My T-130 Works came with Guide RS which were fine until a wet, gritty & muddy ride in Wales during which they started squealing and nothing I did made them stop until i swapped them out for my Hope E4s.

Not sure that helps much.

@lovetoride what’s your budget? I have a pair of unused ROAM40s in 650b that I’ve previously posted on the classifieds.

Very interesting read: http://www.theverge.com/2015/9/17/9338963/welcome-to-hell-apple-vs-google-vs-facebook-and-the-slow-death-of-the-web not sure where this leaves site like STW but as Mark says it’s going to be interesting over thenext few weeks and months.

@jimslade As it’s a bridleway have you reported this to your local rights of way officer they can and do take such things serioulsy

+1 Whyte T130 I have the Works and it’s a very capable trail bike

My riding buddy is much quicker than me nearly everywhere and he’s a good 2 stone lighter, he just a much better rider. Sometimes I can freewheel down a road hill and he’s pedalling to keep up but mostly he’s just way faster than me :-)

I swap around a bit so at present I have a Minion on the front and an Ardent on the rear, when the trails get muddy, as opposed to their current damp status, I’ll go Minion on the rear and Shorty up front. If it’s a really wet winter I’ll run Shorty front and rear.

Shorty is excellent on the front if it’s muddy but quite draggy on the rear so it needs to be very muddy to have it on the rear.

I leave near Winchester and the ground has a lot of clay in it so when it’s really muddy it’s the thick clingy stuff so it needs an aggressive tread.

HTH

I enjoyed ‘The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August’ by Claire North

@gary True but if you want any real grip offroad then in my experience you have to trade the on road speed.

I’m currently running a Minion up front and a standard Ardent at the back which, given dampish trails, is fine for grip off road and not too draggy on road. Most of my riding is ~ 20 -30 miles with 80% off road.

The Ardent Race was much better on road but fairly sliding off now the trails aren’t bone dry.

As always what suits one person tyres wise is another persons ‘no way’ :-) Tyres used to be cheap enough to swap out if you didn’t like them but now at £40 – £50 a tyre it’s harder to ‘test ride’ them, although tyre compounds are so much better than 20 years ago IMHO!

Do you ride with anyone who you feels rides really well? Sometimes following someone ‘good’ shows what the bike can do which I find helps with my confidence. HTH

Ardent Race, mine are 27.5 2.3s, are good but now swapped out as my local trails are starting to get consistantly damp! HTH

Maxxis Shorty for both ends
or
+1 Maxxis Shorty Front & Maxxis Minnion DHR II rear

+1 for the Airshot especially if you already have a track pump

Night riding is some of the best fun you can have on a bike IMHO. Do you have any mates you can do a regular night ride with, there’s a group of 5+ in my village and we ride on a Weds night with a pint at the end! HTH

I realised in March, on my 50th birthday to be exact, that I was the heaviest I’d ever been so I decided to do something about it and this worked for me:

1) Cut out all ‘bad’ food
2) Reduce portion size by 25%
3) Fasted training ride twice a week – 2.5 -3.5 hours going as hard as I dared roughly 30 – 35 miles off road
4) Push hard all the way around my weekly park run 5K
5) Get more sleep

I’m not sure if the last one really helps to lose weight but it made me feel ‘better’ which allowed me to do items 1 – 4 more easily.

I’ve managed to lose 28 lbs ~ 12.7 kg between March and July and am now aiming to lose another 6 kg over the next 3 months.

My T-130 Works is excellent HTH

Ask the LBS to confirm in writing that the repair is safe and doesn’t put you at risk of injury. Also ask what crankset they are providing in the goodwill gesture and post it on here so we can tell you it’s true cost.

I have a MaxxRaxx which I’ve found excellent, I choose it because it allows me to tow my trailer when the rack is in use.

What’s the downside, other than cost, of having a mosquito net? I’d get one and use it that way you’re as sure as you can be that they won’t get you.

Only issue I’ve had with Hope floating rotors is frame clearance so I run a floating disc on the front (both FS and HT) and a plain Hope rotor on the back.

Don’t really think the floaters make any difference but as the LBS ordered the wrong discs and then charged me the standard price so I kept them :-)

I like my RockShox Monarch Debonair, RT3 and in a shameless plug kind of way I have one for sale:

http://singletrackworld.com/forum/topic/nearly-new-rockshox-monarch-debonair-rt3-reverb-125-stealth-and-more

As per my (much) earlier post it depends on what you were/are riding before you change. i have a XC orientated HT with 26″ wheels and a 650b FS and they feel very very different. Some of the difference is wheel size but a lot is the fact that the FS has ‘modern’ geometry whereas the HT has ‘traditional’ XC geometry. Also the HT has a Reba (which is great) but the FS has a Pike (much much better) so that makes a real difference.

As long as we all keep riding bikes we like riding then that’s good enough for me :-)

+1 for the airshot

Main advantage is it doesn’t leak and I’m not worried it’ll go pop if I put 160psi in it.

Also done a few friends tyres and it’s worked every time except the first when I was being a numpty!

As I already have 2 track pumps a Bontrager Flash Charger seemed a step too far. My LBS has the Flash Charger and it does seem quite flimsy as the fittings look to be cheap plastic although it works OK.

I guess £1.5 million isn’t ‘enough’ nowadays, maybe it was 20 years ago? All depends on what you need to ‘live’ but I’m guessing most people enter the lottery in the hope (vain or otherwise) of winning enough that they can change their lives? For me personally £1.5 million would have a significant but not totally life changing effect, £10 million on the other hand would be life changing.

I guess people day dream about “how much better my life would be if I won…” and even if their chances are small there’s a glimmer of hope which for some people makes the cost/chances of winning irrelevant.

Beryl Burton +1 Look at her results, the kit she rode, the inequality with male riders that she beat

For me it’s very variant so last night:

22.95 mi @ Avg of 9.9 mph Elev Gain 1,719 ft

last Monday night

34.67 mi @ Avg of 10.8 mph Elev Gain 2,598 ft

I’m 50 ride at least twice a week around Winchester, not very technical trails and I try not to use much tarmac (except to link stuff up)

Main problem last night was i started tired (lack of sleep) and didn’t get into a decent rhythm.

Does any of this stuff matter? To me yes as I like to know I’m making the most of my riding time and gaining fitness to anyone else it’s irrelevant

I’m quicker on my Whyte T-130 Works on local trails but my HT is fairly XC in setup and therefore quite nervous on the faster downhill stuff. My garmin tells me I’m faster on the FS but as I’ve not ridden the HT for about 8 weeks it might be that the trails are dryer and I’ve been riding more.

Mostly I’m enjoying the FS but in the winter gloop I’ll probably swap back to the HT.

Nice meal out somewhere where the napkins are cotton :-)

Brand new bike or new to you? If the former ask your LBS/supplier for advice but I’d say not having bedding them in is the likely cause.

FWIW I find that pads bed in better in the winter with a bit of mud and gloop but in summer high speed stops repeated a few times should do the job.

I’ve normally run 32psi F and 36psi R on my Whyte T-130 which has Maxxis Ardents setup tubeless on ROAM40 wheels. When I checked recently I’d gone down to 24psi F and 18psi R due to lots of small thorn punctures which had sealed but lost a few psi each time. The bike felt awful when running so low, it really felt like the rear was going to roll off the rim!

As always if it works for you why change it?

I went with the Airshott as I have more than two bikes setup as tubeless and 2 mates who also run tubeless and it makes re-inflating reliable.

With the milkit thing you still need to get the tyre seated the first time but subsequent re-filling of sealant looks easier.

@munkster OK yes CO2 not great I did that and ended up with a solid lump of sealant and lose of air! I use an Airshott[/url] to pop the tyre back on and it seems to work every time, it’s a bit pricey but if you run tubeless it’s almost a must have.

@munkster how are you re-inflating? Track pump? CO2?

We were there in June and I’m sure it said from 15 July until ~ end of August

Had one of our best non-biking holidays in Lake Bled, really good location for a family holiday IMHO.

I’m running a 2.3 ardent on the front and a 2.3 ardent race on the rear (both tubeless) on my Wyte FS and they are both excellent. My mate runs an ardent 2.4 on the rear of his HT and loves it.

As ever different folks like/love/loath different kit :-)

My wife was made redundant from Hampshire County Council because they’ve had a 40% decrease in budgets and a 25% increase in services required (over approx 4 years) so staff had to go.

Very few of us want to pay more tax so when we ask council staff to divert from the jobs they are meant to be doing, many people left in council jobs are now covering multiple roles, it’s not surprising that they have to charge the time/effort required.

Maybe the council should make these ‘admin’ services completely free by shutting down more service like schools, care homes and the like?

OK thanks for the feedback, I guess the OEM stuff is good quality but doesn’t float many people’s boat unless they have that brand already. I didn’t think the OEM stuff was massivly overpriced but it’s not selling so maybe it is :-)

The other parts such as the shock, wheels etc don’t seem really overpriced but maybe they are a bit more specialist in the fact that if you don’t want that wheelset, for example, then you’ll not want to pay decent money for it? I guess if you’re just looking for a 650b wheelset then a brand new £500 wheelset for £350 still looks expensive?

I guess that everyone wants a bargain and so decent stuff either goes fairly cheap or just doesn’t go :-)

I might try my luck on that other popular listings site :-)

In May 2013 I was hit by a car and did a perfect headstand onto concrete. My Xray was OK so the following weekend I rode in Mid-Wales on a boys weekend away and had a couple of slowish speed crashes. Jump forward to 3 weeks ago and the MRI I had for nerve pain in my shoulder showed that I have two damaged disks in my neck and my fractured vertebra had healed nicely!

My physio has told me that neck injuries need prompt treatment as if you leave it too long you end up with the risk of fixing it being too great which is where I’m at now.

I’d get it checked and if needed treated promptly. HTH

+1 for a watch and a wedding ring!