elfin, if you had a funeral to go to and you tried to book the day before, I’ll bet you would have paid well over the odds, ie waaaay more than it actually costs the train operator to get you there. That’s how your ticket was so reasonably priced.
Don’t get me wrong, I love trains and am putting the whole family on one to that there London in a few weeks rather than drive, but the ticket pricing nowadays favours the organised and punishes the desperate and car-less. 🙁

The only train fair i am interested in is the one i get at the ticket office on the day i travel.

hear hear! In those terribly primitive lefty euro countries where every public servant is endlessly on a coffee break or on strike, your ‘normal’ (ie not tgv/thalys/etc) train travel always costs x euros per kilometre, whether you book six weeks in advance or walk into the station two minutes before the train leaves. Of course, it’s consistently and proportionally adjusted for first or second class, under/over 25, senior citizen or war veteran (oh yes, you can even nab people’s seats in some countries if you have their equivalent of a ‘purple heart’) and easy to understand peak or off peak periods. The trains run on time too and they hold up smaller connecting services as a matter of course if the big train is late because they are all singing from the same hymn sheet. Remember when it was like that here?

This advance fare stuff in UK is complete bobbins: your super cheap advance fare will be subsidised by the poor sod who has no choice but to pay £450 for a three hour journey at the last minute because they have a job interview/funeral/other immovable and essential reason. The ticket pricing is so labyrinthine that if you phone around about a journey with multiple trains/lines/operators, you will get three different quotes from three different middlemen err, authorised ticket vendors.

Try silicon grease (a big pot from a plumbing trade shop will last you forever) when you pump out the pistons, and do it at least five or six times, (as in pump out, grease, push back in, repeat) being sure to get the grease all round the piston (hard to do on oro calipers, I used the pointy end of a ziptie to get it round the corners.

If it still won’t behave, then your seals might be getting knackered.
I recently dismantled one of mrs julian’s k24 calipers completely and fitted new seals, pretty straightforward to do, and the seal kit comes with proper kluber silicon grease to lube it all up nice. Seal kit is pretty reasonably priced too (compared to some of the rest of their spares!)

I have a mountain morph and a pressure drive (andyl’s 2nd link).

Mountain morph is ace but you have to dismantle the head to switch between presta and schraeder, and I can’t see the flappy plastic foot lasting that long.

Pressure drive in small size is truly tiny, and the double ended hose thing is well good. All seals up well with rubber flap/caps too, if you are going to keep it in your pocket or on the really nice frame mounting thingy. Mind you get the right one though: the pressure drive is for high pressure & low volume, and so it takes a looooooot looooongeeeer to pump up mountain bike tyres. (get the alloy drive instead for that).

CaptainFlashheart – Member

Well, quite simply, isn’t a massive part of the problem that people choose to live too far away from where they work?

Errrr, London? I would wager that whilst trains are expensive, in many many cases, a season ticket is still cheaper than housing yourself within walking/cycling distance of your city job. Plus if everyone did there would be nowhere left in London for anyone to live, and the home counties would be half empty.
S’alright for you with your deux pieds a terre, best of both worlds isn’t it?

At least you can use ‘normal’ size HT2 type cranks in them, ie just the bb that’s different no the whole crank system. (Oh no, someone’s changing all that too aren’t they? 🙄 )

I suppose it gives the frame builder more options with regard to the shape of the seat/down tube and chauinstay junction: if you need it wider you aren’t limited to 73mm or forced into using ‘special’ wider cranks.

zulu, couldn’t you have asked her about something a bit more important?

“dead man’s leg”…. kwality! 😀

Rusty Shackleford – Member

Weight Gain 4000

Follow your dreams

😀 Beeeeeeefcaaaake! 😀

I am sure it will matter to knee-jerk local crappy paper. Whether or not the poor lady died of complications of a low-ish-speed impact to her head is another thing though. 🙁

discussion sort of about this on Radio 4 right now.

I live in a ‘you could put a blue rosette on a dog’s arse and it would get in’ constituency now so I suppose our MP needn’t bother devotes his time to other issues important to his constituents. I have been to the pub with the wonderful and proper-ale drinking David Jamieson (labour, Devonport, some sort of transport under-secretary) but I was in a band with his son so that probably doesn’t count.

I wonder how much doorstepping you get to do if you are further from London? I be MP’s round our way spend half their lives on the train.

As PP says, it is a curious cost saving isn’t it?

100mm coil tora and recon forks would have had shorter upper legs/stanchions though. (mrs j’s old recon sl as fitted to a specialized myka certainly did). This was a model specific to specialized: custom colour to match the frame and allegedly softer spring for laydeez as standard (we still swapped it out for an even softer one though). It had a slightly different lower casting to the ‘proper’ rockshox forks: from a distance it looked identical but when I serviced it I noticed some of the angles/bevels were slightly different and indeed more ‘angular’ on the lowers.

I wonder whether if specialized have enough buying power to spec thousands of different colour and slightly different, err ‘custom’ recons and toras on their £800 ish bikes: whether some of those parts (specifically the shorter uppers) make it onto the rebas on their bikes too. (can’t remember whether the groove for circlip fitting inside left hand stanchion on air forks is the same as on the coil ones, mind)

Phew, I thought you were trying to sell Richard Wilson for a moment there. You’d have had trouble getting him to stay in the box.

I think there are a couple of ‘standards’: our child seat that fits a basic rack does not seem the same as other rack/seat combos I have seem in shops. You might be better buying both at the same time rather than have trouble looking for the right seat later on.

Ours is not made/sold any more as far as I can see, but the topeak one looks grand, and compatible with their trunk/pack systems too. (Not necessarily at the same time).

CaptainFlashheart – Member

Chum of mine….

*strokes chin* 😉

FWIW I would rather be going a ‘distinguished’ grey than the slightly lopsided bald at my tender 34. (still only 10 or so grey hairs, it’s the lack of brown ones that’s the issue.) At this rate I will have a Jim Robinson ‘island’ by 40. 🙁

bought a couple of things from them via ebay, both arrived within a day or 2 iirc.

At work, telly on in ‘C’ and ‘D’ bays, Hexworthy ward, Derriford Hospital. (before the days of ‘patientline’ tellys on each bed: we had an old 14″ telly on a knackered bedside cabinet at the end of each bay).

Of course I had lots of sick patients to look after too, but we had the telly on all afternoon just watching it all unfold as I went from bed to bed. Perhaps unsuprisingly, the patients were a little bit more stoic and err, ‘patient’ in their own illnesses that day. It’s ten years now but if you’d asked me five years ago I could have named all twelve old folk I looked after that day (very high turnover of patients usually). I remember all sorts of more trivial/mundane details about the day, what i had in my sandwich, where in the staff car park i was parked and so on: like your own wedding day or something…

One of the many odd things I remember thinking was “thank goodness no-one on our ward died today” (typically we lost three or four a week) because having seen all those people lose their lives at once on live telly, I don’t know how we (and I include the other patients too) would have coped.

‘lo-salt’ has potasssium chloride too (about 35-40% iirc); meant for people with heart probs or worries about too much salt, but for super-budget electrolyte mix it is potentially a bit more useful than normal salt. I’m not enough of an athlete to tell if it’s as good as ‘zero’/motor tabs and the like.

I imagine she saw nurses though…

tsy, I have a lot of faith in the help nurses can offer folk (but of course hugely biased) -unless she means ‘consultant’ when she says she didn’t see a doctor more than 3 times, or if she often refused to see them, three medical reviews in a compulsory (ie ‘sectioned’) admission of that length is really, really poor in my professional opinion/experience.

Dunno about recent bbc interview, but I read an article by/about her in a magazine lying around at work (sorry, can’t remember if it was a sunday supplement or a women’s magazine). In that article from the way she described a typical day on the ward it did sound pretty rubbish even when I put my professional hat on and adjust for either ‘unsatisfied’ or ‘I love this place and never want to leave’ variation. Our local adult acute unit is way better than the way she described her stay.

Yeti frames? ❓

Worrabout Yeti Stu/evolution and Bromley Bike co?

Depends.

or:

The second one for sure.

But:

is waaaaay cooler than:

I ‘missed out’/escaped from owning an alfa 33 because i couldn’t get out of work early enough: bloke had sold it by the time i finished. I suppose it could have ruined me too!

Never mind hairdressers, apparently a friend’s leg-waxer had one just like mine. :ooops: Lease car not owned, so I gave it back before it had a chance to break down.

Current t4 2.5tdi caravelle is pretty slow in comparison but drives nice enough and perversely cheaper to run than the car ^^ half its size…and unbelievably useful with the back row of seats out.

and no i haven’t ‘christened it’. Yet.

Well done to the organisers for meetings/flyers/etc.

No 224’s or moto helmets in attendance, but from the group photo taken from the railway bridge, i gave up counting heads at about 250 😯 . Lots of children and women too, which I guess also further backs up the ‘family’ appeal of the developments. (props to the lass on the folding bike!) I certainly expect my kids to be good enough to have a good go at the blue trail by the time its finished… Nice atmosphere and small write-up on Evening Herald website this morning.

There is also another article in support of it featuring a local consultant heptologist talking about it from a public health angle, and another residents meeting on monday night.

NT are setting up shop in the car park on sunday afternoon and monday morning to publicise/answer ranty questions about it as well.

But for all this, what also counts is positive letters/emails/electronic comments forms of support to the planning applications office (links earlier in the thread), so please if you haven’t done so yet, get a wriggle on; the deadline for public support/objections is the 13th.

My phenomenally crap car stereo has nevertheless somhow brought some ‘tweety/chirrupy’ electro (errr, high frequency i suppose) bits out of a couple of albums i thought i knew well too.

My speaker cables must be in the wrong way up 😉

I’d have thought any distance/number of cubicles from The Starship would result in the same awesome sound effects:
http://www.singletrackworld.com/forum/topic/is-this-weird-toilet-stw-contributor-and-sound-effect-content
How did you get on/away with it Derek? 😀

Theoretically, elixirs should be better. A mate has some reliable-so-far, properly working elixir cr’s and they stop better than the wilson family oro’s (2 sets in the go plus a third we since sold on), even if they are a bit more on/off. Neither oros nor elixirs have the best reputation for reliabilty of you believe everything you read on here, but both are rebuildable and pretty ok to get spares for especially since silverfish have taken on the distribution of formula. Anecditally it is easier to get the bleed ‘just right’ on oros too and the avid bleed kit you presumably have access too works on formula too.

If your k18’s work well and your elixirs don’t, I would either get your elixirs done under warranty (if you know how to bleed them properly and they deteriorate gradually over a few rides, it’s likely something wrong with the insides) or just ebay the elixirs as ‘unreliable’ and fit the brakes that work!

Steve Toze’s article has now appeared on the front page of STW too. 😀
I remebered I had a login on SDH and posted up about tomorrow’s meet’n’ride there too. So if anyone turns up on a 224 with a neckbrace on that will be my fault.

Co Op for sure. I forgot about the ‘not bonus’ bit. Provided you aren’t an accidental overdrawer they are fine(not sure if all the banks have had to behave themselves a bit more on that front though)

Banking at post office, by internet and phone means we have needed to set foot in our branch just the once in the five years since we set savings account up for number 2 child, and that was because we wanted to get a lump of cash out to buy a car.

Is that the book with the rolls royce inside a flippy-open-front jet plane? Can you still do that?

PeterPoddy – Member

Sorry, not France. They don’t understand vegetarian, which mrs PP is!

Ah, great place to cycle for routes, scenery and attitude of locals to you. Millie and I both are veggie, and we do OK in the motherland France. Actually Normandy and Britany not too bad as you get to add a few varieties of crepes to the rather short list of veggie options. We managed by rotating pizza, crepes, omlettes and sandwiches. We also had curries in restaurants that were just like curry houses in britain, in fact the staff in one were british asians and used to take a transit van over on the ferry for a lot of their stock!

[EDIT] blimey, loads more postsage on France whilst i was typing this one. Never mind. Highlands and Islands plus ferries is what i would do if they banned me from France.

If i don’t whoop, am I still allowed to hi-five you after I’ve ‘cleaned’ the gravel zigzag down from the end of the railway tracks?

Living in the south west and also being half a rural French peasant, I am well used to people loitering harmlessly but with very little thought for others in a hurry. Imagine how hard it was for me to remember to stand on the right side of the escalators on the tube….

Really I need to consider more seriously that those 20 or so seconds could have bust you from 9th down to 12th. Still, makes a change from usual moans on here about noobs fixing punctures with the bike across the singletrack though I suppose. 😛

Good point dabaldie. Not sure how risky it really is usually (yogis all seem to park there when they meet up without incident) but I suppose now the ride is in the public domain, any level of skulduggery is possible!

Ususal STW left vs right again George, that would seem to be about the size of it. 🙁

Steve ‘Shred’ Toze has just supplied xcracer.com with this rather helpful article:
http://www.xcracer.com/Battle-for-the-Woods-Plymbridge-Woods-Trails.html

Indeed, and as Toze’s articles suggests we do, for minimum local-worrying it would be best to meet at 1800 in b&q marsh mills and then ride the five minutes up the railway path to the proper ‘publicity’ meeting at Plym Bridge itself.

Jesus wept!

IGMC

What are the trails like for a robust 2 year old in a rear mounted baby seat..? He likes it at Haldon..

Long reclaimed railway path, or quite a lot of fire/forest road in Cann Wood on opposite side of the valley. Everything else in Cann would be a bit too rooty or steep for baby seat skillz IMO. But if/when the NT blue trail here is finished i am sure it would be just perfect! 😀