I read that your choice of dressing plus gaffa tape over the whole lot is good: socks and shoes slide over gaffa tape and it doesn’t ruck up or rub off.

CaptainFlashheart – Member

Socialist utopians.

You called? 😀

That bit where he presses the ‘down’ button about fifteen times is ace. Really!

No really unusual hobbies, but I did build one of these this morning:

8) or 😳 depending on your point of view.

My dad has a bootleg of it, bought at a market in France or Italy years and years ago. Sound quality is ok, but it was basically ripped from the video (complete with all the talking and synth noodling bits in the middle!) and a bit of ‘ok as far as bootlegs go’ packaging. I would just rip the dvd mesself.

‘Echoes’ on that film is just ace. Or as high/pissed-up teenagers we would put it on but with the sound down and different music over the top, that seemed a nice idea at the time.

You know those bits when Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall goes to those delightful markets and hustles his wares to posh/odd looking folk in strange clothes?

Yeah, that’s Bridport. 😀

I’d live there though.

Alfabus, what is the business of you present and new employer?

In health and social care what you describe is completely normal. (are we too nice to each other?) Our sort of jobs always have CRB conditions attached to them (unless you are changing to a similar enough post within the same organisation and HR can carry across your CRB.)

So you can take a gamble on your CRB and on finance or HR pulling the plug on the job you are yet to be formally offered and hand in your notice now, having a 4 week holiday with the leave you have outstanding. (it has happened to 2 posts recently in my large health providing organisation: crb’s come back all clear for 2 successful applicants only for finance to change their mind and make the vacanbcies ‘disappear’….)

Or you can tell your boss you are waiting on CRB/etc before yo hand in your notice, and so give them a bit more time to organise who is going to take care of your workload when you leave: I am sure they wiould appreciate the extra time if you have leave to take then this may only be three weeks time anyway. If they are allowed to, it gives them time to put out informal feelers about your repplacement even if they are not allowed to advertise/interview/appoint until you leave.

I suppose it depends on how cut-throat your present boss and employer is: do you trust them not to make your life a misery for daring to leave? I haven’t worked for anyone except health/education for 13 odd years so I wouldn’t know first hand how shirty they might get.

Nope, q factor on a ht2 chainset is goverened by the length of the axle (err, actually a ‘spindle’ technically)attached to the crank, not the width of the BB it spins in. So if you fit the bb with no spacers you will just get near enough the same q factor minus maybe a mm or 2, and about 6-7mm side-to-side play.

It is Silverfish. ‘Yeti Stu’ will still be aptly named as according to a thread on here the other week, he is also joining Silverfish.

http://www.silverfish-uk.com/articles.php?articleshow=1581

Serj rules![/url]

Not so keen on Daron’s voice. Or lyrics. First three plus ‘elect the dead’ and ‘Serart’ for me then.

I had a load of new ones from a job lot of spokes i bought on the classifieds here: I put them on ebay in 2 lots as Buy-It-Nows for a quid ot two below what proper shops were doing them for, sold them in a couple of days. I was rather suprised at how quickly they sold, I thought no one would be interested. Having wrestled with a few alloy-nippled specialized wheels on mates’ and wife’s bikes, I sure as hell wasn’t going to use them!

Andyl, the shimano tool from what i could tell from the interwebz picture was like a hed doctor, you’d need one to fit well in the internal diameter of the ‘tube’.

Stoner, I tried that too but somehow the cone kept either loosening or tightening itself after a few rides. I think it is hard to stop the tube ‘following’ the cone as you back it off against the outer locknut and so you don’t get a good enough grip between cone and locknut. I was baffled by how this resulted in the hub tightening itself though as its a normal thread on the right hand side, the axle trying to follow the rest of the hub as it turns forward should loosen itself against the cone and locknut not tighten. One of my 2 still managed to though!

The best I managed minus a suitably sized expander wedge was to cut a 2mm wide by 3mm deep slot across the outer opening of the disc side of the ‘tube’axle, and then balance it on an old steel ruler held in a vice. There was plenty of ‘tube’ left to butt up against the inside of the fork dropout to secure the hub, and you could get the tube to stay still whilst you adjusted the cones.

mangoridebike – Member

re the hub

I’ve had one of those on my main bike (ridden at least once a week) for over 3 years with no problems what so ever.

mangoride, I must be either cack-handed but extraordinarily lucky with conventional qr shimano hubs which have always been lovely to me, or really really unlucky with the xt and slx ones I had.

Have you had to service yours? The cone/lockring on both mine were both done up ‘bastid tight’ when I got them (only found this bit out when i tried to service them!) but they ran lovely and smooth at first: both went grumbly after a few months, and despite the enormo spanner and finding a way to immobilise the ‘axle’ (ie tube) whilst i did the cones up properly (shimano service centres apparently have a nifty but expensive tool for this purpose, bit like an axle vice clamp but ‘backwards’), mine both were forever coming loose or tightening up.

I’ve still got the rumbly xt one lurking in the workshop ‘naughty step’ if you want a spare.

Leave him be mister P, it’s his weekly ‘pwning morning’.

Those crazy snowflake patterns had more severe looking bends in the spokes, and we still rode them.

Did it creak more than you expect to when you tensioned it?

Still, if it was me i would be re-doing it. (With a different hub. I love shimano cup and cone hubs and have a couple that have been going on for evcer, but the two shimano 20mm ones I had were a devil to keep running even with the expensive spanner, and went through bearings like no-ones business.

TandemJeremy – Member

Julian – thats the sort of system that is starting to be fitted in the US

finally, increased driving standards and road safety become a silver lining to the cloud that is the ‘compensation culture’! 😀 😀

yes for mandatory retests. Hugely costly though: is the dvla registration of new drivers and running of test centres funded completely by driving test fees? You’d also need loads more examiners and instructors, we might even have to wheel glupton out of ‘retirement’ 😉

TandemJeremy – Member

The cameras that record accidents as used in the states would help as well.

I was thinking about that the other week. Surely the technology now exists for new cars to be relatively cheaply fitted with a dash/bonnet mounted camera and basic telemetry recording ‘black box recorder’. It could record in a fifteen minute loop to maximise visual quality for the memory available (for other drivers reg plates for example) and could be stopped a couple of minutes after a collision is detected, or if the driver or police see an incident and want to preserve the film and telemetry and wish to use it for evidence for or against the driver.

I bet that would sharpen up people’s driving, knowing that if you screw up or the police pull you for speeding/dangerous driving you have both your car’s recordings and possibly the other driver’s recordings too. Insurance companies could also ‘profile’ drivers who agree to have this retro-fitted to older cars and reduce their premniums accordingly as they are put off driving unsafely, and more able to prove fault in the other party in the case of a claim.

Check the right hand oil/travel. If you let all the air out of the fork and you can’t comress the fork all the way down, then you most likely have a leaky seal in the right leg. If you’re confident servicing yourself its an easy enough fix. Putting exactly the right volume of oil back in the top of the right hand leg is critical to the working of the lockout. Otherwise, maybe a problem in the compression damper gubbins. Unless its the outer seal at the bottom of the comression bit (the big-ish assembly you pull out of the top of the RH leg), it’s very hard to get into it and reassemble (I wouldn’t dare! it would be sending off to tf/loco for me in that case…)

Only other advice is that having found mine rocked back and forth after a few months hard riding, I put a bit of threadlock on the splines of centerlock rotors and then do it up bastid tight and it hasn’t happened since.

Is it a full suspension frame? My yeti groans a little bit sometimes (on long sweepy/braking turns, or might be my imagination) where the same wheel and brake on my old NRS didn’t ever howl. I surmise that it is some sort of flex between sides of the rear dropout that temporarily misaligns the rotor in the caliper under sufficient sideways force. But that is a guess, it’s never bothered me enough to ask other yeti owners about it.

She has a 29″ commuter with big gears and I have a slicked-up 26″ bike, so on the road mrs j sometimes ‘chicks’ me with ease. Depends who’s had the more tiring week at our current levels of fitness. We often race xc ‘together’: I have not quite been chicked in a race by the mrs, usually a couple of minutes a lap faster. I am sure I will have a moderate sense of humour failure in the race that (and I am sure it will happen soon enough) she passes me on her third lap.

We both race in masters, my four laps at say, 22 minutes each usually gets me in the bottom five. Her three laps at 24 minutes each pretty much always gets her on the podium. So in that respect I get chicked every time we both put a race plate on!

Apart from that course that was all muddy, I really really enjoyed watching the 4x in the internet this season just gone. Shame.

Depends on the bike. My commuter has s/h steel fork and mudguards but otherwise is built of cheap but at-one-point brand new when i got them many years ago bits.

On the other hand my Bullit only has back wheel, front rim, grips, brakes, chain, cassette, chainring chain device and saddle brand new to me. Everything else (frame, fork, post/bars/stem/cranks/gears/front hub) was second hand from stw classifieds. I could probably say near enough the same for my xc bike too.

Has anybody ever bought anything as the result of paying attention to what other people like on this forum?

not from any single thread, no. Like you say, often these threads are full of people who are essentially justifying their exorbitant purchases rather than knowing from experience that their bling is better than this or that bling.

I suppose the more useful threads are “does this fit on this frame?”, ‘how wide does tyre x come up on rim y?’ or ‘can i convert this hub to 12mm?” etc, ie questions with definite yes/no or ‘quantity’ answers which manufacturer’s websites can be a bit vague about.

Also ‘what tool for this part/job’ and ‘oil weight/height for this old/obsolete fork’ ones can be very helpful.

And I suppose if you read here often enough you can (with caution!) get a more ‘meta’ sense of certain products that are consistently ‘ok’ (lezyne pumps, hope hubs, slx) or consistently poor or unreliable.

Woppit, how does the reliablilty/subjectivity of advice/experience about bikes on here compare with components/cables etc on hifi/audiophile forums? I bet that gets pretty hot-headed too if the occasional hifi threads on the chat forum here are anything to go by. (do they ever discuyss bicycles too i wonder?) 😀

heh, I thought the 2 blokes were actually pretty cool, riging a tandem with a soundsystem. So much so that I didn’t really understand the ‘punchline’ for a bit. 😕

don simon – Member

Should have ridden right over both child and father shouting “You’ve been GWed!”.

nah, he’d have bubba scrubbed them both.

He uses some funny scales, lots of chromatic ups and downs rather than mind-melting mixylodian modes so don’t panic. Also dropped D tuning as mentioned above.

You need 2 volume controls on your guitar and an easy-to-reach toggle switch for the on-off bits, so if you like your fender types you’ll be in for a bit of rewiring!

And for a couple of songs iirc, a double locking (floyd rose) tremelo which means you will end up staying in dropped D all the time because tuning the low e up and down all makes all your other strings go in and out of tune. The ‘proper’ morello fanboi guitar setup is a bit of a faff then!

I found this page[/url] which might help with tunings and fx noises….

…which of course means the most excellent digitech whammy pedal. This is pretty cheap if you buy into a digitech multi fx unit with an expression pedal, (lost track of what is current, but even if you buy an old and now very cheap one like the RP3/6/9 you can have a play around and see if you like it. Oh be warned, old digitech needs AC/AC power supply so check befire you buy) I would definitely buy a proper dunlop crybaby though, bestest pedal EVER.

Or purists/fans can pay daft money on ebay for the original red one.

KINGTUT – Member

It’s no wonder I can’t recruit decent telesales staff.

worry not, if the ‘customers’ are getting phone phobic too, then telesales might have a dwindling usefulness: just start employing people to sell stuff in other ways than phoning/being phoned.

If only we had politicians with sense and foresight who wanted the best for the travelling public, instead of trying to dump an expensive solution looking for a problem on us instead.

Rich friends and party donations from big business beats ‘best for public’ any day, regardless of whether you are blue or red flavour. 🙁 Witness health reform, unbelievable pressure from rich private enterprise to let them in on it. Whether or not it is a better use of public money is completely and utterly immaterial, the question is how to dress it up so that Tory voters swallow it.

(shamelessly lifted from IMDB)

Former US Marine Corps Drill Instructor R. Lee Ermey was not originally hired to play Gunnery Sgt. Hartman but as a consultant for the Marine Corps boot camp portion of the film. He performed a demonstration on videotape in which he yelled obscene insults and abuse for 15 minutes without stopping, repeating himself or even flinching – despite being continuously pelted with tennis balls and oranges. Stanley Kubrick was so impressed that he cast Ermey as Hartman.

He is of course also the voice of the army men sergeant in Toy Story. 😀

Also, the highest tor on Bodmin Moor is called Brown Willy. F’ner f’ner.

oooh, I think I might ride out and pay a visit to the poorly-disguised shop in question tomorrow or friday, for all his randomness and hot temper, if i am going to pay £25 for some gloves I’d rather hand £25 in real money to him than £23 to an internet shop. *waves*

I think it’s tj that swears by smaller rotors so you really really cook your pads when you bed them in, reckons that increases pad life because they are always hot and therefore always got a nice hard glaze on.

Can’t really tell the difference between some brakes mesself. I think that provided they are bedded in properly, rotor size makes more difference; I could hardly tell the difference when I kept the same (180/203mm) rotors but ‘upgraded’ from deore M525’s to old style M800 saints.

Hi Charlie 😀

I think we should all wear plaid and dusty ripped jeans tucked into our socks on the 21st.

fiddling with me GPS thingy…

Ha, city boy. 😛

Real countryfolk don’t even use maps, we just sniff the air and say “yargh, over there a bit”

Oh, hi growmac. 😀

I know the shop and the guy in question (as a regular-ish customer, no massive loyalties though). I am amused but not suprised to hear how your phone call went, I got used to his, errr, style and basically he is a decent bloke who’s put a phenomenal amount of time and resources into the local bike scene. My mrs (also a ‘proper’ cyclist) can’t stand him though!

FWIW, there is no way in a shop his size he could have got near 25% off rrp on shimano; he’d be paying you a tenner to take it away. He has done really good deals on bikes/frames/helmets in the past, and not just to people he knows either. TBH if you are about to drop £100 on a helmet it might be an idea calling in the shop, acting as if you didn’t ring him up recently about a chainset and trying your luck for a cash-only discount, I’ve known him do really good deals on helmets and of course you get to try it on rather than chancing your arm with mail order.

aye, cultural desert here, but we can still get doner pot noodle in Devon, and the trails are quite nice.

I am car-less yet I do not feel ‘punished’.

yeah, but you live in London! Tube/dlr/network southeast does not suffer from the daft pricing like the rest of the country’s trains do, so it makes sense to lose the car if you live in London. I would if I did.

How many train journeys a year don’t happen and become car journeys because you only know you need to go there at a couple of days notice, and so you take your car instead because they want a comedy three figure sum for £30’s worth of fuel?

Now, means-tested train travel, that really would be ace!

oh, and everyone knows the thinking man’s driving snack is not a service station ginsters, but your own thermos of boiling water and a pre-bought doner flavour pot noodle. 😀

mmmmmmmmmm, oooooooohhhhh.

*dreams of being a big swinging ball bag*

LOL, post of the week !!

+1

Doner pot noodle is grrrreeeeat, but not because it tastes of doner (it doesn’t really), but it is still a lovely ‘slaaag’ of a snack. Even dirtier than ‘chow mein’ flavour, mmmmmmmmmmm….. 😀

Good choice(s) realman. Of course once you start packing a reliable pump in your pack you never get punctures!