5’11 on a large bullitt. I once tried a large blur xc with shortish stem and that was just right too.

That well-used meeting place and free parking facility for cyclists otherwise known as Plympton B&Q were giving away little packs of spare christmas tree bulbs for free the other day.

almost always!
Either a smaller version of the same tyre on the bullitt, or something completely different for normal xc. I like a grippy tyre at the front and quite like a slidey back. Outside mudfest xc racing, it is suprising how little tread you need to get up hills so i tend to go for less rolling resistance on road/hardpack with more grip on front for loose/mud. Examples being Small Block eight or Intense system 2 for the back and nobby nic or mud x for the front.

I am sure some people will come out in hives at not having matching front and back stuff: I also have or have had mismatched hubs, rims, shifters etc. Not had mismatched crank arms gloves or shoes but i’m sure i will at some point!

Pedal Bob is Pillion Peg’s wee brother.

And the favourite nephew of Auntie Squat.

IGMC

I would like someone to mention Lord Coe so that Flashy and The New Forum Leader can have another, er, ‘debate’. 😀

Oh and I can’t belive we haven’t had The Boss yet!

I wanted cheap cable & have just bought all 3 on Amazon for £12.00…

you’ll only be watching I’m a celebrity on it after all 😉

MRanger156 – Member

If you have a tapered headtube do you need a tapered steerer?

No, you can use a normal steerer with a reducer cup on the bottom. I think its Hope who have very helpfully started demystifying headsets/tubes and allowing us to buy a top and bottom half to suit our exciting range of ‘standards’.

Richie: any chance of you doing ‘small’ spares?

Previously the only way to get some small parts like the lever bushings was by buying them in a kit with some stuff you didn’t need (-totalling £60 just to be able to replace the four plastic bushings on my otherwise lovely-working levers.)

Just for the record Kona Wah Wah pedals
are not the same as the Superstar ones.

Now you point it out, no they aren’t are they? …and they seem to only be in the region of £50-53 nowadays.
SSC did the same when they added a through-pin version of the nano flat. All (kona/ssc/nukeproof and i see lately the ‘new’ Answer’ flat pedal) versions still feature the same gubbins made in the same factory. Same inners and same arrangment of pins on both Wah wah and thru-pin nano, but one is between £7 and £10 cheaper and has a less cool name on it. You pays your money etc…

As for the new Answer ones, does this look all that different apart from the pins, logo and £28 more expensive?

I think the NRS is the worst bike I’ve ever ridden though, bar none.

Quite possibly it was. I’m assuming you didn’t sell Giants in those days and so missed the moral dilemma of having to sell one to someone then. 😆

Well I never…

There is a quiet ‘nrs-love’ contingent on here that includes a couple of very prolific posters, which sometimes pops up and has a quick natter about generally how brill they are/were.

I have a delicioulsly retro xtc/nrs team. And a steel ebb’d singlespeed plus beard to balance it out. I ‘podiumed’ on the ss at the BBB last summer, and I have never come better than 13th on the NRS though, so they must be rubbish. 😉

happened the other day my mate’s (unserviced, a year old) nuke proof hub. Worked fine once it was defrosted.

psychle to the forum please. 😆

Monday: at work.

Last time for my own welfare would have been about 8 years ago for broken elbow, worst bike injury, sustained on nice friendly tarmac cycling past the Lord Louis ‘pub’ near Newnham Park if you know it. (If you don’t, don’t bother).

I did get a ride in the St John Retromobile (actually rather ace) at an xc race in May when i messed up a cheeky line and binned it onto my rotator cuff, but I avoided a formal hospital in my treatment/recovery.

+ whatever it is now for slx. Apparently there is only 20-somehting grams in wieght difference with more expensive xt. And it looks nicer if that’s a consideration for you.

find someone else who wears the ‘opposite’ sprockets down, and swap the good ones?

Failure here. Excuse the wintry conditions pun, but Drac and other pesky health professionals on here will also feel the Fail as the NHS pay ‘freeze’ (ie ‘cut’ in real terms) for next 2 years will make me even more of a failure at 35 than I am at 33. Yay!

mountainmonkey, the deal on the pompino has a couple of bar options and can be either fixed or freewheel. (presumably not a flipflop hub then).

I like the look of that Trek Triton up there ^ too.

Daft idea.

Being too cold is a common lifestyle choice amongst sufferers of anorexia. It is the shivering (your body does this to warm up much as physical exercise described above does) that burns calories. Psychle, you’re in London, you must have seen people power walking in really unseasonably thin clothing?

For you I would just exercise a bit more or eat a bit less at a comfortable temperature.

This is not alu/carbon but nicely not-garish and outrageously good value.
SS pompino full bike for £400

[edit] oh i see there is a glow in the dark option as well as normal persons’ paint jobs.

😆

yeah, rumbled!

They have already (deliberately, to illustrate a point) repeated this spoonerism in ‘Start The Week’. Smooth! 😆

‘beer pub’?

What other sort of pubs are there?

20mm hub will also be too wide to even get in your fork let also secure to it. (110 not 100mm)

I love shimano hubs usually but their cup and cone 20mm ones are a false economy, you need a new 22mm cone spanner to service them, and boy will you need to as my xt and slx ones are rather poorly sealed. And they are rather harder than qr hubs to set up again properly.

Sirlickalot – Member

Was £399.99! WTF?

Halfords do this with a lot of their own bikes. Somewhere this bike has been on sale for £399 and quite righty no one has bought it for that sort of money. £180 is much more like it, but very misleading to the not-particularly-up-on-bikes public that see the adverts in newspapers or wander in on a sunday afternoon and think they are getting a bargain. Like those god-awful clothes shops ‘Officers Club’ and ‘Madhouse’. I know everyone in big retail does this to a lesser or greater extent, but it is still sad to see this happening with bicycles too.

my newest set of 2.0’s (swinnerton’s last summer, £40 a pair) have a much more robust sidewall than the last set of 2.0’s. Not sure if this is ARC but definitely an improvment.

Radio 4 will make you cleverer. You’ve just missed desert island discs. I quite like Woman’s hour. 😳

willej’s one is way way nicer to look at!

Too busy looking. The extra strings and headstock are fine, i could live with the inlays, but 1990 phoned to ask for its quilting back.

Nice. I saw a guy at a race once who’d had his fox lowers resprayed fluo orange to match his Orange Clockwork reissue. That was also ‘proper bo’ (as befits something really good in 2001)

Yes.

My kids say I look OK with 2 or 3, and I quote “like a robber” with no.1.

bravohotel9er – Member

I listen to The Smiths a lot, I vote Tory too.

I’m telling Johnny Marr on you. 😉

I think the issue might be whether Cameron really likes the Smiths, or if he just said so because he thought it was cool.

(Is it possible to only like them ‘a bit?’ -i thought they were a bit of a marmite band really.)(And is it cool? Of course not!)

What, only one?

Today, Hot Chip.
Tomorrow, could be Zeppelin, Auteurs, Doors or indeed the Cure.

I’d have though the Smiths = old labour, Crass/Killing Joke were/are more like ‘no politics: they are all swiiiiines!’.

I felt a bit sick when he had them as one of his desert island discs.

I hoped it would be like the time when asked in an interview, Dubya said his favourite book as a child was the hungry caterpillar (published when he was about 15!), ie he made something up about his past becuase it sounded like what he thought people wanted to hear.

[edit] raises an interetsing concept though doesn’t it?

Ie “do not try and make yourself cool or less Old-Fashioned-Tory-Boy by associating yourself with my carefully crafted Lefty Legend -you will tarnish my reputation as an artist.”

-should that be allowed? Is there a ‘Smiths Citizenship Test’ Cameron could sit? I’d like to see him look at the photos and then name the people on all their record sleeves. I bet he’s get about one in ten of them right…

my specialized xc shoes have the same sole in the same size as my defrosters, and the defrosters with same socks on feel maybe half a euro size smaller than the xc ones (comps iirc). So I would go up one euro size to use bigger socks: your feet will stay cold if your boots are too tight with big socks on as tight shoes will slow your circulation. That said, shimano always seems a bit smaller to me than specialized for a given size too.

That’s quite a confidence-in-bike-bling-distributors-sapping difference!!

What frame is it? And are you paying the regular USA rrp or is it in the sales?

Often when this sort of thing comes up here, we find the uk importer sells it at about 10-15% more than the total cost/shipping/tax from usa, which i suppose is an understandable premnium for local advice/backup and a warranty you can sort out in the UK.

Although I would love to know how that compares to UK VAT and import tax getting it shipped over in bulk as opposed to one at a time. I certainly know and know of people who have paid mates rates not far off 60% of rrp for north american-made frames from a UK distributor.

singletrackhor – Member

how come that lego mtb aint got knobbly tyres?

The freehub’s already gone on ours as well 🙁