No pictures online, but I have a totally unmolested t4 swb caravelle, currently with the rear bench removed. You get carpets, door cards/trim etc, headlining, floor heater for the rear plus six fans in the ceiling, seatbelts, middle (but not rear) windows open. You can also fold down or remove the middle row of seets and then you have a t4 van with lots of windows and a tailgate. Fits five adults plus five xc bikes and all kit inside for a a weekend, and the severn bridge costs less than a van too. Doddle to insure as it is both unmodified and also a car not a van and so on databases of most major insurers.

That said, when we can afford to we will probably sell it on and get a combi van with a plastic/ply boot area as ours is pretty much never clean inside!

Methinks Jeremy Hunt is deliberately exchanging the term “coasting” for “keeping head above water amidst meaningless and unhelpful targets and KPI’s”.

My ‘niche of a niche’ clinical speciality runs on small numbers (12 beds for all of Devon and Cornwall) so one or two patients in a year can and oiften do completely skew any meaningful statistics you might try and generate. We have very few reliably and quickly (ie <12 months post discharge) measurable clinical indicators/outcomes, this is common to the other 30 or 40 places that do the same thing as we do and frequently a topic of discussion in our national peer-review network.

We are therefore usually judged by our parent organisation (now a social enterprise trust) and our commissioners on some fairly irrelevant and therefore poorly named KPI’s (there is nothing ‘key’ about them whatsoever ffs!), aided currently by the fact that we have turned in a roaring profit (for we are paid in bed days by the four different health authorities whose patients we take) over the last 18 months which has been reinvested in other clinical areas. We also have outstanding hygeine/infection control ‘figures’, chiefly because we have the infection vectors and wounds/bugs/germs profile of a primary school not a surgical ward, so frankly it is pretty hard not to be spotless.

Yet somehow all this currently makes us a “good” service because no-one knows how else to judge us. 😕

My Nan’s village in the pyrenees was a final stopover before Andorra for escaping airmen. 😀

iirc continental do a 1″ slick tyre, as do specialized. But they are both really slick!
For knobblies, scwalbe cx pro comes up as about 1.3″ on 717’s: just a smidge wider than a proper 700c cx tyre.

parkesie – Member

Ops version of bike usage and cleaning is accurate rest of the bike is still spotless.

well that will be the distributor trying to get paid for fixing a warranty claim then. 👿

Iirc nothing in warranty about under-crown guards or gentle hose use, and unless the OP’s average speed was less than 3 mph, it was comfortably within the 50 hours lowers service interval.

OP’s stated use and care/cleaning of fork, and fishers/sram’s understanding of what is wrong with the fork (or its user) do not match at all.

Lowers full of mud and water with that kind of use really is most odd: I have never taken a jetwash to a bike, but have hosed a-plenty, dozens and dozens of river crossings at events or just out riding, and even dunked my bike in the river to de-clag between ridiculously muddy laps at 24hr races.

Yet in fifteen or twenty services on the 8 different 32mm RS forks I have had over the years (including four rebas), plus a couple of others I did for mates I have never found mud or water in the lowers – nothing beyond the right volume of oil but a little bit browner than when it went in, and a tiny bit of dirt right behind the lip of the dust (ie big grey) seals.

[Hércule Poirot moustache twirling] Methinks the OP has jetwashed the bejeesus out of his fork, has had it for a lot more than 2 months/11 rides/178 muddy miles, or just maaaaaybe, the distributor is covering up a fault with the fit of the dust seals on the stanchions… [/Poirot]

Also fwiw neoguard/beef curtain (or indeed the guard that RS used to make and sell specially for 09-’11 Sid forks!) is way worse for directing mud towards your dust seals than an under-crown mudguard like a fenderbender/marsh guard.

half hour lap at the mo, including a longish forest road descent 🙁 (this will be replaced by proper trail whe it is all finished, mind!).
Skillz-wise I would put it at harder than the haldon blue but not as many rocks as the red. (so a ‘proper’ blue grade trail!)
I have heard there remains some of what would now be described as ‘cheeky’, after all it was a popular spot with loads of muddy singletrack long before the trail centre bits, but what is left is not really spottable from the main trail, and suprisingly strava does not turn up much either. Good work, localz 😉

Awesum. You could tax paople gthat walk too: that will raise your co2 emissions unless you take fairy steps.

iirc a cyclist is a gazillion times more fuel efficient than a motor scooter. And so the cost of administering the fair taxation of projected co2 emissions on a cyclist (over the emissions he/she would still have using a car or public transport, and in correct proprtion to co2 emissions per mile for motor vehicles) would outweigh the tax yield many times. Bravo!

@gmez619, blimey, i’d forgotten there were even 2 octalink ‘standards’ 😳

Still, the point stands about people fitting undoubtedly lightweight cranks on 7″ travel world cup dh bikes, and I wonder how many not-ht2 xtr cranks palmer etc munched their way through. (actually given the money in DH in those days, perhaps that is exactly what they did in the pursuit of half a second here and there?)

popular music in all its forms
NHS
pubs/drinking establishments
public libraries
good old fashioned free-to-use public conveniences with proper sinks (as opposed to wallgate things)
seaside piers
double decker buses
sausages

A load of mountain bike segments near me seem to be named after Frank Zappa albums. “Weasels ripped my flesh” anyone? 😀

iirc many pro downhillers on Super 8, intense m1, gt dhi era bikes used to use square taper xtr when I started paying attention to that sort of thing. But perhaps they broke them and replaced them a lot?
eg:

I have original shape 170mm ht2 xt on mine and 3 years in, so far so good.

Frogs legs, horse, stuffed quail. Not all in the same meal though. And a long time ago too; not eaten meat or fish for 15 years I think.

Aw man, she is going to totally rip up the Haldon Blue on that rig. 😉

[edit] I have an adapter for that front brake if you want, shall I leave it in the porch for tomorrow?

I wasn’t going to bother reading this thread cos I thought it would be about a ‘normal’ bike, but the loss of a kona A is like seeing a classic car in a breaker’s yard. 🙁

My condolences. Hopefully the back end will be of use as a spare to the few kona A riders on here?

also, you need to post a picture of it on here now.

A well known lbs owner of considerable riding skillz and mechnical repute near me says “Bianchi” wrong despite talking fondly of the one he used to have a few years ago. 😀

“Commen-chal (as in loch)”
but aren’t they from Andorra?

iirc Max Commencal himself is French, but runs his bizness in Andorra because of the excellent trails, mountains, chairlifts and tax arrangments 😉

I think I will start saying “Ca-non-da-lay” from now on and see how long it takes before someone gets all upset at me. 😀

Keith Bontrager introduced himself over the PA at the 24/12 as ‘bon-tray-ger’ (with a hard g) so whatever the euro pronounciation I suppose we should go with his version if we are talking about bike things with his name on them.

As a half frenchie I can advise that the name Commencal has a soft c in the middle, and the ‘en’ bit is that French vowel sound half way between ‘on’ and ‘an’. You say ‘on’ with your voice but open your mouth wide. (try it out loud!)

But where do you stop? Michelin has its own very recognised pronounciation in English and you’d sound well wierd going into your lbs or garage and asking for the French (ie real) way of saying it. (meesh-lang in my accent!)

Animals.

With a second hand frame, I would guess that the new back end would be more than people have paid for the frame in the first place making it not worthwhile surely?

Not necessarily: the chainstay or seatstay (for they are 2 separate pieces) of a horst or faux bar Turner is rather a lot less than the £5-800 you might have bought a second hand frame for. Foxy/zesty/froggy are 4 bar iirc. (Even cheaper for the big brands, I have heard £80 for specialized chainstays, but to be fair to lapierre and sc, we are talking smaller volumes)

Wife likes them. I feel like Mr Smith’s earlier contender for post of the week reached in, took the disgust out of my my head and turned it into English. 😆

Particularly liked their Indian flavoured mash up with Laura Marling and the Dharohar Project.

that one is the absolute worstest. 👿

relatively small companies that sell a large proportion of their total volume as high-end bikes can’t reasonably be expected to keep large stocks of swing-arms and front-ends

Hmmmmm. Yeti, turner, intense, cove, ellsworth, transition (to name a few) all seem to sell predominantly high end full suspension frames in similar or smaller volumes than lapierre and santa cruz (certainly even smaller volumes than Lapierre and SC in the UK!) and all seem to be able to supply/sell replacement fron/rear ends to whoever asks and either has a warranty or no warranty but the money instead. (I leave orange out of this simply because the fs bikes are made over here and so i imagine they can get away with much holding a smaller stock of spares at any one time than imported ones because they can just make up few more locally if they have unexpected runs of snappages).

[edit] plectstomus, the OP is not the only person on here to have come up against this with a s/h lapierre: there was a thread about the same things a few months ago. I tried a search for it but iirc the thread title didn’t have ‘lapierre’ in it so having trouble locating it.)

really dry but cold round our way atm. We have begun shock and awe on our garden already: strimmed off the first 10 cm and then mown it twice in a week. Actually looking pretty nice compared to last year.

The lockrings come with the rotors: the hubs and wheels just have a plastic cap over the splines of the centerlok bit. The exceptions to this are the front 15 and 20mm hubs and wheels, which have a different lockring (with a bigger hole through the middle to accommodate the larger axle) that does up with a ht2 bottom bracket tool.

FuzzyWuzzy – Member

Yeah I really like my Zesty but I’d never buy one second hand.

…and no spares for 2nd hand owners means you will never sell yours for anything like the money you’d get for a frame made by anyone else still in business. 🙁

there was a thread on here about it too.

Electricity usage by offices/factories/hospitals etc still has a long long way to go.

The electricity generated by the HUUUUge slab of PV panels on the roof of our ooober-expensive PFI hospital unit is more than offset by the electricity wasted by the lights: these come on automatically in 90% of areas whether you want them too or not, and whether it is the middle of the night or a bright summer’s day. They stay on 15 minutes after last motion is detected in the room. All about safety, innit. 😕

And when the fire alarm is tested weekly every last light comes on in every last nook, cranny and broom/storage cupboard, and you have to walk round the whole building into every last room/door/cupboard in order to ‘trip the motion sensors and have the light switch itself off again 15 minutes later.

(similarly the super-efficient gas boiler for the heating is wasted since we can’t adjust the heating without a day’s notice, and it spends a lot of time battling against thermostatically controlled automatically-opening roof windows and air conditioners. 👿

My grandma-in-law was registered and baptised Betty in about 1910. Not Elizabeth, just Betty and no middle name either.

I know two sisters (8 and 5) called Trinity and Raven. 😀

That looks ace, pity that 1) I am at work all that weekend, and 2) it is 350 miles away from me!

I will read withn interest: we have a couple of great race organisers in the south west and a range of abilities of xc/cx/road racers. It would be well good someone (shred/fully sussed/inevent) tried something similar down here.

njee20 – Member

I guess they’ll be close enough to work, or team mechanics will get good at undoing caliper bolts on the fly

Indeed.

Engineers on here, how hard would it be to agree and stay accurate to a really tight “standard” for both the thickness (when new/unworn) and the distance of the brake rotor from the NDS locknut? If you could get hub and rotor manufacturers to be accurate to within say 0.1mm, would that make wheel changes on neutral support cars workable?

iirc quite a few downhill bikes came with with 20-30mm less at the front than at the back. The original santa cruz v10 springs to mind.

Mrs J has a cove hooker with 100mm at the back and 150m at the front, iirc it was designed around a 140mm fork.

If you are a serial tube repairer/miser like me (record: 13 patches on one tube 8) ) then proper old fashioned vulcanised ones all the way. The pre-glued ones are great for a quicker fix on the trail but i find they don’t stay stuck on forever and have had slow-ish punctures that turned out to be the old glued patch.

And as an aside, Amazon’s prices are so low as they run loss leaders on most things and, compared to standard retail models, barely scrape a profit on the rest.

…and until that tax bubble bursts soon, the stuff they post from the channel islands (CD’s and toys in my personal experience), and the different approach they have to paying corporation tax in countries you don’t really make all that many of your sales in) that you can take when you run a company and make sales all over the world. 😕 In fact there are seven ‘different’ amazons I can name off the top of my head. (.com, .jp etc) I expect it’s much easier to manage your overheads with the tax flexibility this can bring.

[edit] it is well known that if you buy from any of the european amazons (as opposed to the retailers that operate within amazon, you know what I mean) then your stuff comes usually from the closest amazon-run warehouse that has the stock, ie you can buy something for £30 from uk amazon and exactly the same product for 30 euros from german amazon and it may well come in the same box from the same place and arrive just as quickly. This can be great for bargain hunting (often differences in price of 30% or so between the euro amazons) but makes makes Amazon’s profit/tax shifting all the more obvious.

Kraftwerk’s ‘The Model’. Dead straightforward to play on a keyboarded instrument too.

There is a great bit in the beginning of Generation A by Douglas Coupland where this lad in the Midwest with a combine harvester and a gps makes half-mile long ‘winkle and balls’.

2 of my mates were early crop cicle makers in Cornwall: they were on telly a couple of times, as were a load of druidic types from Totnes who were reading all sorts of mysticism into the late night antics of two rockers with a big stake, 100 foot of rope, a couple of planks, cider and crap hashih. 😆

FWIW, if you set aside the secondhand/original owner, spesh UK do have an excellent reputation of warrantying frames to original owners, even on really old ones. I’ve read a few bad stories about stuff failing (07/08 alloy nippled DT wheel builds and all those epic shocks, anyone? 😆 ) but loads of good stories about the warranty/backup on this forum over the years.

I ride to work on a square tubed (think easton rad but cheaper) specialized with a oldskool curved-tubed fork, full mudguards and a rack. It looks pretty horrible!

Just the same thing happened when my shock pump partially unscrewed a valve in my rear shock: (i think I didn’t need to screw it on much once the needle went up to pressure) little dab of lube and screwed it back in again.

That looks like a good price. And green I reckon.

IIRC activesport.co.uk are one of those bike shops whose online stock control is rather optimistic, and much less reliable than if you phone them up and ask. And even then….

Ahem. Plenty more threads like this on here too.

I speak Italian and have lightning genuflection reflexes. Can I audition?

Also iirc the £16 allowance includes whatever you paid for postage, ie the goods plus p&p mustn’t be more than £16. I believe the allowance is/used to be slighly higher for ‘gifts’ but nevertheless there is always still a rather small maximum value even if it is genuinely little Jimmy’s 8th birthday present all wrapped up in wrapping paper.

USPS international postage has apparently also seen a 20% or so increase this year and a lot of ebay etc sellers are cross at this as its tipped the balance of making smaller orders from them worth the money/time or not.