blimey, that’s good going!
I have worn out rims on my commuter faster than the tyres! (though this is a rather hilly commute and rarely-washed bike with plenty of road grime, mind…)

Oi JY, I’ll not have a bad word said about Totnes.

Any more talk like that and I’ll have to cancel my hunt tomorrow so I can visit my white witch and get a hex put on you. 😉

There are a couple of roadgoing (just!) UMM’s that live near me too. Well uncool and I so want a go in one!

Messiah, a mate of mine has a g60, and besides that frowny headlight thing and the borbets, his looks rather unmolested. It has got blue hoses and then he lost me on whatever else he did to the engine, and he claims he ‘lost’ an r32 on the motorway down here last time I saw him. 😀

I’ll bet the small market towns of Totnes, Kingsbridge and Tavistock have five different independent places you can get a ham and emmental croissant made to order for you by a real person right there behind the counter for you (as opposed to driven in by a lorry ready made at 7am), and five more places that might not have any have any emmental but can offer you some crazy-ass pumpkin-seed muesli and natural yoghurt or something instead.

Day off tomorrow, perhaps I will ride to Tavy for breakfast and have a look.

I’ve never seen a shock quite like that. I am thinking unsuccessful euro-brand-lost-its-way from about 2001.

Ah yes, we got this from Lovefilm a while back. It was really rather good, albeit in a totally un-dinosaury and unspectacular way. It is dark but not that dark to look at (as in lighting) either.

custom built specialized full suspension downhill mountain bike this was hand built 4 years ago

ive had a idiot who recons the bikes from tesco i dont think tesco bikes had fsa fitted as standard

So was it custom built or did it come like that as standard out of the box? 😀

It’s not a tesco frame either but i wonder what it is?

Totnes is of course a town which has always had a surfeit of nice comfy welcoming cafés serving proper coffee, big cakes and interesting teas. More so than the whole of Cardiff had pre costa/starbucks if the above post is to be believed. (It also never had or needed a Lyons corner house.) But then I supose every rule has its exception. 😀

Presumably if the free market allows him abslute control where he spends his money, whenever zulu travels by motorway, plane or train he takes a packed lunch and flask with him then. 😕

Mrs wilson has just sold off her Northwave goretex/winter boots having hardly worn them: she prefers sealskinz plus normal cycling shoes for mountain bike and has neoprene overshoes for her roadie shoes.

FWIW from her experience with sealskinz/overshoes and min with waterproof winter boots/overshoes, all will get your feet wet eventually if your legs get wet enough for long enough over the top of them: I suppose waterproof trousers that come over the top of your boots/waterproof socks would work, also marigold “gaskets” as above! 😀 For me what is important is being warm as well as wet or not.

From the website blurb:

Uses Shimano OCTALINK BB interface only – Proven to outlast those itty bitty ISIS bearings!

So you are correct to be looking at octalink not ISIS bb’s.

On your link, 68 is the bb shell width ie only fits in a 68mm bb shell frame. (you can get 73mm ones too though) .
118 and 126 are the lengths of the spindle itself. You might need to find out the chainline of the crank, and if your frame has loopy rear end alignment (is this for the sx trail?), and work out which size is best from there. In the days of dishless rear wheels and 83/100mm bb shells this bit used to be a right old faff!

[edit] just seen how cheap they are on crc. If it was me getting all giddy about a new bike build, I’d just buy both and see which gives you the best chainline and then flog the other one on ebay as “fitted but never used” -you’ll probably get your money back on it.

I have only just finished the last of the four bottles of “Bontrager Super Juice” chilli sauce I amassed from the 2008 twentyfour12 race. (Laughs in the face of use by dates). Mind you, they were very locally made (<20 miles from Newnham iirc) and just had a funky Bontrager label on as a rather different race freebie.

[edit] chatted briefly to him a couple of times at a couple of the Twentyfour12’s, he seems like a really warm gentle bloke.

If we are doing tangents, is Dyson the opposite of Starbucks?

Ie people frown because he outsources production abroad to save costs, and therefore not a massive UK employer given the ubiquity and Britishness of the brand, but Dyson claims to pay his taxes properly in the UK based on the profit he makes from trading in the UK.

PS FWIW we had a couple of Henrys and a James at work, now we have a couple of sebos and I had an oreck in a furnished flat I used to rent. They all suck reasonably well (particularly the oreck which is like the big dumb v8 of the vacuum cleaner world), but I would still choose a dyson for my home, even a cylinder/hose one.

Because it would be completely pointless under our current electoral system?

+1

Also, as I recall, last general election my choices in my constituency were UKIP, Conservative, Labour and Lib Dem. 🙁

Binners, sheeple will still go to starbucks in their gazillions if they hoik up their prices to pay a proper rate of tax and keep their execs and shareholders happy. So no, of course they will not pull out.

Also, if we are going to draw parallels with ‘cash in hand’ builders etc – it’s the equivalent of a builder who makes an absolute killing, but tells the taxman he makes no profit whatsoever.

Indeed. If you are big enough you can aford to pay people to do this for you legally, wther this is accountaing or setting up of offshore companies and renting your house to yourself etc. If you are small and able to circumvent a conventional salary and income tax, you can still pay someone to help you legally avoid tax, but it probably wouldn’t be worth it. So you either break the law or you don’t bother. I am not sure this the intention of the laws that allow this to happen was to allow huge companies to squeeze out small competitors. 😕

Out of interest, any figures about to indicate how many “bent builders” makes up one “starbucks/vodafone”?

‘Old’ rs solo air spring (circa 2004-9) could also be shortened with all travel spacers. What’s changed?

My wife and I spend so much on our own bikes that £300 for a whole brand new bicycle seems ok. Resale value is also a big factor: if i spent £300 on an adult sized bike, or just say a suspension fork, how much of it do you think I’d get back after a couple of years? Next size up islabike for our 6 year old already looks like much more of a bargain now we are aware of what we will be able to sell his current one for.

That said, the hotrock is pretty good too, as are the trek kids bike with (apparently patented) extra holes in the cranks to make them shorter/longer, but I could take or leave the “suspension” forks they come with, and I wish someone would make trigger shifters for 6 speed as all the kids our children ride with seem to dislike their gripshift.

TFT once diagnosed this fault on my old 05 reba as a cracked seal head. (as in the top of the rebound assembly that carries the two seals: on my version fork this was white plastic) They fixed it with a vew one (didn’t charge even for the part, which they robbed from a dead fork) and sent back the old one with the repaired fork: I would never have guessed or even been able to tell the seal head was cracked (I probably still have it in a drawer somewhere) but the problem never recurred.

I do, but it is the least ridden of my bikes: much easier to pop out for a couple of hours at night or get some badass hills in on way to work than all the faff of getting a 38lb bike/kit to the trails for a decent length of time: a day off spent downhilling is a day without spending much time with the kids. Gawton/Tavi Woodlands, mostly.

A few other local dh-ers lurk or infrequently post on here too.

He was the voice of Megamind too iirc.
8y.o. duaghter just watched the cowbell sketch ^^ with me, she totally got it. Well proud!

Dirt mag once “reviewed” a set of ruffian grips that had been “customised” by mice, iirc they said the grip was even better for it.

The same fate has befallen one of the bright pink foam grips on my daughter’s scooter. I am not sure she will be as enthusiastic about it.

hora – Member

Can you run the x7 with a shimano ht2 bb?

You can buy an insert for hope bb’s that goes in NDS and allows use of gxp cranks.

Not sure about the longevity of it compared to a hope bb being used in the normal shimano/fsa/etc sense of “preload bolt squeezes both bearings inwrds together”: the difference is still that the cranks clamp only on nds bearing – the crank spindle floats on the drive side bearing.

If it was my money, having had gxp crankset before and got on just “ok” with it, I would still get a shimano/similar crank.

Orange Crush – Member

Secure? No worse than other bolt ons I suppose but if I were dishonestly inclined and wanted a $75 light I suppose I would be prepared to spend 10 seconds with an allen key.

…and yet all over the place disc brakes, forks, cranksets and carbon finishing kit aren’t being nicked from otherwise locked-up bikes. Obviously that happens, but I am amazed what doesn’t get stolen from bikes all that often really.

Hopefully I have kept my commuter rubbish enough to not be worth bothering stripping parts from….

^which is pretty much what Chris Boardman said on Radio 4 (PM show) yesterday afternoon. He also talked at length about Holland and Denmark, and expressed cyling safety in terms of kms travelled by bike vs injuries/deaths. Which is lower/’safer’ than walking even in the UK apparently.

Of course on here we all know that despite people cycling in normal clothes and very low uptake of helmets amongst regular commuters in Denmark/Holland, their “deaths per km” is even lower than over here where no newspaper report on a cycling accident (including the last two biggies) is “complete” without mentioning whether or not the cyclist was wearing a helmet. 😕

Can’t believe I am finally with Cameron about something. At the risk of confusing someone hiding their sexuality being confused with someone using similar behaviour to hide their paedophilia, it really is best left to accountable agencies who are not allowed to blab it all to the world on twitter or sell it to the tabloids.

What a shame the police have no legal mandate to investigate freemasonry too though. 👿

I’ve heard that Martyn Ashton is going to do a road bike skillz video, can’t wait! 😀

I’m not sure the height of the arch relative to the height of the dust seals really matters, the damper rod and air spring lower rod length will still limit the overall axle-to-crown, and you still need something to stop the front wheel suddenly stopping as it catches the fork crown.

You would lose a lot of available travel as the damper rod and bottom of the air spring dictate the maximum axle-to-crown, (ie your a-c will still be the same as the with the old 26″ lowers on, and the amount of stanchion showing will be about 35mm less than it was), and as an absolutely critical safety feature, you would also need some way of putting a spacer/bump stop inside the positive air spring chamber to stop the wheel fouling/catching on the crown when the fork is compressed. (maverick do this but I don’t think their spacer kit would be bodge-able into a rockshox fork). Even if you managed all that safely your 150mm 26″ fork would end up being about an 80mm 29er one.

More trouble/cost/risk than it’s worth imho.

It will take whatever 10mm axle mtb hub (ie 135mm) you want, although you’d need a socket to fasten on a bolt-on hub (ie with 15mm nuts on the end) as it has cowled dropouts.

I have a normal qr xt hub in mine (ie 135mm o.l.d. and a freehub that will take a normal cassette, but mine has a singlespeed sprocket and spacer kit).

Hope that helps.

PS great frames but if you are buying, check the geometry: the soloist is about three quarters to an inch shorter in the top tube than the breath/life in all three sizes.

We are a constitutional monarchy and as such still tied to the Queen and the Church of England, so I guess we are stuck with having our politicians and the media offering some degree of recognition to the Archbishop, hoever outrageous, opinionated or indeed homophobic-etonian-oil-exec they may happen to be.

Government should be well chuffed at this: Williams always seemed to be a thorn in their side, however I can’t see Welby and Cameron seeing eye to eye about gay marriage. 😆

FWIW my uber-evanglical mother in law manages to be a proper liberal in many ways, but conversations with her about homsexuality and evolution/creationism are tremendous fun.

stoopid double post.

I have exposure flash/flare lights on my commuter. Whilst it is very practical in terms of space it takes on handlebar, ease of taking on/off, easy to carry spare battery and quick to recharge etc, I’m not sure that the flashing mode on the front one isn’t too bright.

The flash on the front sure is wierd: it is always “on” but pulses an extra bright flash at about 90bpm. I’m not sure I really like it but haven’t been growled at by any drivers yet in the three months I have been using it. Obviously I point it downwards a bit but the spread is by the design of the light very “round”.

-The flash really is so bright that despite the “baseline” light in between flashes, it is a bit disorienting if I am riding alone with no other traffic/headlights behind or in front, on a lit-but-not-fantastically lit road (forder valley road in plymouth in case of my commute, lots of trees obscure streetlights somewhat especially on the cycle path). Even sometimes feels too ‘flashy’ with another 240l bar light on the other side of the stem to ‘balance it out’ and give drivers a fixed light source to see as well as a flashing one. Also the flash is a bit of a faff to switch between modes, especially with one hand as the light just rotates in the mount when you rotate the bezel.

I think I might try ‘downgrading’ to using the exposure light on fixed (150l or thereabouts) and a less bright 1 watt led on flashing.

wysiwyg – Member

How are these publications still going? Who the hell buys them?

Sailors innit, or specifically submariners with no internet access.

At St Levan’s gate Devonport Dockyard, there is a small row of shops with everything the sailor with a few hours ashore needs, including a uniform adjuster (you know, where you get your braiding ets sewn on), a greasy spoon, a topless pub, bookies/fuitmachine place and the Legendary Ron Dewdney’s pasties, which sells almost as much top shelf grot as it does food. So much so that there is but a token sprinkling of daily papers and puzzle books right at the bottom, and the top shelves start about three feet from the floor and go all the way to the ceiling. 😯

Depends on the size of wheel you are after, but discreetly ask in the workshop of your local ‘main dealer’ van supplier: vans with alloys as optional extras (think vitos and t5’s particularly) are often supplied to ther dealer with steel wheels fitted and the alloys plus tyres in the back of the van. Alloys go on in the workshop, steelies/tyres go out the back door for relatively little money to minicab firms who want them for the tyres.

Digger, only ones I have ever had are specialized ones and are so long I can get mine to join the tops of 5″ cuff socks for a proper daft look 😀
FWIW they have also stayed up fine for whole 12 hour solo races.

Depending on inebriation and company, Sliding scale between full on Janner (as distinct from the rest of Devon) and quite middle class but vowel sounds giving the game away somewhat.

Despite being proper halfy halfy Enngleesh/French, I learnt French as a child/teenager not a baby/toddler, so my accent in French is obviously a bit foreign, not particularly recognised as eeengleesh and with lots of comedy south west (pyrenees) inflections and slang. A bit like that time in the 90’s when Bjork sounded a bit cockney and well wierd.

Apparently the only thing I am at all good at is impersonations, so I suppose if I listened to a few people and then concentrated enough I could be from Huddersfield.

Jamie, I see your Brum and I raise you a Wolves. 😀

Seriously, a colleauge is a errr, Wolve (?) and I could listen to him all day.

Therefore to suggest that only the voters in a few swing states have any say is a construct of the media for the sake of headlines and is fundamentally flawed as a concept for the reason given.

😀 😀 😀

And there I was thinking you might show me all the states that everyone thought were a done deal suprising us and voting the opposite to what we expected.

And meanwhile in the real world….

political parties accept that some, no actually most US states (or indeed constituencies as the same is in part true with “safe seats” in the yookay) are already so full of enough voters who will only change their minds if their chosen candidate turns out to be The Devil Himself that they may as well accept that and concentrate on working on the opinions of the potential swing voters. A candidate who is foolish enough to ignore this and canvas wherever the wind takes him/her is in the real world a fool, and runs the greater risk of losing, since the die is already cast in the non-swing states.

So I stand by the minority of swing voters in swing states deciding it. 😀

BTW Just because I believe it doesn’t mean I am at all happy with it. The “electoral college” system as it is operated currently means that the political wishes of all those democrats in Texas mean absolutely naff all at the moment, same for republicsans in democrat ‘safe’ states.