jasonm945 – Member

I thought Reba’s took 5ml of 15 wt oil as per their chart here

FWIW the old/original shape one (also original revelation, pike, recon and tora) had 15mls specced in the service manual.

heh, I don’t mind when it is as long as its still at Newnham again. Did we mention that it rained for a total of about 20 minutes this year? :D :D

I have a 12 year old caravelle which has wind-up windows, no such thing as a/c or central locking but it does have a cigarette lighter and no less than three other 12v sockets dotted over the back. What do i win? :D

As a CTC member you get 3rd party cover already as standard. £10M worth IIRC. This alone makes the membership fees worthwhile as far as I’m concerned.

Since the great heck train crash there is theoretically no limit to ‘liability’ payouts for motor insurance, if there was still a limit (iirc the minimum on cheapy third party policies used to be £1m) i wonder how much of the overall cost of motor insurance this would be for a car. (and don’t forget the rest of the stuff you get with ctc membership.) This is a nice statistic to trot out in the “cyclists should be insured” debate: if £41 membership includes £10m cover, the insurance underwriter must be very sure of the actual incidence, risks and consequences of a cyclist-fault accident to offer it that affordably. Out of interest I wonder how much out of that £41 overall membership fee the ctc pay their underwriter/insurer per member?

Northwind – Member

As a VED-paying car owner and cyclist, I might have to go in search of some pre-tax classic cars today and shout at the owners.

You could find some soldiers driving green (coloured green: their emissions are amongst the worst) vehicles, diplomats staff cars, that bloke who drives the prime minister round, ambulancemen, fire engines, coppers and disabled people and shout at them too. Bleddy spongers. And of course Pruis drivers. :D [edit] oh i forgot tractors. Them too.

PS just realised today it was a week since I last drove my car. That’s about £4.50 ‘road tax’ Ihave paid this week for just having it parked there and instead my clogging the roads with my bike all week.

bigyinn – Member

Name, shame and address.

What a shame the buyer’s username is now easily found a couple of clicks away from this thread. And ebay makes it so easy to ‘save favourite sellers’ and watch their listings whether you think they are good ones or bad. It would be truly terrible if this karma came back to haunt him via disappointed buyers of the bike stuff that he sells on ebay.

ononeorange – Member

This is where we need TJ to tell us all that we shouldn’t work more than 20 minutes a month!

most of the shift workers who have posted here seem to average out at about 40 hours a week, it’s the craziness of the hours not the amount. IIRC TJ did/still does his 37.5 hours a week in loopy nursing shifts too.
On the other hand there was that crazy thread last year some time with folk in law/banking/finance/sales being chuffed that they put in 80 hour weeks and thinking that they were as dynamic, efficient and productive at 10pm as they were at 8am that morning.

Of course (I’ve had a couple of sleeps since my last miserable post on here) everyone knows the upside to crazy shift work is mid-week quiet trails, much less trafficy/aggro commuting, being able to be in for the washing machine repair man, and getting round the shops in half the time it takes on saturday or sunday. :D

All over the place, mine!

I finished nights at 8am yesterday and started days as of half past midday today. Finished my 20.30 finish late shift at 2300 with and achey body and blood (someone else’s!) all over my shirt.

Of course I am a nurse. We have rules about working hours and so on but (I suspect like prison officers, police and ambulance crews) we have a duty of care that overrides any time of day or night the european working time directive, our families or personal lives might stipulate that we clock off.

26 or 29er? 29er will feel harder as ou will effectively be turning a harder gear becuase of your wheel size. Assuming you are 26″ wheeled, borrow a mate’s bike with triple chainrings and an 11-32 tooth cassette (or indeed a single 32t ring and 11-32 cassette) and try a typical route without using the granny ring: 32-32 will be the same to push as your 36 ring on a 36 tooth sprocket. I have a couple of mates who have 32 up front and 11-34 at the back on 26″ wheels (so a bit easier than 36-36) in devon/dartmoor steepness and they manage ok.

But as above it is subjective: if you have no option you will turn a harder gear and manage. I have a singlespeed which I ride all over dartmoor for rides of up to 4 hours and 800m climbing, but I also have a 3×9 bike that I will frequently be sat down and in the granny ring on the exact same ride/climbs just because I have the option to do so! :oops:

Maintenance rather than upgrades for me this year: DIY fork (x2) and aircan service, chains (x3)cassette and chainring (x1), rebuilt 2 worn rim brake wheels with new rims and brake pads (x4) only! I nearly fitted new grips on the yeti but then I just turned them over a bit so the rubbed off bits are out of the way.

Still shocking how much it cost me just to keep the bikes running unchanged/un-upgraded though, bearing in mind I always keep an eye out for cheap spares/consumables and buy when going cheap, not when urgently needed, and that I have not needed to pay for a bike mechanic to do any of it.

But I did buy a whole new-to-me (8 years old) road bike so I don’t feel too un-upgraded. :D

DezB – Member

I’m a BBB Virgin

Dez there is a guy there most years with the most fantastic sidewhiskers, you must meet him! ;)

Who is coming?

I am, with t’wife and kids.

What are you most looking forward to?

Pint-to-pint raceevent.

What can be improved from last year?

ooh, i dunno. Last year was the best of all of them IMHO. I’d have to say that despite it also improving year-on-year, the food is still the bit it would be good to see improved further upon, as in price vs nommyness vs quantity vs availibility. The ghost/ghoul lollies were totally ace though.

Which STWer are you most hoping to meet/avoid?

You are all ace. It would be good to see Matt Treviss being all-round racing snake/font of knowledge/fun-size package of enthusiasm this year as he spent the last one in hospital.

Any recommendations/advice to the BBB virgins, I mean new guests?

-You will enjoy it but your kids will enjoy it even more. There really isn’t an event quite like it if you are under 12.
-If you have a choice of bikes, leave the bouncy one at home and go short travel/no travel.
-Bring lights for the rather excellent night race, and finding your way back to your tent after bands and beer.
-before you get too ‘customer services’ on their asses, remember pretty much everyone working there that weekend is doing so as a volunteer and putting in some seriously long hours that week! Anyone who admits to being related to or staying with Nick/WCA particularly deserves a gin! ;)
-Bring bastid hard tent pegs and mallet: there are quite a few parts of the campsite where under the 3 inches of nice earth in the campsite lies a layer of flint with the occasional break in it to allow your tent pegs in a couple of inches further. Bent a lot of pegs the first year, more recently had success with those big chunky yellow ones and the ones that are basically 8″ stainless steel nails with plastic hooks on the top.
-Stay a night or two extra either side. It is lovely round there and worth a camping trip even when there isn’t a BBB on.
-Stay the monday night and acquire some clean empty containers so you can help the empty the remaining ale barrels on monday after everyone has gone home.

Sounds great, but I had not realised this though (from the article):

But shadow transport secretary Maria Eagle said: “No amount of cynical spin from David Cameron will make up for the fact that, immediately on taking office, he axed Cycle England, the Cycle Demonstration Towns scheme and the annual £60m budget to support cycling that he inherited.

“Since then he has axed targets to reduce deaths and serious injuries on our roads, reduced traffic enforcement, cut the THINK! awareness campaign and allowed longer HGVs.

A one-off £94m payout looks like a bargain spend compared to the ‘savings’ made since 2010. I wounder what he would be spending were it not for the successes of the olympics, TDF’s and keeping up with Boris? :?

mmmmm, silver stuff! Looks ace. :D

Yummy.

I like the look of that warbird. What’s wrong with calling it a cyclocross bike though? :?

True. The Hustler on the silverfish website looks quite a bit like it did eight years ago: 135mm qr rear and a normal external bearing aheadset headtube. Can’t remember if the angles changed when the decals did.

However the Cove website also says on the front page:

Shortly, we will have two 650B bikes ready for you. The new Hummer 650Bj is almost ready to roll.

650Bj, phnerr phnerrr…

fwiw, for regular non-high-speed (tgv) services outside the RER network (equivalent would be partway between tube and network southeast) france and italy definitely calculate fare on peak/off peak and per km travelled regardless of which line you happen to be on, how busy or popular it is, and how much it costs the railway to maintain that piece of the network or run that train on it. In fact somewhere I have a couple of ‘ferrovie dello stato’ tickets from the 90’s which are simple card tickets with 20, 40, 80kms and a code from the station you boarded the train with. You could buy a stack of them in advance and travel almost anywhere as long as you remembered your peak/offpeak boarding times, and remembered to punch/stamp it before you got on.

Let’s not learn any lessons from how well european still-state-owned railways do compared to ours though hey? (I avoid the use of ‘subsidised as the UK stll very much subsidises railways and consequentially the profits of train operators.) In five years time there will be a similar thread on here and a similar diagram courtesy of Ernie about differing prices of GP appointments. :(

Original post:

After merely 10 rides the material under the insole has literally fallen apart, it seems to be made of cardboard! It did this on a wet ride across Exmoor.

nickc – Member
you’ve got a pair of shoes with a slightly disappointing inner sole, which could be replaced (Ok, you may not have planned to do that, but it’s not the end of the world)

and

nickc – Member

and you can get replacement inner soles for them….

OP was talking about the midsole not the insole. Glued to the rest of the shoe and part of it. Not easily replaceable though I expect a skilled cobbler could repair by taking the whole shoe apart. Similar problems with early five ten impacts iirc.

Evans seem to have dropped the ball in this rigorous testing/vetting process then. You’d think buying something for over £100 from such a big name shop that they would have been as thorough as you have before they put it up for sale :?

Point is, why should the OP have any less confidence in something obviously far-eastern buying it from Evans as he would buying it from you?

Sancho – Member

I did, but these are cheap Chinese no brand shoes that you can probably buy at a market, what would make you think they would be any good.

Isn’t it your shop that is one of many that rebrands and sells far-eastern no-brand products? Perhaps you have the inside line over the OP as to what is cheap and chinese, and what is also good quality, cheapinexpesive and taiwanese. ;)

My kids think Applewood is ‘posh’ cheese. More processed than babybel in reality, and rather guilty-pleasure-moreish.

Also where are we on cooked cheese ‘snacks’? I am thinking chilli poppers, paneer poppers (recent arrival to frozen halal section in Tesco), breaded mozarella sticks, breaded camambert? Mmmmmm, heeeaaaart attack! :D

There is a ‘blair witch’ trail near us: fairly flat (for devon!), close spaced smallish conifers that have all been trimmed right back to even let a bike or walker through, narrow trail that twists and turns back on iself several times over. Ride it in the dark on your own and the name makes sense.
I also named a trail on strava as “weasels ripped my flesh” cos I love zappa and that’s what my flesh looked like at the end. :D

mikewsmith – Member

I reckon they would be fairly different as your comparing HT’s with FS bikes

You are underestimating the RRP of a yeti frame.

When you list something for sale, the ‘paypal only’ accepted payment option is the default. As well as mentioning cash on collection in the free text blurb, you have to swallow this:

We’re making transactions safer for eBay members by updating our accepted payments policy. The policy requires all sellers to offer PayPal as a payment method in their listings.

…and tick a little box that allows you to accept other forms of payment in addition to paypal. Likely the seller just overlooked this bit. Easy enough to do, the listing page is pretty busy.

If the seller is stiffing you because it didn’t sell for what they were hoping for, there little point in you giving a paypal ‘deposit’ as that is all you will get back when the seller finds some reason to cancel the sale. You could leave bad feedback i suppose but for low-volume/occasional sellers this is probably still ‘worth it’ if seller feels like they are missing out on the money they thought their listing should have sold for.

I wonder when they will just drop private sellers altogether. :( I expect its becoming less and less worth it for them compared to the cash-cow that is high volume business sellers using them as an easy-to-find shop front (and easy ‘find’ on google shopping searches).

b r – Member

other sale outlets are available

indeed, (I have shifted hundreds of orders on discogs.com for example) but I would love to know how many sites have been quietly bought up and closed down by ebay over the years. Remember when paypal was just one way to pay on any auction/marketplace site? ..and remember when ebay bought them out?

I’ve been banging on about this (and suggesting someone in each trust gets paid good money with what could almost be a one-line job description of driving hard bargains with suppliers) at work for years: not just with NHS logistics but everything else and every other service we buy in: we have a couple of suppliers/contractors outside nhs logistics who have blatantly taken the piss for as long as I can remember and still middle/team managers are told from on high that these are who they have to deal with.

In a ‘money saving’/micromanaging exercise (delete as applicable- probably whether you are above or below band 8c), all teams in my organisation have also recently had their corporate credit cards withdrawn, so no more canny use of public money for small but look-after-the-pennies procurments, eg sidestepping disgracefully overpriced Niceday stationary by buying it at tesco or staples. :evil:

That’s nuts. What a dude!

I actually took it that he was highlighting how dangerous a car/bike interface can be

+1

was looking at Kipling bags 50 quid in a sale for a snotty cheap nylon bag you could get for a tenner in any tat outdoor shop

I remember once upon a time, (oh alright then, early 90’s) when Kipling was reasonably affordable, decent quality, a little bit niche and best found in little shops in Europe. Another once-kooky brand lost to the masses. :(

mattjg, tyre clearance on that fork is ok, i bet you will get a 650b wheel in there with a 2″ tyre on. ;)

That was more to do with solving the wheel-falls-out-when-you-pull-the-front-brake problem, wasn’t it?

…but there was already a 20mm maxle on rockshok forks, even the reba came with it 2 or three years.

iirc the absolute best anyone has managed is a handful of grams weight savings over the whole system (lowers/axle/hub) between 20mm and 15mm maxles. And now the new pike is 3mm beefier and 10mm longer than the old one and only comes in 15mm axle. :?

Another top kwality Martyn Salt/Inevent Event, great atmosphere, great catering, great stalls/sponsors and above all a sensible (ie not too rad, they say you lose your skillz after the forst 16 hours) and 100% rideable course.

I dodn’t see too much in the way of bad manners and aggro but the first 12 hours are always the worst for attitude and riders-per-km in my experience. Nearest I saw was when I was fiddling with gears outside my tent right by the tape on the splitty bit in the solo camping, obviously too close to the tape as someone taking a wide line in a hurry just roared at me (yes like a lion) as he missed my head with his handlebar. HIe was on the slowest line too (left way was a few secs faster), sorry if I cost you a couple more seconds! :lol:

richiethesilverfish – Member

Hope you all enjoyed our Zombies

Richie the zombies were great, and in amongst some ‘enteraining’ roots for those of us that started at midnight and rode them both wet and in the dark :lol: Bowie/Aladdin Sane zombie was my favourite. Who does your zombie drawings? They are well good.

I don’t think I was ‘well held’ rider, but I did see someone on same roots lose their bike from under them and end up clinging on to the tree.

It was my birthday on the stroke of midnight when I started, and I did 12 laps -I feel about 40 years older today than I really am!

Finally mrs J came first in torchbearer and has £60 worth f prizes ad a medal to show for it. Huzzah!

City, bankers and hedge funds

Northwind you forgot private ‘bob-a-job’ healthcare/infrastructure/criminal ‘justice’ multinationals. :evil:

I am all for greater transparency about where parties’ money comes from: (surely this would be embarrassing to both cheeks of this political arse we have pooping on us at the moment,) if only for the comedy value of Cameron losing his nerve before Milliband and trying like a piss-wet 4th-rate Berlusconi to bluff his way out of it.

There is a Wayne locally that has had a couple off my wife too. :lol: Not that she should complain, not many women ‘public’ on strava locally so she still has about four pages of QOMs.

the hells teeth downhill section would be ‘interesting’ on a cx bike (there is a blue option that avoids this and the bastid climb to it), all the rest including the other red bit is definitely 100mm (singlspeed!) hardtail or rigid territory. Great trail, mind, and nice cakes too.

Great having it on our doorstep these last 5 (or is it six?) years, but is must be a ridiculously fort-william-esque drive for some folk to get here. We have been spoilt with relatively cheap, excellently organised and fantastic trailed small and massive xc events courtesy of Martyn and Newhnam for many many years now. How he makes much money off this weekend when its up to four nights camping (three with hot showers at thousands of pounds per trailer alone) at not far off half the price of SITS/MM is beyond me!

not here yet either. It happened as we were camping last summer, two hours of great wierdness: the family next to us were about to pack up and leave, and then it rather suddenly stopped. :?:

Huge SFA fan here. Before my huge record cull (which financed a great many bike things of course) I had pretty much everything, even the old ankst 7″s.

I was listening to the last one (dark days, light years) just yesterday and I think it might just be my favourite.

Did you ever check out the ‘spinoffs’? Ffa Coffi Pawb is like the ankst stuff but worse, but Gruff Rhys’ solo stuff is just brilliant. As are his gigs! I also found the Cian Ciaran album recently and it is superb, if nothing at all like his input to SFA.

Wonny J, if you are serous about the ‘rest and relaxation’ part of tapering, there is an Ale and Cider fest fri/sat/sun, a short mile up the road at the rather excellent Miners Arms in Hemerdon.[/url] Also rather decent restauranty-pub food and very bike friendly, in fact they helped host a sort of trailquesty thing last year.

The lovely Triton Cycles seem to have it in stock, with 40% off too. And Stif too.

PS I hoped this was going to be a thread reminiscing about the chilli sauce also known as Bontrager Super Juice: it was a freebie at the Bontrager 24/12 a few years ago and it was ace. Team mates not that fussed so I went home with about six bottles. :D