Well an eco town would have one of those pyrolysis plants turning what would be landfill into electricity, backing up a safe carbon free baseload from the nearest nuke plant, and maybe some fracking going on nearby producing gas that can go straight into the diesel engines in the local transport and utility fleet as a low carbon fuel – when it isn’t being used as a domestic and low carbon alternative to coal and oil.

Or maybe it’d be a bunch of unworkable showhomes made of felt and wattle arranged around a mockup of a wind turbine, and a show market stall sporting ‘organic’ veg with some dirt rubbed on it and packed in straw.

I almost went 29er front end on my current bike, but each component needed to fit at least 2 others, some of which I had, some I didn’t, and some I either did or didn’t depending on what the searches for those I didn’t have turned up …

What with different options for axle, brakes, steerers, travel, hubs, etc the n-dimensional matrix of possible purchases gave about a gabillion possibilities, within which the number of actual compatible/suitable instances was zero!

That proves (for a given value of proof) that these standards are all about getting people to throw out 5 components in order to replace 1. I’d still have one of those voodoo bajingoes if I was buying now, though.

Blazin-saddles:
Had a Diamond Back years ago, a new FS design called the XR8. unfortunately the type face on the frame made it look like KR8, who wants a FS bike called a crate?

As a ‘krait’ is a very dangerous snake of the Indian subcontinent, ‘KR8’ could be quite a cool name for a company called Diamond Back. They missed a trick there! (The XR8 actually IS the real DB bike.)

Is very disappointed… Speeding, the very work of the Devil and no condemnation or holier than thou comments about observation, deaths of children, world poverty etc. Tsskkkk, STW is slipping.

There’s no point, France is a lost cause regarding speed. Often their speed limits are a little higher than ours due to being rounded off in kph – and as we know our speed limits reflect the maximum safe speed possible.

Was it not laterally stiff yet vertically compliant?

Is this basically about what constitutes ‘real mountain biking’?

Seems like the next step for you is controlling front wheel height, that’ll get you off drops and over small lumps like rocks roots and sticks nicely – and it’s also the first part in a proper bunnyhop.

The technique is called a “front wheel uppie-duppie sans pedalling”, or “manual”, there’s probably a wealth of instruction on youtube for this technique. Watch some, then repeatedly ride off kerbs to nail it down. Bon chance! 🙂

You’ve got some time, just grow a beard.

The women at the start of that vid sound like they’ve been reading the advice I posted here about getting in shape, and had made a good start! 😉

Those most happiest with their bods can be those who are really into a sporty activity. The conditioning actually makes them look good, even while they’re thinking less about how their body looks and more about what it can do.

The options are almost limitless, but maybe avoid sumo.

Almost forgot – “aspirational”.

As the energy

Voodoo Bazinga, with 400 odd quid left over to spend on another one, if you find a deal!

If merely braking harder wears out bushes faster, and you have the skill/grip to brake harder than your little rotors allow, then yes. But considering that your bushes absorb smashing into rocks and landing jumps, then it will be by an un-measurably small amount that doesn’t matter at all.

Or:
Isn’t the whole point of better brakes to help you stay out of the bushes, avoiding any wear on the local shrubs at all! 😀

From the article above:

British Cycling called on the government to act to ensure sportives are better co-ordinated so as not to clash with road races.

Now you can blame many things on the government, but this ain’t down to them – and frankly I’d say organisation of sportives should be of no concern to national level government at all.

I’m not an expert in the lingo of this pass-time, so this might be way off, but: Why not just buy a voodoo bazinga?

Already being covered above, but just to add my weight. The ‘green’ movement in general is in favour of things that are bad for the environment and bad for people. They are anti-scientific and dogmatic. They promote a political and social idea that we should revert to a pre-industrial way of life and claim that it’s about the environment.

Oh, and the ‘nuclear waste’ problem is only a semantic problem. It’s not waste, it’s fuel, it still has up to 95% of the original energy in it. We have a nuclear fuel surplus.

I rolled down a slope with a hole at the bottom, did that pause mid OTB thing where you seem to be on the front wheel for an age … and just stayed there. My rear wheel was caught on a branch, so I slid down to standing on tiptoe with a bollock either side of the stem, the bars across my thighs holding me on, and the saddle against the back of my head.

Other half was nervous about a gulley full of a deep layer of autumn leaves. Looked over shoulder, told her to relax and let the bike do the work, went straight OTB. Put her right at ease, that did.

Getting on a modern, mini penny farthing, stood on the back-most pedal to spin the free wheel to get the pedal down, to stand on it and mount up. But of course the cranks are fixies, straight into the front wheel. An OTB while in “reverse” doing a “wheelie” on the wrong wheel. While watched by a clown. So that mickey taking lasted a while.

OTBs are great, aren’t they?

The Boardman range, and the Voodoo Bazinga.

molgrips:
Back under your bridge.

You seem upset, did I take your turn?

Some cost less than cheap motorcross bikes, some cost more most cost less than expensive motorcross bikes, does not require engine rebuild frequently if raced, not really the same thing.

They might not need engine rebuilds, but they do require the configuration of gears, travel, and such to be changed every fortnight, then they need the frame replacing every year, all for reasons I haven’t quite grasped. And you also need to own about 7 of them, also for reasons I haven’t yet grasped. And you need a separate set of tyres for every place you ride, for every time of year. That must all add up..!?

I’ll go one further than Orange 5, and say: mountain bikes.

They sure look like an offroad vehicle, having bouncy bits and excitingly chunky tyres, but to judge by the moaning here about “ruined” “trails” (a trail being mountain biker talk for “piece of ground I ride on, and thus own”) they are utterly hopeless when faced with a hoof-print, a (braking) bump, or a tyre rut. They are also no fun at all if a “trail” (see above) is “sanitised” (ie: “smooth”). And they cost more than motocross bikes.

(Thankfully, my “bicycle that I ride offroad” doesn’t seem to be an actual mountain bike as it doesn’t suffer from these ailments – and it was cheap.)

Have to say, this is a problem we have less of because our land access laws aren’t designed to funnel all the traffic into a too-small network of trails.

A direct consequence of user interest groups devoting themselves to campaigning against the rights of others when they’re supposed to fight for rights for themselves.

And the right to “not be around people who enjoy the countryside differently” is not a right, it’s just a flimsy semantic trick.

(Down with ramblers!)

Forget goals. Goals can be achieved, at which point you stop, or fail to be achieved, at which point you give up.

You need to foster a state of mind, that state being complete and utter self loathing. You must hate your body. You must loathe the site of it, the feel of it. You need hate to motivate you to work. You need hate to motivate you to inflict pain. Every set of reps is a punishment you deserve and yet is never punishment enough.

The moment you think you’ve done enough, the moment you’re happy, you’ve lost. You are weak, you are scum, you are pathetic, you deserve to suffer.

Best of luck and all that. 😀

The scheme doesn’t go far enough. If we’re gonna have zones of progressless dawdling behind the slowest cyclist on the day, then NO-ONE should be allowed to pass anyone. So no filtering past the cars and nipping by the ‘not real cyclist’ on a BSO at the front.

Isn’t this what pudding is for?

Finish dinner or no pudding. Worked on getting my sister and me to eat pretty much any vegetable my mum put in font of us – except for broad beans, but there are limits.

And I like sprouts. They’re good roasted too.

Just as you can use coloured in the US and not here

WHAT!?!? I remember as a kid we were encouraged to use coloured, not black. Now coloured has been rotated out? When? Who decides? Do they send a memo? Why aren’t I on the mailing list?

Just as ridiculous as the yanks objecting to oriental, which I still struggle to believe…

7 pages of ranting about a word that wasn’t used in a clip that wasn’t aired in the context of finding it very hard to choose between two cars. It’s ok not to like a public figure, but to try and manufacture a spurious allegation of racism against them simply dilutes the SNR in which genuine incidents exist and damages the cause.

And Stewart Lee’s piece on Scotland and Willy Wallace is a showcase of brilliance in material, delivery, and guts! But he can seem very bitter and whiny sometimes, like in the piece on a “stolen joke”.

Sounds like standard local government obfuscation

It’s the exact opposite – it’s unvarnished facts.

The speed limit is commonly set at or below the 85th percentile operating speed (being the speed which no more than 15% of traffic is exceeding)

That being the case, speeding is actually a necessity! If we all obeyed the speed limit it would keep dropping until it reached 0… 😕

Mean is the average

Mean is an average. 🙂

45 mins/30 miles each way is very do-able..

Get decent goretex (and it has to be goretex) textiles – look for deals. I got the lot from Heine Gerricke for 350 quid by wandering in while they had a sale on. You do need to maintain them with wash in stuff.

Get heated grips.

Use something to prevent visor fogging and maybe a water shedding spray on the outside – it seems to help when rinsing off bugs and dirt too.

Weren’t tiny brompton size wheels shown give a significant aero advantage, but then ruled to be too “un-bicycley” to race by whoever it is who rules on stuff like that..? Someone here posted a black and white piccie of a bunch of guys racing them on one of those bicycle NASCAR track things.

Don’t sweat it too much, they mainly want to know you’re not being fired for gross misconduct. That said, a good answer could conceivably be a decider among closely matched applicants.

As above, describe what you think is good about the new company (if you must mention money, do it obliquely) not what is bad about the old – they want to hear you’re going to them because you’ll fit in and thrive together, not that you’re running from something else to whatever you can get that pays more.

Go to a private physio. GPs are no good at this.

Coincidentally, my back injury was 2 or 3 years old when it suddenly went very bad and I sought help. Turned out I’d been protecting the damaged muscle ever since and so it was all little and weak and inflexible. I was recommended a punishing course of verrucas (or “swimming”) and a dull uncomfortable stretching regime. And it got better.

Likelihood is you’ve got a damaged atrophied muscle and fixing it will require effort and pain. Anyone offering a cure not involving effort and pain is lying. Especially if it involves subluxation or chi.

Physio is hard and it hurts – and it works.

I can then strip down to my pants in the kitchen without upsetting the neighbours too much.

Try getting changed in your own kitchen.

(Late I know, but one of the earlier posters really should have thought of it.)

Just think what could result when saying to the tattooist “I want your name on my buttock”…

Which Neil Gaiman though, obviously done Good Omens (with Pratchett) but the only other I’ve read was American Gods.. verging on the dark side (sandman esk). Which are his comedic stories?

Stardust is probably quite comedic. I liked Anansi boys.

Just had a thought – Michael Moorcock’s stuff is mental. ‘Dancers at the End of Time’ is funny as hell in places. I reckon it’s the best of his I’ve read, and I’ve read a few.

A ‘Nomad of the Time Streams’ is good too, it’s Steampunk so would feel quite conventional – by Moorcock standards.

Who cares, it’s a mountain bike forum.

Mods, please move to off topic chat forum.

Seconded!

You wouldn’t post about Lance in the ‘Bikes’ section of a motocross or BMX forum, why do it here?

Michael Marshall Smith writes off the wall, weird SF.
And of course Pratchett writes off the wall, funny, weird fantasy. But you knew that already.

(And Game of Thrones is amazing, if not what yer after right now – though Tyrion is funny and has an even cuttinger (if sometimes earthier) wit than Jeeves!)

My other half had a gentle bump in a carpark, so filled in the ‘gentle bump in a carpark’ form and sent it off. Rang up some time later to find out what was happening and was told that as they hadn’t received the form they’d decided in favour of the other party and paid out.

She was furious – until renewal time when the premium dropped by 50%.

Just remember, the money you get paid comes from a bit being added to everyone else’s bill. This is wrong, and hits the poorest the hardest.

If you’re ok with that, also remember also that the rest of us are gonna get sick of paying you to have a blue shiny roof – to the extent that stopping it could be a vote winning issue.

If we really wanted to collect environmentally helpful ‘stuff’ from our roofs, we’d be collecting rainwater for toilet flushing, showers, washing machine etc.

This wasn’t Woodrups in Leeds by any chance?

Nah, won’t name and shame but two local shops and one large chain with garish orange livery.

So it’s not a big shop thing, or a little shop thing. Just a bike shop thing.

I guess the money’s in people who get their bike “serviced”. ie: a look at the brake pads, wiggle the wheels, re-index the gears. Near zero effort, zero parts, ker-ching. 🙂

Are you sure it’s not the frame that’s the wrong side of the fork?