Thanks for all the posts.

A) I am aware of the law and know I do need (and in fact own!) a light board and registration plate
B) This is genuinely a two journey use – the current electrics are out of action, I’m not planning on keeping the car much longer so to get them up and running I would need to spend money on car that I won’t own in a few weeks time
C) £60 vs £100 repair (I’ve been quoted) seems decent VFM or risk vs reward.

C) for me makes it worth the risk in this particular circumstance I think, but I appreciate the words of caution, and they are duly noted!!

Sorry, but it was / is a genuine question, not a troll!

I have the chance to rectify the issue at a cost of £100 and personal inconvenience and trying to work out whether it is £100 I’d rather have in the bank for 2x journeys, or if the risk is simply not worth it.

Lots of success here – 10% BC discount applied to whole purchase, including bike that was discounted (which I was fairly sure was supposedly excluded from the BC scheme).

So got 10% off the whole spend, voucher fully used and the rest of the spend I could use Halfords vouchers which I can buy through a staff scheme at 10% off face value.

Don’t ask, don’t get!

AA Home insurance (well, their agents) turned around and fully paid a claim for theft of three bikes under a standard home insurance garage contents policy in less than 12 hours from submission of claim form. New for old, accepted the arguments that new were more expensive than we’d paid for the old.

Cheers all – I’ll try to dig out some stuff when i get home tonight. Fingers crossed for a sensible insurance arrangement.

With the protection of the seat tube, it seems to me that an electronically activated dropper would be the least vulnerable to damage on a MTB compared to DI2 shifting etc. A simple transmitter at the bars and a small motor on the foot of the dropper post and bobs your uncle?

The principle seems to work for motorcyclists, so no reason why protecting your core couldn’t be beneficial (when accompanied by protecting the head too). Whether the price / comfort of it means you’d want to invest is a different matter.

Twelve50 seem like a good setup, bought some stuff from them over Xmas and they’ve done a few wheel repairs for me. Nothing more than that though.

Tracs always seem a bit overly grumpy (though last time I was in there, this weekend actually, they bucked that trend somewhat). Not used their repairs service though.

In fact, it says precisely:-
“Inflate tyre to 30psi to seat bead. Do not exceed 40psi / 2.75bar. For road tubeless use consult max pressure of the tire and rim and do not inflate above the lowest listed pressure”. It then describes the bouncing / rotation.

https://www.notubes.com/stan-s-tire-sealant-pint

Checked the bottle of Stans I have last night – it says inflate to a max of 40psi, though for road tyres it says inflate to the minimum recommended PSI of the tyre. Not sure what would be the right choice for your tyres, but I think the logic is that if the bead is set properly you don’t want or need particularly high pressure, particularly because there might be a chance of a messy explosion as you’ve had!

Doesn’t the bottle of Stans say NOT to inflate to a high pressure at first when the sealant is in once you’ve got the beads set in place?

I’m not imagining that the piston is damaged, not through an OTB etc anyway, so I’m suspecting things like o-rings and general sealing. The service kit sounds worth a punt with the accompanying “having a looksie” first.

I did look at the ReMote Sustain. Interested, because it takes out the hydraulics in the actuation. But not cheaper than a replacement lever!

Thanks all! Will try LBS see what they can do for a new old-style button lever.

Difficult to tell, but not from the hose / inlet. Somewhere in / around the piston / plunger.

Cheers all.  Looks like a decent bet – now I just need to shift the Frog 62 so I can afford to splash out on the Bonaly!

@steve_B77 huh?  10.2kg would be super light for a 26-er MTB surely, especially compared with even good value adult entry level bikes at that price (e.g. decathlon’s offerings around £400 would be 13-14kg – though the absence of a sus fork helps of course)

Cheers, was that the disc or non-disc version?  Disc is claimed at 10kg, non-disc at 8.6kg, so presuming you’re referencing the non-disc.  Even at 11kg though of course, the Hoy would still be v light.

I’ve had both a TomTom Runner (first model) and Garmin Vivoactive (currently in use, not the HR model). Both were great as running watches, I “upgrade” to the Vivoactive because it was on a deal at the time and does smart notifications and custom “apps” and displays (e.g. some basic navigation features etc). Also has Bluetooth and Ant+ so I’ve got a HR, cadence and speed sensor paired with it.

Both sync fine with Bluetooth, I think the Vivoactive is nicer and it mounts nicely on bars when I’m riding too with a cheap Decathlon bar watch mount.

Can’t see how the OP is to blame in any way at all here. Surely a LBS has to assume that the minute their piece of work is taken off the shop floor it is being ridden, and not that the purchaser will do their own QC checks on it. After all, one of the reasons many people would take a bike to a LBS is that they are technical numpties who don’t know what to do with a set of allen keys.

At the very least they should be refunding the whole cost of the job (or at least a very substantial part) as it was not done to a satisfactory standard. If there was damage done to the bike after the OP noticed it wasn’t “right”, I can see that they shouldn’t be held responsible for that.

Chrono order went out of the window on my feed about a month ago. Wonder if many have only just noticed as the new skin on the feed is also now live.

The new look I don’t mind and I’m sure I’ll get used to.

The absence of chronological ordering though is bonkers.

The most likely scenario is that some behind the scene deal was done where those who thought him guilty of manslaughter agreed to go with the not guilty verdict on that (we don’t know if that ended up being a majority verdict or not in the end) in return for a unanimous guilty verdict for the wanton charge.

That’s not the most likely scenario. The most likely scenario is that the jury came to a majority verdict through their own means of NG for manslaughter and G for the W&F* offence. Deals are only done, if at all, in terms of the charges presented to the court – there is much less ability in the UK plea bargains etc, and if the verdict was left to the jury to decide (which it was in this case) then there was no deal being done.

*I still think most are missing the point about the W&F offence, as my reading of it just requires an injury and an illegal act, the W&F is optional or potentially just descriptive.

@aracer – I don’t disagree with how it might be logical to come to the interpretation you have. But equally I don’t discount that the judge has not left a wide open goal in a written summary which an appeal would pick up on as evidence of the judge adding her own evidence to the case without a basis in fact.

On that basis, I prefer to accept as more likely that the judge has given an accurate account of the evidence she heard, rather than make an assumption about evidence not heard.

I do agree though that in the absence of any transcript neither you or I know the answer to this question.

Ref pedestrians being held to account. How common is it that a pedestrian negligently or carelessly gets themselves onto a road and the harm is done to someone else? Invariably the harm happens to them. In that way they are held to account!

I think in the UK it is accepted that it is not illegal or necessarily negligent for a pedestrian to attempt to cross a road at any point whether or not there is a specified crossing place. Rightly or wrongly there’d be uproar if there was legislation to address this.

The balance of the UK law is to make it the responsibility of a driver (or rider) to not hit something that is in their way on a road, irrespective of how it gets there. If you hit something and it is not conceivable that you could have avoided it, there is mitigation. If you hit something and it is reasonable that you could have avoided it, there is a price to pay. Seems sensible enough to me, and that’s what’s in my mind when I drive or ride through heavily congested areas with pedestrians crossing.

Of particular note is the judge’s comment: “shouting and swearing at pedestrians to get out of your way” – as I mentioned earlier, the use of the plural appears to be the judges interpretation.

Can you evidence that. Given judges propensity to choose their words carefully, I read that as being a recounting of evidence that the court heard during the trial, rather than just a pluralisation of a single event in the mind of a judge.

I think we all need to be careful of extrapolating a whole story from the snippets that we’ve actually heard. Unless you were in the court to hear all of the evidence (as the judge was) I’d suggest care needs to be had when we are drawing inferences (e.g. “plural appears to be the judges interpration” – it “appears” to you, but not based on any specific fact, as far as I am aware. Happy to be corrected!)

It’s one of the fundamental tenets of learning to drive – you need to be prepared to stop at any time (hence the emergency stop protocol) to deal with an unexpected event in front of you. Whilst there’s no driving test for bikes (no mandatory one anyway) the same applies – you’ve got to be prepared for someone doing something stupid in front of you (e.g. the classic kid running in the road to get a football etc) and be both competent enough to stop as soon as you can, and have a vehicle maintained such that it can achieve that stop within normal parameters. Not every car has ABS, wide tyres, active suspension etc to stop as soon as is possible to engineer, but they all are expected to meet certain minimum standards. Same for bikes – where its simple – a front a rear brake.

Excellent summary there ^^^

I’d say it was arguably higher than death by careless driving, closer to death by dangerous driving by the way it has been described by the judge in those sentencing notes – reinforcing how valid the sentence appears to be in that context.

Interesting thanks for the link. I suspect whether reading that you view the judge as someone who just doesn’t understand cycling, or as the views of a rational judge in the circumstances, might depend on your existing prejudices.

I read it as rational, save for the peculiarity of the standard “you didn’t have a helmet on” seemingly to be an indication of lack of safety consideration towards others (which it self evidently isn’t).

Given that he was not found guilty of causing death

Not strictly true, as he was not charged with a crime featuring “causing death” in its construction. He was found not guilty of manslaughter.

He was found guilty of causing bodily harm – the fact that that lead to death but not to a guilty verdict of manslaughter is the reason why the bereaved husband is petitioning for a “death by…” style of crimes to deal with this sort of situation.

The Guardian article reporting it suggests he has some significant emotional issues which may well get in the way of his ability to demonstrate or feel remorse. I’m not saying he’s a character deserving of 100% sympathy, but there looks to be more going on than is simply distilled in a forum.

I think we have to consider that the court has heard the story first hand and the nuance of how deserving this chap is of the sentence awarded is one they can judge far better than us. It does seem an unusually tough sentence, but I’d imagine the judge hasn’t made that decision lightly.

A bit of a history around how we “missed” the fact that fat isn’t bad, but sugar is…

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/apr/07/the-sugar-conspiracy-robert-lustig-john-yudkin

I heard a programme on the fat vs sugar thing a while back. Something along the lines that “The phrase that fat makes you fat is about as scientifically valid as that the one who smelt it dealt it”

For me my Garmin watch running livetrack works ideally for this. Until you end up off the beaten track with no data connection…

There are enough times when I’ve been on various runs / rides where even SMS signal would be unavailable too, so whatever you find will be fallible. And sods law says it’ll be fallible right at the time you need it ;-)

Got both CM and Smorgasbords running tubeless in our household, not noticed either of them weeping with Stans fluid.

I had cause to remove and refit gorilla tape recently as it had punctured due to ham fisted tyre removal by son. Peeled off with zero residue, reapplication took all of 3 minutes.

This is numpty to numpty advice, but as I’ve just replaced my first pressfit BB I am one step ahead!

In terms of which BB you need, I found a call to the bike manufacturer put my mind at ease that I was looking at the right one to buy. It’s broadly shell width, cup diameter and crank diameter that these things vary by. So I suppose if you measure those you’re in the right starting place?

The Ride cranks are 24mm according to the RF website (https://www.raceface.com/products/details/ride-cranks)

In terms of removing and fitting, I used a 10mm socket on the end of an extension and a soft mallet which removed (and destroyed) the old BB (which was knackered anyway), and then I bought from ebay a cheap tool to press in the new BB. Both jobs probably took 5 minutes each without a hitch.

Not much help, but it’s all I’ve got!

To contradict Larkim, I think it would as you are effectively riding one large roller and trying to push your weight up it. This isn’t the same with a separate roller for the front and rear wheels.

But look at the bike from the side – its not going anywhere up, down or sideways. So there’s no “work” being done.

A treadmill that you walk on lets you move your centre of gravity forwards, then the treadmill moves it back.

Or put another way, if you mounted the bike vertically and the rollers vertically, do you think it would be any harder to pedal? I don’t think you’d find you were doing any uphill work.

But again, I could be wrong!

I don’t run any XTR or Dura-Ace, but I wouldn’t dream of racing a bike that wasn’t as well lubed and fettled as possible – certainly if I was spending more it would be on replacing worn out parts earlier rather than replacing bits with XTR and running them to the same state of wear.

A clean Tiagra drivetrain doesn’t give much Rapha Clubhouse posing cred though.
I’m sure that’s true. But are you confident that you turn your bike out, day in day out, to the same standard as a good pro team mechanic will with the team’s racing bikes?

I bet a pro mechanic could get my Sora clad bike to run more freely and efficiently than I could (and therefore “make me faster”), but instead I could buy a groupset which saved me a ton of weight, fit it badly but still end up with a significant weight saving which therefore “makes me faster”.

Almost certainly no difference on a standard GT day, even a high mountain day, assuming the bike still weighs at the UCI minimum and there have to be no other compromises to the bike to achieve the UCI minimum.

If it wasn’t Froome though and was perhaps a rider heading off on a solo breakaway on a 200km flat TdF stage? Perhaps a little more friction from a heavier drivetrain, a little less aero on the shifters, etc might amount to a handful of seconds.

It seems likely to me that amateur riders looking to save weight achieve more than pro riders do from some of the higher end, lighter components. Especially as the pros can guarantee that their bikes are cleaned / lubed / fettled / maintained to a consistent standard daily, so lower quality parts issues won’t arise.

Would it change if you were cycling on a running machine pointed up? i.e. a travellator type thing

For some reason I’m thinking that it would feel harder (because if you stopped riding and it stopped moving you’d still roll backwards)
But you’d still be staying still and doing no work against gravity. The roll back would just be potential energy being released which was input when the bike was put up on the treadmill. I think.

This sort of stuff messes with my head – a bit like the 747 on a treadmill thought experiment. https://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2006/12/11/the-airplane-treadmill-conundrum/