as such hardly anyone would get it. When my formulas went in for warranty the excellent warranty guy and I both referred to the complete master cylinder assembly as the ‘lever’ and seemed to understand each other. I don’t think either of us got sprocket-rage about it. :D

traffic flow? What price can you put on making sure Jonty’s Range Rover Evoque gets to Thurlestone in good time for his golf err meeting? Difficult for traffic lights even with sensors on to tell if there is one car on one side and 15 on the other and time the lights right.

Won’t work.

gearcable outer will be too narrow to fit your brake cable throughthe middle (try holding gear and brake inners up against each other). brake inner cable is fatter as it is considered more safety-critical than gear, and has a different knobbly thing on the head so you don’t get them mixed up or fit a potentially-more-snappable gear inner in your brakes.

FWIW xtr/dura ace brake outers are, err, ace. :D

Shermer75, it must be so tiring being a beacon of correct mechanical nomenclature. I trust that you also also:

-know your spindles from your axles
-say Dérailleur not mech, and pronounce the double l properly.
-bleed your brakes from the reservoir or master cylinder not the lever
-say ‘ferrule’ not ‘end cap’
-only refer to an allen key if its manufactured by Allen
-talk of ‘chain bushing wear’ not “stretch”.
-have absolutely no adjustable wrenches in your home or workplace. ;)

But it’s not a chainring: that would be better used to describe a ring made out of chain. It’s a front sprocket. Or in the case of motorcycles, a pinion. ;)

Does anybody else get annoyed by this?

No. I learnt mechanics on technic lego where the exact same parts could be cogs, sprockets or pinion wheels depending on what you mated them to.

Someone needs to tell all those charlatans selling “chainrings” and “chainwheels” (shimano iirc) about this too then. ;)

Is it me, or would anyone else expect that paying that much you might get some kind of discounted crash replacement? As far as I can tel this is not the same everywhere (in the USA the distributor does do a crash replacement for POC) I would have thought this encourages/incentivises people to ride with a safe and undamaged helmet rather than thinking “I paid £150 for this and I will ride in it till it falls to bits.) For this reason (and that they fitted my swede nicely) the last few I have bought over the years have been Giro (and it is madison who do the replacing/dicounting not Giro btw). Apparently if I crash/damage/break my Athlon I can get a new one for half price. http://www.giro.co.uk/crash-replacement.php

I looked at the thread nickdavies posted up there and somewhere in it I found this comedy gem:

hora – Member

Del-(personal experience) I wont buy anymore secondhand forks from STW. Not a chance.
Posted 3 years ago # Report-Post

:lol:

You can make your own with a piece of windscreen washer/fishtank tubing cut to size and a long thin ziptie threaded through, round one hose and back on itself again so it holds both cables/hoses against the ends of the tube.

Now a Livestrong Power Balance band, that would be something….

Tough luck for having a crap seeding, surely?
You wouldn’t find F1 drivers letting Vettel pass if he had a bad qualifying run, so why would another sport be different?

Its the opposite in DH though: the better you do in qualifying the later in the day you start your race run(s). In fact its run more like a time trial not a ‘mass start, first across the line’ race, but arguably harder to pass the slower riders you are timetrialling against than on a road. So theory/likelihood goes that the rider behind you is likely to be a little bit quicker than you, unless that is they are so quick they catch you up o the first half of the course and then complete the second half muh0h slower than their practice or seeding runs cos you are holding them up. You could run dh races the opposite way round but then the hotseat wouldn’t change after the first three people got down, and half the spectators would lose interest…

Pyro – Member

Fantastic. If he’d wanted worse pictures of the director, I could have supplied him lots. I used to kayak with Neil intermittently.

I think he has tinkered with that photo. I met Neil a couple of times and no way is his face that grey or his hair that orange. 8O

So far in the budget lottery with both organisations I have done ok..

+1 Like any mail order bike stuff, if you have access tothe internet to buy it, use the internet to google it first! (eg headsets poor, pedals great, hubs are novatec but with seemingly less lasting bearings so get the colour you want at knock down price but prepare to
change the bearings soon)
(Oh and the wheels! Although often you get a bang on well built set, I would add that you should budget for a re-tension/rebuild if you take advantage of the silly cheap wheel prices -you try buying just the parts for what he sells them for built up loosely assmebeled by work experience boy)

[pseudointellectual] what we really need is a proper inter-rater reliable scale for the features and atributes that indicate pseudo and genuine intellectualism. [/pseudointellectual]

I lived for a year in a crappy freezing house 200m from Leicester City football ground (the old one) and every home game the road was closed for pretty much the whole day, and if you didn’t move you car they moved it for you!

It really wasn’t that big a deal.

The only place you felt trapped was in the queue for the chip shop on Welford Road if you went in there after the match. We used to try and guess the score from our back garden by listening to the noise/chants of the fans. And the faces of the away fans going back to coaches parked in our street.

I would like to hypothesise a rule where the tolerance of sporting or community events outside one’s home is inversely proportional to the value of the property. ;)

If you type the acronym for “i’m not reading all that sheeeeyat” then the swear filter changes it to

” I struggle with long sentences ” [edit, yes it still does]

I think “what tyres” used to be filtered on the old forum too.

Pah, these Surrey folk are proper noobs at nimbyism. Ours were/are much better/worse (blue graded mountain bike trail in local woods). The Surrey nimbys would do well to borrow from the Plymouth ones the following points:

-Upsurge in campfires and barbeques, as well as empty cans and bottle of cider.
-Will scare off the peregrine falcons nesting nearby.
-Residents will be forces to park on their drives and not the road in front of each others’ houses.
-Cycling is inherently dangerous and cyclists or innocent bystanders will DIE.
-Cycling isn’t healthy really: you just get oversize thighs and no real cardio fitness.

NB these are a small selection of what we had, but 100% from the mouths of locals! :D

Before you grab your pitchforks do you have evidence the accused bought his during the offer?

surely there is no other excuse for having parted with money for those terrible terrible grips. You’d have to pay me to put them on a bike. ;)

Small world: I lurk on and occasionally post on the lego forum that atkinsar is a moderator for. *waves* :D

I would say that in the grand scheme of things, atkinsar is very much at the upper end of the fantastic collection spectrum: he is to lego (particularly the little sets in bags not boxes) what Stoner is to on-one bicycles and Hora is to frame-swaps. :lol:

The foot nut is indeed the 10mm one in our picture. Yes that part (2nd down on your link) would do it: equally you could speak nicely to the likes of Loco or jtec fork tuning people and see if they have a spare one knocking about as that sort of nut is common to a lot of RS forks.

The air will stay in if you remove your nut: inside, the threaded part you are having trouble screwing your shock pump on is actually a long tube which goes up to the negative chamber way up inside the fork, ad there are a couple of seals stopping air leaking out regardless of what you do with the foot nut. (if air does leak when you undo it this is a sign that one of the seals inside the air spring has failed).

All being well inside the fork, the worst that would happen whe you remove the nut to get your shock pump on is that some of the lubricating oil in the lower leg would leak out. This is unlikely though: it is an interference fit inside the lower leg that you have to tap inwards with a rubber mallet to undo if you want to drain the oil and service the fork. I very much doubt that screwing on a shock pump and careful (as opposed to jumping up and down on it) pumping would disodge it, and putting the nut back on and nipping it up tight would re-seal it anyway. For belt and braces approach, do the top/positive spring first, and then break the ’11th commandment of stw’ by turning the fork/bike upside down and then do the bottom valve. (You should always adjust positive first on rs dual air forks)

I know it is some kind of sport for the uneducated to chuck empty bottles and cans from moving vehicles at cyclists, but who throws an apple?
-Uneaten?
-From an articulated lorry?
-At 60mph?

(I am double pissed off cos we were on a signposted diversion that spat us onto a dual carriageway we would never dream of planning to ride on normally…)

Linux/Ubuntu

Merkur

Stop asking on here and see a proper doctor.

Double Facepalm

You should have been at the Big Bike Bash

winter (car) tyres

What do you mean you have tubes/more than one chainring/25.4mm handlebar/stem longer than 70mm/bottle cages, you retro freak! (delete as appropriate)

Bikediscount.de

konabunny – Member

Okay, so if more money were available, what would be the answer? Some sort of secure custody/place of safety facility inside hospitals? A kind of mental health A&E?

[professional hat on] Absolutely this. But at/on same site as the mental health unit rather than A&E. ^^

I have a good friend who is a police custody nurse and we often discuss this as TBF I think he gets dumped on with patients that are seen as too dangerous or drunk for the local mental health unit’s Section 136/Place of Safety suite and go to custody instead.

Barriers to improvments are 1) money, 2) economies of scale and 3) the institutional intolerance, in fact horror on the part of middle managers that there might be some times of the day where people run out of things to do and just sit there waiting for a call/admission.

1) Money: space, setup costs and ease/guarantee of access. The care quality commission and mental health act commission’s standards for that sort of place, and the impact it (or rather its patients, the chaos/disturbance than can come with them and the needs they pace on the staff) have on the other patients already properly admitted to mental health units are understandably high. Given the size and layout of mental health units it is often a huge undertaking to provide a Place Of Safety Suite. There is also an ongoing debate about how to staff it and with what type/grade of staff. In an ideal world I would say Band 6 Mental health nurse plus helpers of some description but realistically you are talking £120k just for a b6 nurse 24/7. Unless they are shared with another service in the same building, which brings me to…

2) Economies of scale. Most mental health units are reducing their bed numbers and consequently their overall staffing numbers, and going, going gone are the days of massive hospitals or units with loads of wards all of whom could send a pager-equipped member of staff to assist with emergencies and so when the alarms went off on a general adult mental health unit, you would have 6 extra people to help. (secure units and hospitals have far better responses to emergencies but are also not often on same site or indeed run by same hospital trusts/companies as general adult acute units where 136 suites are the most usefully placed) Obviously if you had one switched on member of staff at all times in your POS suite who had access (reasonably within 30 seconds of pressing alarm) to a few extra staff who were guaranteed to be available (much like you do in a police custody suite but for diferent resaons!). But to be abe to guarantee this, you need to have a large enough body of staff to draw from (if your response team is 4 people but there are only 8 on duty in the whole 2-ward unit then you are pretty much bound to get a situation where everyone has their hands full with one crisis or another and one person turns up to help when the alarms go off. But this brings me to:

3) Middle management are horrified by the notion that you might not always be busy or indeed just be sat on your arse waiting for something to happen[/i]. I order to guarantee a timely response to any emergency you need to accept that your expert staff may at times run out of things to do, and have to sit around just waiting for the call. Middle managment (and some posters on here, given some of the comments I read on fire/ambulance service threads) cannot cope with this sacrifice of overall productivity versus the ability to respond properly, expertly and immediately when needed …but the more you spread your staff between different roles at the same time (general ward staff, unit co-ordinator, emergency response person, Place Of Safety/Sec 136 Person) the greater the chance of something terrible happening because everyone was too tied up in their other role to be able to deal with the emergency. In our local POS suite the permanent member of staff (not a qualified mental health nurse BTW) is usually called to help out on the wards if there is no one in on a 136 because the wards are so horrendously busy. That being so, what happens when it all kicks off in the POS suite: what chance have the wards of helping out there and what compromises do they make to the care and safety of the inpatients on the ward in order to attend an emergency elsewhere in the unit?

So I’ve ordered some Ritchey torque paste

…that’s just cheap wholesale torque paste decanted into into a little sachet with Ritchey printed on it you know. ;)

(seriously, per gram it is about 50 tomes more expensive than same stuff in a tub as supplied to non-bike industry)

gusamc – Member

julian, db
New one on me: David Bowie? Douche Bag? Don’t bother?

gusamc, the examples I can give are the best we have at the moment and many degrees (did you see what I did there? ;) ) more useful than your “everyone in private versus everyone in public sector” link earlier. FWIW it is also hugely easier to measure pay and conditions when they are not modified by company cars, bonuses, Christmas bonuses, staff parties/pissups, gym membership, electronic devices, staff discounts on whatever it is you sell, share options, sponsored/funded training/secondments/higher education and so on… Nice to see you taking such an interest in the details now. ;)

What the private sector is arguably better at than the NHS is putting a price on a job without the constraints of a nationally agreed pay scale with only 9* pay bands to choose from.(actually its a tiny bit more complicated, call it 12) But such is the market that with it being so close to the implementation of the health and social care act (and the privatisation of more and more previously nhs-run services) that there are still relatively few posts that exist that are directly comparable to an NHS couterpart. Those that have been privatised tendered out recently (locally I am thinking Childrens community services in Devon which was Devon Partnership NHS trust and is now Virgin Healthcare) are still subject to TUPE and no doubt the employer not wishing to rock the boat too soon. No good putting in a low bid at tender if half your staff leave before you get going.

I started typing but then deleted a whole load of answers to your list up there as there are still so many variables and it was turning into even more of an “I struggle with long sentences” post. [edit: I am sure this is old news but stw has autocorrected ‘i struggle with long sentences’ from where i typed a more well known and overused acronym. :lol: ]

Suffice to say that at the moment (and you need to consider here that there are fewer nurses nationally than posts for them to work in), nurses don’t return to similar/near identical posts in the NHS from private hospitals for the take home pay, NHS-wide t&c’s or the pension any more than they leave the NHS to ‘go private’ because they are envious of the paid-for staff parties, excellent in-service training and sponsorship for training/education or free gym memberships. (your big list omitted those. Oh and I am well envious of the first two. My next post-reg but not masters level course will be of huge help to my service, but will still cost me £1800 and all my own time an 8 months course)

If you are really bored and wish to see the balance of what we do know versus the variables from one NHS trust to the next and one private healthcare provider to the next then I will see if it is quiet enough at 4am on my night shift tonight (which by the way I will be getting paid the same per hour for as I do on a saturday daytime) to for me to conjour up some links to various employers t&cs and pension schemes and oblige you with a better answer.

If i hadn’t worked in the field for 14 years I would be just wondering about these things (like i did for prisons and schools on the last page) not offering them as examples.

Too early in privatisation of the publc sector to say what will happen to the difference in wages for like for like posts. (examples posted here are clutching at straws IMHO)

Give it a few years and you will be able to look at organisations sold out to private enterprise which were previously NHS or LA and see if private side wages have changed. In nursing and midwifery this is unlikely as there aren’t enough of them and at some point if companies who have taken over NHS services reduce wages or replace leaving staff with less senior ones, market forces may well prevail and staff will stay in or migrate back to the NHS where they are paid what they were always paid, with maybe some adjustment for more sparsely populated areas where the density of posts is lower and folk are less inclined to have to move house/town/kids schools unless they really suffer.

I may be putting the cat amongst the pigeons with regards to education in wondering how you can adjust for smaller class sizes and use of tutors (as opposed to B.Edded or PGCE’d teachers) in private education and academies to make like for like comparisons with you typical state secondary or primary teacher who may or may not be supported by TA’s or SEN staff.

At the moment google confirms that permanent like for like nursing jobs are paid the same in private sector as NHS (agency/temp/locum wages again are an unrealistsic comparison), and actually slightly more plus perks for nursing managers in places that have been private since way before the Health And Social Care Act (eg Priory group, Huntercombe group, St Andrew’s).

Anyone know what the wage differences for officers and governors/managers are like in privately run prisons versus state ones?

sugdenr – Member

And dry them on the line in the sun, sun and air seems to help somehow

^^iirc many of the bacteria that linger on your clean clothes (and make them smell again once warm and wet) are killed off by UV light.

Some folk are just too cool or important to slow down.

Coming back to Devon on tueasday after bank holiday we drove through that crazy storm; haven’t driven in rain like that for 10+ years even if it was over and done with in 5 minutes. Anyway, we slowed down to about 35 like everyone else but there were a couple of smartarses in jag/BMW’s who seem to have the sort of technology that affords them the visibility and roadholding to steam through at 70. :roll:

gusamc, from your link:

The compositions of the public and private sectors are different. Consequently differences in gross weekly earnings do not reveal differences in rates of pay for comparable jobs. For example, many of the lowest paid occupations, such as bar and restaurant staff, hairdressers, elementary sales occupations and cashiers, exist primarily in the private sector, while there are a larger proportion of graduate-level and professional occupations in the public sector.

What point were you trying to make with that link?

In fact I gave an example of this back on page 4. (NHS hospitals subbing out portering, cleaning and catering jobs to ISS et al and in a stroke increasing the average wage of their employees without actually paying them a penny more).

…and of course many/most low end jobs in public sector institutions (by this I mean catering, claeners, estates and porters) have long since been farmed out to private enterprise.

Local example being our 5000 employee district general hospital which farmed out (most of but not 100% of) porters, and all cleaners and catering to ISS 14 or 15 years ago so the average wage of that particular hospital trust leapt up correspondingly even though no one got paid a penny more.

Where it is possible to find like-for-like jobs in private healthcare (private CPN, ICU or A&E nurse? almost unheard of but you will find equiatble posts in other non-medical-emergency inpatient services like rehab, mental health etc) they are competitive with those in the NHS and usually feature non-slary benefits as sweeteners. You will find that IT and HR are the exception though, they get way more in the private sector, in fact I am suprised any of ours bother staying!