tonyg2003 – Member

Much of the London economy is driven by the city – which has bounced back very quickly from recession – and money/tourism from abroad – which given the exchange rate – is doing well too.

Anyone have radio 4 on yesterday lunchtime? There was a debate about Scottish independence and predictable bunfight about whether or not the yookay heavily subsidises Scotland and NI. I was suprised to hear that London is also allegedly doing very well (funding-wise) courtesy of the rest of the UK. There was no detail about how/why, but it seemed to be by the same measure that people bang on about when they moan about free prescriptions and university fees.

Genuinely suprised at that. 😕

I posted that ^^ the other week. Hi-5!

Underground Basilica de St. Pie X, Lourdes.

We had our wedding reception in this piece of brutalist retro-crete. 8)

Benny Hill music. The euros would love it! 😀

rOcKeTdOg – Member

locked up on a bald cx tyre, nothing to do with technique i assure you *coughs*, more to do with her stepping out from behind a van

aaaah, I thought you were in a motorised vehicle.
Clarity from workplace required (assuming you are at work) about whether ‘no pedestrians’ means ‘motor vehicles only’. I bet they never even considered it.

Re: ribcage: there’s a very similar topeak one with a little rubber bit. I got mine on crc for about £4. It is plastic and weighs a few grams more than a carbon one so probably not for weenies. 😀

They are ace, and sold logo’ed up as
Nukeproof, Answer and Kona Wah Wah elsewhere for getting on twice the price of the carbon cycles version. Do it!

it is astonishing how much quicker a similar weight rider can freewheel down a modest tarmac’ed hill, sat right up for wind resistance. I don’t have my tires over 30-35psi and use 2.1 nobby nic on the front and 2.1 sb8 on the back. Not a particularly racey combination i’d have thought. 😕

Does this fab difference in rolling resistance make me faster uphill too?

samuri – Member

Who’s getting ready for their commute home then? I’ve got my courier bag ready, my ridiculously pointless and difficult to ride 1k fixie cross bike is ready, I’ve just checked that my stylish hipster shorts are dry from this mornings ride in and I am so going rip the legs off all the people on sensible bikes that I can find.

Awesome.

All the above should score a massive points bonus if it transpires the commute is less than five miles and has less than 100m climbing in it.

you can email roger and if its the same address you had when you bought it originally, he will send you another one.
in fact i think you can do it ‘automatically’ as long as you still have access to the email adress you bought it from.

FWIW, I ride to work every day and thoroughly enjoy it. On my three speed ladies shopping bike!

phew, the way I read his original post, I thought Flashy had scored 15 points this morning by his own bike and getup…

Lots of casually dressed people on old rigid canti’d mountain bikes with semi/slicks this morning. I think I scored nul points (for my own getup and everyone else’s!)

My 50mm deep socket still wasn’t deep enough for my sids: look for a 10mm ‘tube’ (i think its called a box spanner or something). I bought something like this for mine.

You can’t, no.

en321 is pretty chunky. I have one on the front of my bullit and do rocks/drops/downhill on it, still very true. But it really does depend on the build: a properly built 717 will outlast a much wider heavier rim on a machine-built jobby off a ‘built to a price’ full build mtb. My mate broke a wheel on a new kona a few years ago riding up whyte’s level.

I would go for a 719 and a decent builder.

SBZ stylin’ it up on his local mountain, last week:

biscuit powered, wouldn’t the same happen to the pro2 hub? That has 20mm inner diameter bearings and sleeve too.

woody2000 – Member

Wind + dead wood = sticks on the trail. Occam’s razor FTW

what does: “sticks all perpendicular to trail” equal?

Perpendicular (ie walker-‘induced’) logs, like perpendicular roots, are far easier to ride over when its wet, whereas random windfall is not so.

I’ve seen our log man a few times in Cann Wood lately, *waves* but no new loggage. The other day mrs julian rode past him straight into some proper cheeky trail and in contrast to dog/shout nonsense last time she met him, he didn’t say a word this time.

aaaahhhhh, the Henry vs Dyson debate seems to come up here a couple of times a year. Usually featuring a few indestructible dysons (like HTS’s) and a few that fell to bits when a gust of wind came in through the catflap. Also featuring a couple of henry’s which have hoovered up the remains of dead business rivals, and a couple which couldn’t hoover up a rice crispie.

For my experience (henrys and james at work, dysons at home), they are both great. Get a dyson cheap from the local paper to try one out, we got ours from someone with a pristine house and unseasonal suntan who just had to ‘upgrade’ to the latest one. 😆

bikewhisperer – Member

Would joke at work that I could listen to a bike being ridden past and tell you how much it was going to cost to service…

Can you tell that by the quality of the car it is unloaded from too? 😉

The shimano one is a bit pricey but very well made.

Gryphon.

Hmmmm. Photos look like there is bags of room. But you say ‘it catches at 7 o’clock’: my money is on a bent chainring or crank ‘spider’.

The Edukators (as it is known over here) is a top top film. 😀

My login name is just my name, disappointingly.

Smugfroggywhinysocialist would be more apt.

DAB is ace! 😀

Tesco (speshul offer innit) Leffe Blonde here. When I lived in the Motherland France, people in my local would all go “ooooh” if you ordered a Leffe, like you were a city boy made of money. 😕

in my experience there is no mud quite like the mud you get at a rainy enduro!
A good idea would be to do a search on the old mayhem threads from years gone back and see what everyone did well in/on then (hint, it is nearly always muddy!)
FWIW for enduros I take a pair of 1.3 schwalbe cx pro in the van as ‘insurance’ against ridiculo-clag, and then do ok in mud x’s (1.8 at the back but my frame tyre/mud clearance isn’t fab)

Fox fluid can be had for cheap.

Oh and does he ride much radder than you?

i can well imagine a wheel lasting less time under some of my mate’s cornering ‘habits’ than mine!

A couple of thoughts from my 20ish wheels built experience:

1) Waaaaay easier to build onto a brand new rim, even if hub and spokes are not new.

2) Rlepecha, were your own wheels on new rims?

3) Was your mate’s wheel a handbuilt one or did it come on his bike? Unless you buy a really nice (read £800+ for hardtail) bike, the wheels will have been tensioned by a machine in a hurry and the tensions and stresses on the rim may have been all over the place on the original build. So even tensions may make it straight until the first really hard corner before the rim tries to go back to the shape it wants to be…

4) Do you squeeze the spokes as you go? In my experience this really helps. The wheelpro e-book explains this in great detail.

5) Were your rims you built for yourself a lot burlier than your mate’s? I find downhill rims vastly easier and quicker to get dead straight end really really tight than xc ones.

6) Oil your nipples! I leave mine in a little pot of 5wt oil or winter chain lube before I build. It’s messier and sounds counter-intuitive but like gresing your bolts, the lube gives you more reliable feedback from the spoke key, allows a tiny bit more tightness before they strt pinging and creaking, and mitigates a little against spokes ‘pinging’ out of tension.

jhw: 😯

LoCo: 😯 😯 😯

GW – Member

So Julian, being honest contrary = trolling?

FIFY 😀

Pikey?, naah. In my head, you avoid words like ‘razz’, ‘gnar’ and ‘stoke’, ride an old-ish bike with shabby looking but reliable 05/06 marzochhi, jeans and a lumberjack shirt. And a cheap helmet and holey hands. 😀 You’d need all the above minus any form of helmet plus massive wheelie whilst rolling cigarette to be pikey, surely?

NDS chain tug probably doesn’t make a difference. Neither should braking, as the brake on a slotty inbred is inside the rear triangle (sometimes happens on slotty frames with disc tabs in normal position as the braking force tries to lever the wheel out of the back).

Happened to a mate and he got fed up with it, never got to the bottom of it either. Didn’t happen on new frame (love/hate) with same parts on it but vertical dropout and EBB, so I guess it was something to do with the new chain stretching, or the chain tug/qr bits.

Is your chain the same slack/tight wherever the cranks are positioned? -sometimes chainrings go on not quite central (not sure of it is the chainring or crank tabs/spider that would be the issue), so if you ‘tension’ the chain tug with the crank in one position it fells slacker in another position. Mine does that a tiny bit with old xt crank and steel ss chainring (half inch at tightest and 3/4″ at slackest) but I just live with it.

Sounds like you have it right.

Mine did that once, but it was the seal head (ie white plastic bit at the top of damper rod) cracked rather than the seal itself. …just in case replacing the seal doesn’t do it. Mine was at tft at the time as when damper failed it was due a proper (all seals and valves) service and tft were good enough to install me a ‘recycled’ seal head from a dead fork for free.

GW – Member

troll?

most gloves thin enough to actually feel good riding in rip ridiculously easily, skin is tougher and heals fairly quickly

Yes, (to the trolly bit) but only 4/10.

I use tld air and ace gloves, (the 2 thinnest/least burly) and not managed to rip them so far. And needless to say I am a crap rider and fall off quite enough thangyewverymuch. I like my hands as they are and although having open grazes and cuts on them isn’t such an issue for me in my current place of work, I am a huge wuss and would finish my ride much more enjoyably with intact hands and trashed gloves. If or when I do rip them, I would like to think my skin will either be spared or ripped a bit less as the layer over them rips a bit first. Perhaps I am not crashing hard enough or falling ‘better’.

What with this morning and his thread about cheap/tesco xc helmets, GW seems to be the opposite of ‘astroturfing’ this week. ie: ‘stop spending so much money on stuff you could get way cheaper or don’t really need’. The optimist in me sees this as a form of public service for the less informed rider in these financially tough times. 😀

GW – Member

all gloves do is rip

crap troll GW. How much more of your hands would you rip without the gloves on to rip first? My helmet broke when I fell off once. I still knocked myself out and ‘lost’ half the day. If I was going to knock myself out anyway, perhaps I shouldn’t have bothered wearing the helmet in the first place.

I suppose if you work with your hands or need to have clean/intact hands the idea of falling off with no gloves is not great.

When I worked in general nursing and washed/sanitised my hands lord knows how many times a day, having grazed/cut hands or fingers was a real ballache in terms of keeping your wounds covered.

Forgotten my gloves a couple of times (on rare rides that start with a car journey), can’t say I felt the benefit in feel or response that others do without gloves, apart from chunky winter or windproof ones, but I like an unpadded palm on a glove rather than the bouncy spesh body geometry type.

I feel like I get a bit more ‘oomph’ on out-of-the-saddle climbs pulling up on spd’s, but only if you have the rear wheel traction to do so without the back wheel spining out and having your nutsack make a beeline for the stem. Since I built a singlespeed I have certainly worn through SPD cleats faster and in different bits/corners of the cleat, (same pedals/cage tension from the geared bike) so I must be doing something different..?

Surrounded By Zulus – Member

On present form I’m thinking Cynic-Al.

George, don’t hide your lamp under a bushel. 😀

Ace 😀

+1 Robin Cook

Yes all coil ones fit that knob. Different one for air u-turn though as it has the positive air valve in the middle.

You know what they say about men with big hands, don’t you………

…their girlfriends’ bangers and their own winkies look all the more disappointing?