My daugher gets this in the summer: we give her a kiddy-size dose of Loratadine before bed when it’s really hot.

Oil filter wrench like the one pictured is going to be much to big for the outer diameter of the 15mm axle. Rubber strap wrench: possibly. Worth a try and they are pretty handy and inexpensive tools to have around even if you buy one and it doesn’t work. Trouble is you have to stop the axle rotating even the tiniest but whilst exercising some serious rotation on the other end as your tighten the locknut and hold the cone still with the comedy oversize cone spanner. My experience with strap wrinches is that its quite hard to grip a smooth surface well enough. I use a boa constrictor strap to undo air shocks but then its ok if/when the strap slips a bit before it really grips on. To get a good grip with the rubber strap you have to be turning it against something first, which is fine with a shock body held in a vice (or oil filter in car etc etc) but you are trying to immobilise a rotating axle before you start working on the other end of it.

Only other thing would be to see if someone with a lathe will machine you up a copy of the shimano hb15 tool, or just the cups from it: you need to be able to pass an old rear axle or similar through the middle of it so you can do it all really tight and then clamp the disc side cup in a vice or adjustable spanner.

I know his world view a bit unpopular with some on the chat forum (but if you don’t know anyone else to ask) Kaseae/katec bearings has made and sold his own bearing presses etc before: it might be an idea to ask him for a quote: I have bought a few bits from him before and he was very quick and helpful.

Before I moan, FWIW I looooove riding on and working on shimano hubs, but I still think they didn’t think their 15 and 20mm ones through properly.

Leku you are right, this tool it is the only effective way of holding the axle still whilst you do the cone and lockring up on the other side. You would do this on a shimano qr hub using a vice or third cone spanner on the opposite side to the one you are working on, to hold the axle still as you tighten the outer nut against the cone. Of course on shimano 15 and 20mm hubs there are no spanner flats to be able to do this, and so the £40 tool is there to hold the axle still in a vice or the jaws of an adjustable spanner.

You can do it by ‘trial and error’ ie start with the cone a bit too tight and expect it to loosen itself a bit as you tighten the lockring a bit. That is a bit of a faff requiring several attempts to get it just right, and doesn’t always work or stay put very well (in my experience of no problems whatsoever with lovely shimano qr hubs and plenty of grief with the slx and xt 20mm hubs I had.)

You can also do what I resorted to doing and write off your warranty by sawing a 2mm wide by 3mm deep slot into the disc side of the axle. Then put a spare cone spanner (or anything else made of <2mm hard steel) in a vice with a bit sticking out of the top of the jaws of the vice, and put the slot you have cut in the axle on the exposed bit of spanner. This way you can tighten the cone and locknut onto each other without the axle rotating.

What a shame that to service these hubs properly yourself you have to spend a total of £51 on unusual tools, (the slx, zee and xt hubs all cost less than that! What other hubs are there that require you to spend more on the tools than you did on the hub?!) or £11 on just the massive cone spanner and saw a slot in the hub. 😕

T4 2.5tdi.
-tinted
-lowered
-some ridiculous new rims (I saw chrome spinners on one the other week!)
-remapped
-loud farty exhaust
-daft bonnet bra
-combi-van or camper interior.

(I have a totally stock/unmolested t4 caravelle but am only 35. A mate who is a lot closer to 40 seems to have the above plans for mine however…)

Make it a midlife crisi man-project vehicle which you can also cart your bikes and mates around in, for the same fuel and insurance costs as your midlife crisis Winkie substitute! Winner!

I have a surly fork (complete with factory-applied Surly Branding just so people know how surly I am) fitted to a specialized frame, on which obviously the downtube logo could be seen from a low orbit. I just don’t know what to think any more. 😀

I found a very similar disclaimer sticker on the chunky-but-cheap OS stem as fitted from new to my commencal MaxMax jump bike! IIRC it was advising not to engage in extreme, off-road, downhill or jumps.

On. A. Dirt. Jump. Bike. 😕

Also, though they are not prohibited for mountain bike use, the many and “you WILL die” disclaimers for mechanical ‘incompetence’ on formula brakes are quite outstanding. 😀

@stumpyjon, you don’t often start or post on a thread about a bike shop if you just get the service you expected. The same applies for schools, banks, churches, petrol stations and indeed hospitals.

fwiw I partly agree about the ‘everyone to blame’ part, however I have seen great teams of great motivated compassionate nurses turned into bad and lazy ones by great old manager/sister leaving and introduction of either bullying or ineffective managers. Thus without having started out as bad or lazy people, the individual frontline staff members become complicit in the poor care. No different to any other business or organisation in that respect.

if only the worlds most expensive health care scheme had a little more money..

That will be Germany and The United States then? I thought this thread was about the NHS. 😉

Earlier points about better treatments extending life and costing more are right on the money, pardon the pun.

IMH(professional)O, the targets and financial consequences set by governments of both red and blue flavour over recent years for meeting/missing them are all messed up. It is clear that you need measurables, but they are set by people who lack the breadth or depth of experience to know what is realisitic, what is a measure of efficiency and which targets wil be ‘helpful’ and which will be counterproductive. The rewards and penalties are so great that senior managers (again often many years out of actual ‘practice’ if they have ever practiced as a healthcare professional or doctor at all: our ‘interim’ deputy chief executive is an accountant, I kid ye not) are either ‘seduced’ into or forced into bad decisions. And then the poo rolls downwards, I have seen plenty of consultants and ward sister or matron-level staff bullied into prioritising care for targets not clinical need against their better judgement: waiting/trolley times being the example most on here will be able to identify with.

FWIW I have participated in the fringes of a time and motion study as a community nurse six or so years ago and even then, even overseen by senior managers who had once been clinicians themselves, the study failed spectacularly to identify those who worked hard and moved patients and cases on, and those who racked up a succession of five-minute visits and phone calls to little effect on the progress of people’s recovery.

Thanks Julian. I don’t get the first bit sorry!

The ‘Tiny Tory’ bit or the “imagine the uproar from the Right if they fined Barclays but not RBS for the same crime” bit? 😉

White and red Raleigh Styler.

Many years later I met a girl with a mixed up bunch of random parts with blue mx brakes, yellow tyres and skyway mags. Married her too! 8)

THM, I was playing devil’s advocate. Surely the Tiny Tory inside you should be jumping up and down at the thought that a state-owned business/service provider (in this case a bank) should have preferential or lenient treatement compared to a fully private one.

So if we fine a body that is owned and funded by the government (say) what happens?. They pay the government out of funds provided by the government.

That is pretty much what happens when an NHS trust is fined too. This also impacts on that trust’s ability to care for its patients, which in the case of trusts who are forced into cutting corners and making bad decisions because they are already so skint, it seems rather counterproductive to me too. Same applies to social services and LEA’s.

Of course huge misconduct and mistakes in social services, LEA’s and NHS trusts are often addressed by relevant professional bodies and at a strategic/board level alongside fines: I am not sure how or if that is possible within RBS, or indeed any other bank, and I can only assume that there needs to be a sense of even-handedness in this despite how peculiar we both seem to think it is.

[afterthought] perhaps if they just fine individuals then the worry is that the bank is even more likely to stitch up or point the finger at the wrong people.

Kidney Stooooooones?

Otherwise fining a company that is majority owned by the state would appear odd.

It is quite normal for NHS trusts as organisations to be fined for wrongs that arise from misconduct of individuals within them.

The first result of ‘NHS+trust+fined’ search on google. All the first page are different stories about different NHS trusts all fined within the last year.

Why should it be any different for an organisation that is a bit less than 100% state owned?

Cos gay people are fashionable !

😯

Hopefully you are pointing out that Cameron might be somewhat cynically chasing the gay and PC vote (if there really are such things).

But hey, maybe he thinks he is on to something: a quick think around my own gay and lesbian friends and family turns up one tory and ten bleeding heart lefties.

Why do the rights of gay people trump the rights of religious people?

Are you asking that question like that because you think being gay is a tradition passed down through families or a lifestyle choice?

Good post Bokonon.

Given my (cons) MP is heavily involved with, and has his interns funded by this christian organisation[/url], (who rather amazingly promote a cure for homosexuality[/url], I think it is likely that for the first time since way before the last general election, he will actually vote against the party leader’s line.

I know someone with no previous and of good moral and professional standing, who still served a prison sentence for exactly the same crime. She had too many points and tried to get her son to take them for her. Don’t see why it shouldn’t be any different for Huhne.

Mmmmm I like. Kimbers,yours loses points for being a perfectly singlespeedable/hub gearable slidey dropout bike with unneccesary cassete and derailleur on it.

I love the yellow fork. Actually I liked all the daft 04/05 rockshox colours. IIRC the yellow reba was the ‘bells and whistles’ air u-turn one that year. I had the revelation in that wierd terracotta for a bit and aprt from the paint falling off if you swore at it let alone scraped/dinged it, it was great.

hora – Member

This isn’t unreasonable: http://www.ridefox.com/fox_tech_center/owners_manuals/07/eng/service_intervals.htm

😯 Never mind the fork: according to that link, if the conditions are wet and muddy, you need to do Air Sleeve Maintenance on a float shock every eight hours, including replacing the quad ring even if it looks ok. Does this mean you can invalidate your warranty three times over in one 24 hour race?

Werther’s Paedo Pellets

😆

A tiny bit more than 15% of FC-run forests are actually owned by the FC now: after all the hoo-hah about selling Great Wood in the Quantocks last year (it was all about hunting BTW) the Forestry Commission ended up buying it. 😀 😀 😀

Was it not also quite specifically a model predicated on a single flat rate of contribution, irrespective of means?

That sounds rather like the way my parents explained poll tax to me. I recall that one went pretty well 😀

I used to have both types on different bikes, and I did find it a bit odd for a while but not so bad that I ever swapped back. But it was not any wierder than when I got sram shifters and had to change from ‘finger over top’ to ‘smaller paddle with thumb’ in order to go down the block. FWIW Rapid rise derailleurs made a lot more sense with those flappy paddle lever/shifter combos that shimano don’t do any more.
Simple enough to swap back to a ‘low normal’ if you are fed up with it though.

Has anyone who has fitted them both facing towards (or indeed both facing away from) the shock had a look at them recently?

Assuming the bushing (and by bushing, I mean the little hula hoop bit which is either cream coloured plastic or a thin band of metal with a coating on the inside) is supposed to rotate around the mounts (the actual ‘offset’ drilled part), then the offset bushing kit should find its own position, non?

The more you bounce on the bike, the more the offset mount(s) will want to migrate round the shock bolt and the inside of the bushing until the hole that the bolt goes through is as far away from the direction of the forces compressing the shock as possible. Therefore if you look at the driveside of the bike (and the shock itself is mounted roughly horizontal not vertical), then both mounts should eventually migrate to three o’clock.

Anyone who has seen an improperly tightened eccentric bottom bracket try and move itself to the three o clock position under pedalling should understand what I am getting at: like an EBB you need some way of clamping the offset bushing mounts in place if you want them to stay put in any other position, and I am not sure a single m8 bolt is up to that…

Is it possible that Hope mill their parts because of the prohibitive cost of forging presses? I recall an article in Dirt when shmiano invited a few journalists to the plant in japan, and they described these ten tonne presses half the size of my house just to pop out xtr brake calipers. I would have thought that only far east massive factories have the orders and diversity of products to make it worth getting big presses in.

FWIW I think the last words from Thomson (somewhere on their blog when I googled it recently) also said the same thing, but about the equipment for drawing aluminum bars: their choice was $400k minimum to buy in the machines to do it in house, or just get friendly with a good factory that already makes bars for someone else and do their best to make sure that no one nicks their angles/sweeps etc.

dave_aber – Member

Apparently it was named after that very vinyl

Excellent. Some rascal has named loads of Strava segments round our way after Zappa records. 😀

Is there a reason you’ve chosen the name of a Danube tributary that’s given it’s name to a glaciation as your pseudo, Günz?

Now he has started a thread about how nice his buns are, I reckon the forum name is more about this: 😀 and 😉

geoffj – Member

Bongo Fury

Best name for a fan site / forum ever!

Shirley invented by a beefheart/zappa fan? 😀

Russell96 – Member

I’ll take it one step further, I had a Lexus RX300 for a few years, let the flaming begin.

I once had a Mini One (1st gen facelift) which was both hairdressery and considering it’s size and the people/stuff you could/couldn’t fit in it, it was horrendous on fuel, particularly round town. Does that count too?

honestly, massive respect from me for that.

It’s a lifestyle choice not a religion, I don’t think it’s really that noble gallant or respect-worthy. Same way I would get cider and whisky in for guests at a party even though I can’t stand drinking it myself. You still have to smoke in the garden though.

What is really funny is that whilst I am often curious, I have never ever been able to sneak a cheeky taste of whatever meaty stuff I am cooking in the kitchen whilst no-one is looking. Ridiculous of me since the animal is dead and served to my kids whether I have a sneaky nibble of it or not. 😆

I also tend to over rather than under cook meat these days as its so many years since I made it for myself I worry I might have lost my ‘judgement’. Friends approach my barbecues with some trepidation nowadays!

I listened to the Macca interview on R4 this afternoon. Mostly nothing new to me about the immense calorific value of food/crops lost to us when you use it feed a cow to then feed people, and Macca is a bit nauseating at points. 😆

I was pleasantly suprised at the notion that you can sustain such a population of farm animals on stuff that would never be consumed by humans, ie with no ‘cost’ to the potential humans fed by prioritising producing food lower down he triangle.

JY Quinoa is undoubtedly an excellent food source particularly for us veggies/vegans.
But until it is grown locally and in greater quanitities worldwide, it is not without its moral cost:
I read this in the Grauniad last week.

FWIW I am a strict vegetarian who also cooks meat for his children and friends.

Bit of a lottery IMHO: I have a raincoat of theirs which is fantastic for the £20 I paid for it (in tk maxx so I could cop a feel of it), in fact I think it is all round better than my £100 raceface one. We bought softshells for t’wife, me and both children and despite all costing around the same money, there are differences in build kwality and “features” between mine and the wife’s and bvetween son’s and daughters. That said none of them I would not buy again for that money, it’s just that the wife’s was much nicer for her £15 than mine.

Essentially like More Mile, much Craghoppers product (particularly that for sale in sports direct and the internet) and more recent Karrimor, you should totally disregard the RRP and look at what it costs right now not what the “discount” is. Shame that’s the way dare2be etc seem to want to do business for all but their highest end kit. 😕

I think thomson are doing better on the graffix front.
Interesting to see two highly regarded companies who are famous for milling/machining their own stuff in-house “producing” handlebars. If it turns out that they both get them done by the same far-eastern factory I will laught my ass off. 😀

Rickon, he has listed it as buy-it-now or ‘best offer’.
I suggest you offer him £570. And let us know how you get on. 😀

Posts like this piss me off. Mainly classifieds poster, thinly veiled attempt to increase audience for their overpriced/undesirable item!

Harsh.

Also with that P on his name I suspect that what his posting history lacks (ooooh, like only a third of his posts and threads started are in chat/bike) he makes up for over you in financial contribution to the running of STW plc. 😉

FWIW I spotted it a while back: if it was a size bigger I would be well interested.

^^ that’s Ming the Merciless’ home planet, that is.

Also “sram” sounds like “chram” which in eastern europe (and indeed in Borat) means “todger”.

I think Ben Elton beat us all to the pun in the 80’s with the “crapee” in ‘Gridlock’ though.

The only reason would seem to be that it matches the rear M629 hub, which is also “29er specific”.

The only reason the M629 rear hub is “29er specific” would seem to be the “Micro ratchet mechanism freehub: Quicker engagement (11.25 degree) & faster acceleration”.

Whether this is an improvment so to speak, or Shimano’s way of admitting that the durability and pickupn of the old freehub might not have been good enough for larger cassettes and 29″ mountainbike wheels is anyone’s guess. 😉

Also I didn’t think that price fixing was allowed, RRP is RECOMMENDED retail price, yea they can recommend a price but they can’t legally enforce it!

^^ I suppose what you can do is just stop supplying dealers/shops/resellers that don’t sell your product to your RRP though. I can think of at least one very established overseas bike brand with a UK distributor which manages to do this very effectively indeed across lord knows how many bike shops across the UK. It is likely that someone who knows the business better than I will point out a few more I hadn’theard about.

CHB, if the bits, minifigures and books are all there, and the boxes are OK, sit on them for quite a few more years and those two will be ‘worth’ a lot more than you paid for them. (in fact the death star II set already is: cheapest on Bricklink.com is £378!)

(must get round to posting/confessing Lego geekery on the “what else are you into?” thread 😳 )