Was looking for them a few weeks back. Shame, they did some good stuff at a great price.

Why do people keep buying Shimano brakes?

I had XT caliper fail and lever fail twice so looked elsewhere. Hope were literally twice the cost of XT, and personally I still prefer the performance of XT. I went with the Hopes, but it’s not hard to see why people don’t.

I was sure it was the frame, but on closer inspection the top end bit is bent to the right. No idea what would of caused this, as it looks like that end is pretty solid structurally. Assume it was like this from the start and as on my old bike the rear yoke was horizontal I didn’t notice it as it had to be wiggled in anyway.

More likely is that an eyelet is mis-aligned than the whole shock is bent.

I’ll try and measure it later to work out exactly where the alignment issue is.

Just been alerted to 2 full F&R XT 4 pots minus rotors for £140 all in…shall I do it? 😉

If you want new brakes. Yes.

I’ve used those exact brakes a few times in Morzine. The only time I had issues is one day on the long fireroad descent right from the top of Swiss National (I forget the name). End of the day and just dragged the brakes all the way as it’s high speed (and boring) so didn’t want to die. By the bottom the rear had gone a little bit spongy. 10mins later it was fine for the rest of the trip.

Fidlock have a “uni connector” that can be used with any water bottle, but it will be slightly higher profile than the dedicated bottle.

Yes! Ordered this. Pretty much perfect solution. Means I’m not stressing about losing the dedicated bottle as well. Thanks for the help everyone.

I have the 2.25 Ralph on my hardtail. It comes up very large. On wider rims it comes up like a balloon! Someone even asked me what plus tyres are like when I had it fitted to 35mm internal rims.

It rolls very quickly but a Rock Razor is going to be stronger and more versatile. Likely heavier than the NN though.

I’m told Haldon Forest has decent off piste stuff/blockquote>

Rode “Cafe side” bits for the first time in the SW Enduro the other week. Very impressed, some good stuff.

I see Symondsbury was mentioned. The little bike park there isn’t listed on the website any more and sadly last time I went down it was very overgrown. Worth phoning ahead if anyone is planning a visit. I assume the XC loop is still in place.

+1 for Morzine too. Purely for simplicity from your point of view.

Loads of accommodation choices, just book something outside of town and pedal to the lifts if you are bothered about being busy. As said, Morzine isn’t busy in the summer by winter standards. I liked to get up early and ride to the bakery and the town is silent in the morning, nothing like the winter.

Riding wise there’s an insane amount in the area, and if you are happy to explore then you’ll find more steep techy non jumpy berm stuff than you could ever ride in a week. Just be aware that a lot of the marked trails are jumpy/bermy so you will need to head off the beaten track. Getting a guide for at least one day would be a good idea, but I can understand the desire to find it yourself.

La Thuille is probably the best place I’ve ever ridden, just as you seem to be struggling getting things sorted, Morzine seems the better choice for first holiday.

Another question hope people will still see this, would anyone still consider a 5 year old bike (say like this trance) or would people go for newer one?

The previous gen Trance is a good bike. It’s geo is only really outdated by its fairly slack seat angle. The SX has 160mm forks? So around 66 degree head angle? Great for a trail bike. It’s also light and well built. I’ve ridden the newer Trance and there is very little difference.

£600 is a reasonable price, the only question I’d have would be how much use has it had, and have the fork/shock been serviced recently? If its done thousands of hard miles and the suspension needs some love then you can be looking at £200 for that.

Im same height as you and had a small 2014 Trance. It was my first “proper” mountain bike so I just followed the chart. Even by the standards of the time, it was pretty small. Fun and maneuverable, but a medium would of been a better fit.

If I was going to buy one now though I’d go large as with a short stem even the medium is pretty small. (I’ve since ridden both the 2014-16 and latest Trance in medium)

I always add a few psi as where I live its just mud and roots, no rocks , so can get away with pretty low pressures. BPW whilst it doesn’t have many pointy rocks, tends to be higher speed than my everyday riding, so more forces going into the rims.

Ironically, Rim Dinger has now been remodelled and is pretty smooth.

What size are you after?

M probably.

There seem to be a few T130’s around with coils on, I’m not sure that the linkage progression is what you’re after but quite a few people have gone for it.

Yeah pretty sure T130s are regressive at the end of the stroke. I want something that ramps up nicely, as I don’t want it to feel to soggy.

Really the Spitfire seems pretty spot on. Only downside are the bottle cage location and lack of internal routing, but these are small when everything else seems so perfect.

Spitfire looks pretty spot on!

Any reason not to just use a phone?

First time are Haldon. Stages were great fun and good atmosphere. Weather was a nice surprise too.

S4 is the alternative black down Y Wall, instead of the zig zags. It’s recently been felled, but is open again now and I think I prefer it now. It was good before, now it’s a great steep techy descent.

as there’s not typically anything to learn from just riding round the terrain

Yeah, not sure I agree there at all.

My crank fell off end of the last lap on Sunday, I keep a tool on my bike so put it back on, with the faff I lost about 4 mins, but there was no way I was going to just give up. Part of the fun was seeing how many places I could get back.

Pretty sure most shocks/forks don’t come with any air in from the factory. Plus you need to set it to your weight otherwise it’s likely they will ride horribly.

Most Rockshox have an air/weight chart on the leg.

I have a Leyzene pump that I cannot use since every time you blow a tyre up and try to remove the inflation tube, it simply unwinds the valve core.

I found adding a blob a grease to the thread on the pump helps.

They pedal ok, not great. Seat angle is slack which doesn’t help things. As said frames are impressively light.

Rear end is very compliant, very good in the rough stuff.

On flat stuff it suffers from what many longer travel bikes have where theirs not much to pump against and it smooths everything out. Not particularly poppy either.

I think Reigns are underrated, but wouldn’t buy one to ride trail centres.

Have the 2016 rockshox yari been serviced recently? Even just a lower leg?

Bird Zero TR?

Yeah, they are perfect frames. Over budget sadly, but the spec is great. Ideally one of them with poverty spec components ha.

That Marin looks pretty spot on. Ill investigate!

XC racing and Long / Low / Slack don’t really go together

I don’t really see why not. Slackness doesn’t affect climbing that much imo, and I see no reason why XC bikes are short, seem to be that you want stability? Same with low, whats the downside for racing?

I use a 2.6 MM front and 2.35 MM rear. It’s pretty slow but good in the winter on steep sloppy stuff.

The Nobby I find is a little flimsy so prefer the Hans Dampf or Rock Razor for the rear for something faster rolling.

Most phones now have 1000ms sampling rate, which is good enough.

I’ve found if you record your own segments, and when doing so, go slowly to make sure there are enough data points then it seems to be pretty accurate. As above, anything under 1min should be ignored as they tend to be the least accurate.

I do a similar loop on my lunch break most days and distance and elevation are always within a few m, so it is consistent. Looping the same segment that I’ve recorded results in times within a few seconds, which is what you’d expect.

Strava isn’t accurate enough to race with, but as long as you control as many of the variables as you can, does make for a useful tool.

but overall, fast people are fast on strava, slow people are slow.

Also this.There’s always the odd outlier, but looking at segments as a broad spread this seems to be true.

I used to get fatigue and burning in the thighs in the attack position on long descents.

Doubtless that gym and strength training is the most efficient way, the fun way I took was commuting on a singlespeed geared to #just# be able to make the hills. This seems to give a full work out to legs, core and arms as you need to pull on the bars, and stand up nearly all the time.

I’ve used them before, as mentioned they do slacken the seat angle as well as the head angle. For this reason I prefer an angleset as this steepens the seat and slackens the head.

Quick Google shows it’s likely 185 x 52.5. Plenty of options and people have put 185 x 55 on them apparently to increase the rear travel.

Pretty sure you should be able to use any trunnion metric shock of the correct length? No need to buy from Giant.

Akrigg videos are the best riding videos imo. Everything about them is so good, the music, the location, audio and obviously the riding.

There’s so many little bits you miss, so they stand up to repeat viewings. Plus lots of the locations and features aren’t massive crazy things, the kind of places many of us would just ride by without even seeing that anything was possible on them, but Chris does crazy things on seemingly simple features.That’s the genius.

Always instantly want to go out and ride after watching one.

What don’t you like about the Suntours?

Finding a 9mm QR decent fork for under £200 might be tough.

Pinkbike is showing these options :

https://www.pinkbike.com/buysell/list/?location=193-*-*&q=9mm&category=9&price=..200&wheelsize=11

Everyone’s name is probably spelt wrong mind you…

Yeah we’ve got some interesting bike names.

15 min time limit was ridiculous

As above, we used a spreadsheet. Copy and pasting 6 people takes less than 5 mins.

Our group nabbed at least 16 ,only needed 6 so more released soon. Imagine quite a few people did the same.

Which way is it different mate?

Yes it squares the tyre off, but it also makes the contact patch wider. It seems to differ from model to model, but some tyres come up HUGE on the 35mm rims.

Here’s a photo of a 2.25 Nobby Nic and 2.25 Rocket Ron on them.

Both are much much wider than on the 24mm rim, and the Ron is just hilarious.

I went 19mm to 24mm and the difference was minimal. Now on 35mm and it’s a huge difference. Agree I’d just go to 30mm.

I fairly regularly race XCO and 2 hour+ XC races on my 160/150 bike. I change tyres and add loads of low speed compression to the suspension.

I still really enjoy it, I’m never going to bother the podium whatever bike I’m on so just treat it as a fun race trying to keep up with as many people as I can.

Great race on Sunday!

Practice the trails were slidy but running well, after the rain stopped the bottom of 2 was a real slog, and 3 was very slick in quite a few places.

https://www.instagram.com/p/Bo6bD7rFinY/

Had a lot of fun, and I’m sure the spectators did too!

It’s not working very well on any of my devices

Working fine on my S9 with Chrome. Never had an issue with speed logged in or out.

Maybe make a list of which devices are having issues ?