That’d be £630 for two weeks a year.

You needn’t spend that amount. c.£95-200 for fronts and if you have space save them for next year?

No worries in 30cm snow, towing boats, Scottish pass-storming on closed roads etc etc. All on either a rover 75 or berlingo. The difference is night and day!

Eclectic
Eclectic
Eclectic

Thanks to everyone for their generous donations.
As someone who has had need of mountain rescue and the chopper before, I’m sure Chris would be very grateful for you support

After some over-adventurous riding

Absolutely devastated. I was with him on Friday night and he was in great spirits and was excited for catching up with friends in Glencoe. He was such a great guy who had achieved a lot within amateur Scottish cycling and otherwise. He will be missed by hundreds of people I’m sure. My thoughts go out to all the other friends and families affected by the tragedy and my thanks to mountain rescue and police for their help and support.

I’d go for the SX for just looking ‘right’ but would also consider the enduro and rune
Intenses are pretty expensive so might compromise the build and the Mega can be a bit uninspiring unless you get the shock set up right.
Yeti is more of a mile munching, efficient trail bike with back-up bounce.

On One are selling Ti frames for £500 at the moment. I have a race 29er from On one and like it but it’s not very compliant.

I’ve smashed a TL28 and an Arch EX in very similar circumstances (water bars on Skye and Torridon respectively) the Arch EX came off considerably worse. I’ve had no problems with teh TL28 on teh front from a year’s DH, Alps, enduro racing etc etc. Great all-round rim.

Isn’t graphene just the conductor in a screen? People seem to be making huge jumps from a layer of carbon to bendy, indestructible electronics without considering the limitations of the other materials necessary to make a screen.

It might be a nice material in moving parts for low-wear and low-friction properties.

I was the same for a few months, fairly random beats. Went away after a few weeks.

I’ve had one on the front of my big bike for nearly a year, has done Torridon, Alps, Dh races, enduros etc etc, no hiccups at all. Smashed the rear one on Skye, must have had a slow puncture and hit a water bar with a little too little air. Just dented it though but sent it back as I thought it was a little poor for a new rim that JRA said would be fine for that kind of riding.

I recommend them and JRA for service.

if done when the bearing is new it will extend the life of the bearing many times over.

+1
pop the seals off clean and regrease, job done.

Mondraker Dune with 170mm lyriks – does rad stuff, Alps, Enduros, technical trail centres etc.

On One carbon 29er – mincy stuff, racing, big days out, non-technical trail centres

Ribble sportive racing – doing the tarmacs.

All built up from frames because I’m a snob and a tight-arse.

If I was only able to have one it’d be a rad 120mm 29er 140/150mm 650b, a spesh cube or a norco I reckon.

I’m similarly confused as to why I was faster up climbs on my old remedy when I was unfit than when on my new carbon 29er and appreciably fitter.

As much as I find the police union(s) constant complaining annoying this really irks me. Yet again the newer, younger recruits get hit with the cuts and will have to pay for everyone else’s nice big public sector pensions while getting paid much less in real terms and having to contribute much more for their own pensions.

Graduate starting salaries seem to have dropped in real terms a bit over the last couple of years (excluding Oil and financial services). When I was looking £16,500 – £22,000 was the norm.

I’ve done 2 day/night enduros at Inners. PROTIP: put your light on your helmet, not on yours bars. Doing technical switchbacks at race-pace is a bit tricky when you turn into a pitch black void!

Some of the trails can be fairly technical but they’re all doable on a trail bike, just consider your lines when doing the day run.

Take some food with you too, you’ll be doing a hell of a lot of climbing over the day so make sure you don’t bonk!

It’s great fun though, definitely the best blend of price/trails/difficulty/amount of riding of any enduro event I’ve done in the UK.

Try for:

Oxbridge
Harvard
MIT (I’d kill to get into MIT)
Yale
Stanford
Princeton
You’ll need more that 5 As at highers to get in to those, you’ll need a few advanced highers too. You’ll need AAB or AA in advanced highers for Oxford for instance.

I would recomend some mathsy engineering – very versatile if maybe not as hands on as civil engineering. You can help develop cutting edge technologies/products/projects.

I’m half way though my research masters and am none the wiser as to what I want to do, worked in renewables for a year and it was pants, gold-rush industry full of cowboys and the planning policy is ridiculously inconsistent.

My advice would be to do something useful but general if you’re unsure, no point getting stuck with something that bores you!

Pure bampot.

Bontrager 29-1 are superb, very fast, very grippy even in the wet and clear mud exceptionally well for such a tyre. I’m just gutted I didn’t realise that not all teh team-issue ones are tubeless. Very light too for the amount of grip.

One figure that amazed me when I was researching some stuff at uni was that until c.1955-1960, the biggest anthropogenic source of GHGs was from simply ploughing fields.

As has been alluded to, one of the main issues is threshold events and feedback loops such as loosing albedo from snow/glaciers, ocean acidification, methane release from submarine sediments (potentially cataclysmic if sudden), Antarctic terrestrial ice melting etc etc.

Add to that the fact that places like the Gangees delta, East Anglia etc will be rather Atlantis-like in <100 years and it’s not something that we can simply ignore really.

unusually high levels of Oestrogen

I used to be of this train of thought too but after doing the cyclocross bikes I reckon that’s the manliest racing in terms of pain per second. I tend to think DHing is probably the least manly with all the infantile ‘colourways’ and self-appointed intrinsic coolness etc.
I just like road biking as I’m a strava addict,you get to gurn a lot when going balls-oooot and also because it’s just so fast.

Still, I have a lot more fun on my bouncy bike.

I had good service from them recently, asked a few questions about their new road wheels, got a quick response then ordered them. Realised I didn’t say I wanted a campy freehub and they swapped my order round after it being sorted for delivery without any hassle. nice one.

Mega, that’s true but if cavemen can get through it we should be alright shouldn’t we? Of course if it upsets agriculture it’ll be a right pain in the arse for millions of people.

As for worrying about green issues.. I just see it as common sense, yes it’s an added expense but it means we can keep on supporting a growing population without it catching us out in a big way at some point. e.g. if we were all veggies we could support c.20-32bn people, so plenty of potential there. In the end we just use too much stuff, if 7bn of us lives like a US citizen we’d need 5 planets, like a UK citizen 3ish, global average is 1.6 and a Bangladeshi is 0.3. So from that we can see the massive potential for developing countries to increase consumption so long as we sort ourselves out. (Considering the USA and Europe will skew that 1.6 from a lower figure in a big way) Rockström et al 2009 did a really good paper on this type of stuff – places where we’re well within limits and those where we;re exceeding them – identifying where efforts are best placed and where we can let ourselves go a bit to compensate. Summarised here

I love the look of barons but (very light) friends have punctures the be-jesus out of theirs. Seems really low volume too.
I love my 2.5 muddy mary at 16psi as an all-rounder it’s like another 10mm travel!

70% of plant and animal life was believed to be wiped out at the end of Cretaceous period by some event. Life carried on and the earth recovered.

Yes, but.

The rate of extinction we’re experiencing now is pretty much as we’d expect from a massive event like that which is scary considering many people aren’t even aware of it.

And it’s not due to some massive force of nature, it’s us being selfish and terribly inefficient. I don’t like the idea of just brushing off mass extinction of hundreds of thousands of species as being par for the course of me getting steak every week or having my lovely new Ipad.

we make no difference at all. in the slightest. whatsoever.

In terms of the time we’ve been around, and the tiny, tiny time since say 1300, we’ve had a mahoosive effect. Species can adapt to the odd meteorite, ice age or super volcano but not a complete removal and degradation of their physical habitat on a global scale.

Humans need to put more effort into space exploration rather than pissing around trying to ‘save the earth’

You ain’t going faster (or anywhere near) the speed of light so it’s completely pointless. And if we could, every time you went on a journey you’d end up hundreds of years away from when you started so you’re family, friends etc would be dead. Also, you’d be well behind with the gossip/latest niche.
Also, the cost of doing that – in order to go to completely inhosptibale planets with nothing of any use or interest would be umpteen times greater than just sorting our sh** out and living within our limits – there’s loads of cheap potential for reducing impacts.

Inners’ climb is a fair bit tougher which is worth bearing in mind but the descents are better/radder from what I remember.

life is too short to worry about stuff that is so far out of our control, just enjoy your little microcosm before you go to the big sleep

That’s the problem with humans, I want all the things now, I don’t care if that means everything’s naff for my grandchildren (never mind the millions of other species we share the planet with). Has to end badly doesn’t it?

As for arguing about atmospheric/climate science I’ve had too many arguments to be bothered. Don’t feed the ignorant trolls. Go read some science and have a wee think.

PRO tip: ride Crag quarry first if you’re doing both, works a lot better if you keep the speed up which can be hard if you’ve done a bit of riding in Lee quarry and ridden up to Cragg. Want to go back with my new, mincy 29er hartail which should suit it pretty well – great for training laps!

Sound Magic E10, in-ear so stay put and the best sound at that price range by a country mile.

Generally drains pretty well, wind is the main problem up there, particularly on the red route around the top of the quarry. It’s been reasonably clear for a couple of days now so should be alrightish, maybe a few puddles here and there but that’s to be expected. There aren’t really any muddy bits.

SKYNow is naff, no HD and few decent films.

Both orders dispatched. Win.

Second hand giant defy 2 2010 should be just about doable for that price. I have a 2008 Boardman comp available in your size-ish that you could have for a lot less than 500 but has recently been stripped so would need putting back together.

Douse with cheap gin.

Whyte’s recent offerings have all had great geo from what I’ve read and will hardly be beaten for value for money by an Orange. I’d go for the whyte. I’ve only ridden my On-One race 29er a few times but it feels much more stable and capable on the downs than its 26″ equivalent. But that might be because I have 20mm forks and stiff wheels.

Nice one! Some cracking trails and great riding by the looks of it, the fella on the yellow five certainly scared a few trees! What area were you riding in? Might try and make a video to add to the Calderdale best-of genre when it dries out in 2014.

Burnside trails in the dry
More Skye/Torridon
More Lakes
Somewhere outside the PDS in the Alps
Some big road rides.

I rocked up 8 minutes late so rode most of it on my own except for the fast boys coming through. Enjoyed the climbs and descents but that flat field was horrible!

First proper cross race for me too. Should be interesting. I’m on a (likely very noisy) on one race 29er with havens ( they were cheap and I ruin wheels!) I presume doing it on an xc bike is fine?

The ride up to the DH trails is fairly quick so it’s worth doing a few runs after doing the xc courses. All the DH runs (at least the last time I went) are doable on a trailbike indeed many are likely more fun on a wee bike.

Plus you’ll have lots more ‘flat’ miles so you’ll look like a ponce.