the way jy’s post read, anyone let alone the chief whip of the government could have ridden a bicycle past number 10 before the black gates were put up.

Cycling plebs would have to have a cap on at a jaunty angle and be whistling out of tune though.

Flashy, I had Prince Charles dust off the Wessex and chopper me some in last week. 😀

(*ponders… does he own or get a cut from Duchy Originals stuff?)

mmmmm, shortbread anyone? 😀

It’s a moment of political mischief and nothing more

…it’s hardly Cameron saying “calm down dear” at the despatch box is it? Plebs normal non-“don’t you know who I am?” people have been arrested and cautioned for being less offensive than that to police officers. (and why not? …as the Conservative Party line that I am sure AM is well aware of reminds us…)

I think the public have a right to be reminded that this is what some politicians of all parties think of those who (sometimes) vote for them and whose taxes pay their wages.

I am sure AM is not above making an example of or arranging the scapegoating a unfortunate and blundering MP in his role as whip. Is it that wrong that it should also be the case for him?

Many years ago the is mount ones weren’t, but the post mount ones are all the same front and back. So yes getting a rear right hand one and trimming 80-90cm off the hose will be reet. Be aware that you also need a new barb and olive (listing on rose bikes is not clear if these are supplied) and the newer shimano brakes are a bit more of a faff to bleed if you do manage to introduce air into the system when you shorten the hose ( I have swapped hoses over without needing to, but here you are talkking about tapping a new barb into the cut-down hose too).

I rather like the retro look of this one (SNCF cc 7100), still a few around in the 90’s and a four or five in the noughties but all retired from French rail network now:

Despite its rather non-aero look, it set a world record of 155mph in the 50’s. 😯

This exact one was one of my ‘local’ locos when I lived in the Pyrenees; love the seemingly pointless inverted slope windscreen.

How did they manage to name it after that posh village in Leicestershire? I can’t imagine what a rank hovis/ici marketing boardroom discussion would have sounded like, or what other names they didn’t choose for it. 😆

I recall our health visitor telling us that Quorn is not recommended for children under 3 as it is too “empty” to be worth them eating, tat is to say that the gut of a 2 year old will expend more energy extracing energy and protein from it than they will actually absorb/retain. So I suppose that is why it is very popular with the normal-eaters in my sister in law’s Slimming World group

iirc linda mcCartney sausages used to have some err, “exciting” trans-fats in them, such that they would have been banned by the FDA in the States, but they are a bit different and slightly less bad for you in more recent years.

(btw 3 vggies and one normal eater in our household, and I find no quorn-related bowel eruptions, if anything gives me wind it is late shifts at work (whatever I eat), muesli, lentils and chickpeas/falafel. But hey, farting’s great!)

legend – Member

When is it legal to ride on the pavement?

Strava run

😆

What a strange and sad story.

I recently had a remarkably similar ‘scenario’ during a mental healthcare-related training course at work. (No not like that, the course wasn’t that bad. I mean that one of the trainers was pretending to want to jump off something and another was rather enthusiastically goading them on.) The lead trainer advised us that it was quite right for us to remove the ‘goader’ under common law (and we did, ahem…) as it seemed highly likely that he was going to actively contribute to the ‘jumper’s death. Though quite how you would do that as a police officer with a number of individuals in the high street I am not so sure.

Whatever he was, the gospels make Jesus out to be a real old bleeding heart lefty, which is always worth reminding the religious-right-moral-high-ground-dwellers. (my homphobic party-whip local Conservative MP for starters) 😀

Ice in bags.

Has no one said lottery tickets? (notwithstanding the dude on here the other day who won 20k of course…) -stealth tax on the poor.

Kindle books (that in the magnificently efficient process of converting to kindle format, hosting, selling and downloading via the world’s cheapest media website) somehow still have enough “value added” that they cost the same as the real book that has been physically printed (materials, press, employees), distributed (lorry, fuel, employee), put on a shelf in a bricks and mortar shop (rent, fittings, utilities) and sold to you by an employee with wages to pay. One great big “WTF?” about that.

Never ‘invented’ anything new, just thought of new applications for existing gadgets.

Those rolling LED text diplays you get in post offices, a&e etc: as a child in the post office queue I thought it would be great to have one in the back window of your car that had butons on the dash for “sorry”. “thanks”, “back off a bit will you?” etc. Someone did make and market that but never took off.

Also years and years ago I thought a tiny hi-res digital camera mounted inside your windscreen on a 5-minute loop (to save memory) that you could use in motor accident disputes and eventually get discounts on your insurance premiums. Of course buses do so now, and is hugely popular with city cyclists here and motorists in eastern europe (see that thread about near misses/accidents that was on here the other day.)

I know someone who swears that infra-red sensor “terrain following” suspension is the future for motorcycles though. 😆

-a set of bearing presses/drifts specially sized to remove and install your linkage and hub bearings: with a 10mm hole in each so you can use and old axle and nuts to do the pressing.
-Offset rear shock bushing/mount kits.
-if you have cartridge hubs, see if it would be feasible to make a set of spacers/adapters to use them in different axle standards should you ever change fork/frame.

althepal – Member

Sounds very similar to life in the ambulance service.. Only with slightly reduced prospects of violence and less interviews/court attendance..

…and mental health nursing.

phil w…. you can be sacked, struck off (if applicable), prosecuted and even imprisoned for omissions and errors of judgenment as well as physical acts BTW. Until you have worked in direct and immediate fear someone else’s or your own safety/life, you will have no idea what daft decisions poeple are forced into making at a second’s notice because the wrong set of chance circumstances have conspired against you and/or ‘the system’ has let you down.

We also have one of the rather better/best disciplined and regluated police forces in the world, of course.

[edit] mcboo, am I right in thinking from a thread many moons ago that you have an armed forces pension?

you can re-use the fittings on goodridge hoses, and the hose itself (ie not the whole kit) is £8 for a metre at CRC. (or £6.39 for pink!)

daveh – Member

Super, let’s crack on renationalising everything too.

I can’t see exam boards being nationalised. I can however see huge amounts of “lobbying” (coughs) to whichever government is in at the time from Capita/Group 4/Serco/ISS/whoeverthefeckelsewantstohaveago about who gets to be the ‘chosen examiner’ though!

…He’ll be off her christmas card list then!

I don’t have a dog, but there is a guy near us who rides the unofficial trails in our local FC woods, and his trail dog rules! 😀 (there is a bit more to it than ‘rules’, but yes the dog is very fast and basically chases his owner about 3m behind.)

Competition/choice in “not always the solution” shocka. From one of the beshtest thatcherites the cabinet has to offer no less. Wonders never cease…

[edit] in fact, if you put aside the possibility of a return towards two-tier education, the bits about a single exam board, long/tough final exam, tougher grading and limitation of the awarding of top grades sounds alarmingly like how those keeerrrrraazy loony left wing folk over the channel do many of their exams. 😆

You could do it by draining completely I suppose, after all that is effectively what you do when you have to replace a lever, hose or caliper (or a much smaller cheaper part in the case of most other bicycle brake manufacturers 👿 )

In practice, (if you bleed it like a car from the top down and out the bleed nipple), the amount of brake oil left in the caliper is really rather tiny once you have retracted the pistons and put the bleed block (or a 10mm allen key) in. This means that the impact of mixing of old and fresh oil really is minimal: a tiny bit at the top as you begin topping up the reservoir with new oil, and a tiny bit at the bottom as the fresh oil pushed out out the last of the old oil.

If it was me I wouldn’t bother draining and then refilling, just pushing out old oil with new will be fine.

PS why does the oil need changing? Mineral oil brakes can go far longer between fluid changes than DOT systems, as long as they are working firmly and properly. A friend has my old deore 525’s, and the rear one has never been bled or anything in eight years, and it still works very well indeed.

I remember a variation of the infant school playground “my dad’s bigger than your dad” whereby as five year olds we didn’t realise that falsely claiming that your dad was the oldest (iirc I said my dad was 99 years old 😆 ) did not necessarily make him more likely to duff up everyone else’s dads….

That jacket is genius, as is the blurb that goes with selling it. 😀

I really hope that the silent clutch hub has been built up and is getting used.

druidh – Member

Farmer John – how many of those “additional” Private Sector jobs have been outsourced from the Public Sector?

Indeed. 3000 ‘new’ private sector jobs in Plymouth just from health reforms meaning NHS staff being moved out of the NHS. Plymouth is barely big enough to be called a city yet has contributed 3000 of those just from Health, along with the loss of about 300 jobs altogether (really, all we have in our service both frontline and behind the scenes are ‘streamlining’, vacancy freezes and vacant posts being wiped out rather than filled again), I wonder how many more of those 1 million private sector jobs are not actually ‘new’ at all?

bencooper – Member

But to answer your question, a bit of both – it’s an interference fit, so the tube compresses a bit and the race expands a bit.

But it expands a lot less than a split race would do.

bencooper, surely supplying a split race encourages people, (even bike mechanics with the proper tools!) not to bother prepping the base of a fork steerer, because the split race will go on by hand or at the very worst, with a couple of rather light taps of a setting tool. I have certainly come across plenty of big brand complete bikes from £500 to £3k with unprepped steerers and crowns and split crown races.

IIRC the cane creek 110 headset 110 year garuantee is conditional on proper installation with a proper headset press, but not conditional upon the steerer/crown having been reamed/faced.

Out of interest, (haing never had to resort to cutting a headset crown race) when you have a very tight fitting non-split race, is it the race that stretches round the ever-so-slightly-wider steerer, or is it the steerer that is compressed?

I understand that a reducer race is a different issue, but the reason I ask is that all this concern in previous posts about widths of races that weren’t supplied split (and are split by the installer) is surely worth naff all when you can put a (supplied) split race cane creek 110 headset on both tighter and slacker fitting steerers and if done so correctly still have the 110 year garauntee.

Francine’s, North Prospect Road, Plymouth. Also if you go any time after the middle of November they have a lifesize moving talking/singing Santa to irritate the bejeesus out of you whilst you queue. Oh yes, and there is invariably a queue (for a good reason).

Good and bad stories on previous threads about enduro bearings. A mate and I bought a few sets a few years ago all of which lasted far far better than the bearings they replaced; most bikes long since sold on but the set that is still on my wife’s singlespeed is still going fine after four years and all the dirtiest rides of three winters.

However you are not the first to find them lasting far far less either, I recall lots of people on the last couple of threads about this complaining of lifespans shorter than shimano ones. TBH complete shimano bb’s are so cheap from rose bikes that if you buy a few sets between mates for the postage, it is much better value to replace the whole thing than to spend £20 on just the bearings.

Personally i would also wonder why anyone would not be in a trade union, unless your in a bosses union– CBI, and all the business associations that lobby on their behalf.

+1

All those threads that pop up on the chat forum from poor folk wanting advice with problems at work “my empoyer is screwing me with this, that or the other”, “please explain this wierd HR thing to me”, “my boss is a sociopath and is trying to manage me out of a job” and so on… This is the more important reason why I have always been in a union, thankfully not had to call on it in this way.

Although recently my union has been also been heavily involved in opposing pay/pension ‘reforms’ and the health and social care Bill/Act, and I voted for industrial action (about pension reforms)and went placarded-up on the demo. Strike day fell on my rostered day off though so never got to wrestle with the pay/letting your colleagues/patients down issue.

They also made the earlier models of RS reba with v brake bosses (i used to have one) which can be ‘spacer’-ed down to 80mm.

Sale is nothing to do with me, but I noticed there is a luuuurvely looking 29er scandal singlespeed in 20″ size in the classifieds, £850 iirc.

I used to be able to squeeze the downtube and (gently!) flex the bottle cage side to side on my old maxlight xc pro (the lightest one they did at the time with massive oval downtube), and there were no cracks anywhere on that, even after I rode the tits off it.

I would be taking it to a good bike shop preferably a Cannondale dealer and asking them if it is the laquer that’s cracked or the frame itself. Edit: took so long typing this that the preceding posts have rendered the above irrelevant.

Attitude of seller stinks. I would have had those bottle bosses properly looked at before sale and then been honest about whatever turned out to be wrong.

Really great bike, but too small for you IMO.

I am 5’11” and ride an 18″ but really I think I am ‘between’ their sizes: the 20″ would be too little standover for me, but for whatever reason, the top tube is an inch shorter on the soloist than it is on their geared xc frames and i have a 100mm stem on mine to make it feel stretchy enough for me.

If you have long body and arms and like a long reach you will feel well cramped on the 18″: it has only a 22.5″ top tube. According to the website even the 20″ has ‘only’ an 23″ top tube.

I would look out for an on-one inbred or scandal: much longer top tube in relation to seat tube length and also great fun to ride. T’wife has a slot-dropout inbred and frame weight is near enough the same as the white (ie not the 853) soloist.

PeterPoddy – Member

Hell yes. I rock.

You do ‘rock’ for a biffer in sandals anyway. 😀

Next instalment: Poddy gets props from da yoof doing doughnuts in his Omega in b&q car park. 😛

glupton1976 – Member

I wonder if there’s a single billionaire on the planet who isn’t a sociopath.

“the psychopath test” by John Ronson is a nice little intro into the theory that the ‘best’ self-made multi-millionaires have clear and considerable sociopathic traits.

A teacher at school told us that Bob Monkhouse does too. 😆

CaptJon – Member

Do people have the money to build extensions?

I expect they will all remortgage and max themselves out on barely-affordable repayments with overly-keen lenders. That helped last time didn’t it? 😀

sas – Member

Does anyone live next to a Tory MP?

My Tory MP lives ‘next to’ no houses at all, in what would be a 900k house if it was just in a garden, lord knows what it is worth set in it’s couple of acres of grounds. That is not a joke at all btw. But he doesn’t have a moat and the duck house was funded from his own pocket.

But you lose points for sandals.

I think the other dude loses even more points for being beaten off the lights by an errr, ‘robust’ man in sandals. 😛

Having worked both 8 and 12 hour days/nights, I find the twelve hour shift much easier and felt more switched on/productive if I stopped doing one sort of thing and switch to something different half way through. Obviously that depends on what you do for a living, but I coped fine with, say 8 hours of meetings/managment/paperwork/admin followed by four hours of working clinically out on the ward or on home/crisis visits. Or vice versa. Not nearly as good if I did a solid 12 hours of either one or the other.

There was something on radio 4 last night about longer hours/days and productivity/value for money from your workers’ wages: apparently in manufacturing/production/skilled manual work, the Americans are the benchmark of good productivity! I suppose I was suprised at that. It turns out that other countries’ productivity is often measured as a percentage of the Americans, ie Greece 52%, UK 80-something percent, France 94%. (French only do a 35 hour week whereas Greeks typically work way more than that btw.)

jam bo – Member

Spending time in a mental hospital is by far more enjoyable than reading the mail.

+1

Black-and-white/all or nothing borderline mentalities? -Check.
Tinfoil hat conspiracy theories? -Check.
Kneejerk outrage at the drop of a hat? -Check.

But the mental health unit is still a far more interesting and warm experience than the Mail. 😀

The mayor in that video was well funny. He has obviously come across the “childs face” comments on here 😆

“I don’t want to be taking flowers to the cemetery because a heavy cyclist exploded (literally!) a child or an old person.”

front triangle of a K9 dh frame is steel but not the back. IIRC there used to be an all steel Identiti single pivot dh/fr frame a few years ago too.

A friend of a friend has a BMW (racelink?) and it is well-ard! Weighs more than any expensive bike I have ever handled, apart from my mum’s old pashley princess maybe! 😆