Hey molgrips what do you mean about ‘not riding like a car driver’? not sure I agree with you or not. :) In terms of road positioning, especially at roundabouts and junctions that’s exactly what I would do, choose exactly the lane and position you would if you were in a car…

On point 1, the reason most cyclists aren’t seen isn’t because they aren’t wearing hiz viz, most of the time that makes sod all difference, the real reason you don’t get seen most of the time is because you aren’t where the driver is looking, I overtake most cyclists without changing my position on the road as most of them ride too close to the kerb. You should be far enough out that if you make a left turn signal and there’s someone standing on the kerb, you won’t hit em. you’ll get fewer people attempting overtakes where there really isn’t enough room. You may get beeped at a bit more, but if you get beeped at it means not only did they see you, they even had enough time to react :), only after considering those 2 points do you look at whether you should change your riding behaviour. If you can still get hold of John Frankin’s cyclecraft book I thoroughly recommend it.

if by a lot, you mean 2?   no need for a rear brake on a fixie, the law counts fixed hub as a brake and so meets the 2 separate independent braking systems rule.

Well that does seem an effective way of beating your mates up a hill, I’m getting seriously annoyed about the smug git who keeps passing me on a hill on his electric recumbent, I must be pushing close to 500 watts and he just cruises on past like I’m sat still… :)

you really really really need to use the right kind of wood especially for smaller holds, then you need to make it very smooth as you don’t want splinters, and some woods are really slippery when you make them smooth and sweat a bit, and pinging off crimps can seriously injure your tendons. I’d be pretty cautious about it tbh.

Seems to me like it’s stated educational aim of showing kids what it’s like working in cutting edge technology and engineering in the uk, is now finally complete…. sad news.

Guess the final step is for a foreign company to buy all the intellectual property and make a fortune from it and then we are done…

On my canyon aeroad which doesn’t have the integrated stem, you can remove the funky aero shaped spacer above the headtube and run the stem straight on to the bearings if you want, it’s what some of the pros do and I do it too when I’m using it for TT’s, the only issue is that the rain can get into the bearings I was thinking about making a big flat spacer to keep it out, but I’ve not bothered yet.

I’ve put normal football studs in my shimano xc shoes, so they are the same size…

it’s hard, but you can always walk, Don’t think it would even make it into my top 5 hardest hills in the uk though :)

I don’t have a suggestion I’m afraid, but I wouldn’t replace my mk1 Pompino with a new one anyway, my wife has a more recent one (post change in frame strength regulations) and it’s heavy and lifeless in comparison, to the extent I hate riding hers whereas mine has always been a joy to ride. If my pompino breaks I’d be gutted.

yeah, I would have laughed, if I could have drawn breath :), probably not helped by the fact I’d been diagnosed with osteoporosis a couple of weeks earlier :(

still can’t manual, was doing ok, till I demonstrated your stepping off the back advice to my wife on the road, only I got my clipless shoes caught on the flat pedals of her bike…. cracked several ribs and still can’t get properly comfortable at night to sleep 8 weeks later ;)

Novatec cxd? if you can find them. Wiggle used to do them for 320 quid a pair but not any more it seems.

Not sure about sorting it all myself, I’d hate to go somewhere amazing then miss all the good trails….

Whistler would be cool, is Moab worth it for a week of riding?

Same here, think mines a 2014/15 model ,a bit of mud and the 2.35 Hans Dampf rubbed the paint off, I just live with that, but I wouldn’t go any wider…

The battery life on the  bolt is just amazing, I did a 15 hour sportive at the weekend with the mapping constantly on and still had 8% battery left at the end, every one with Garmins took external batteries….

My only gripe is that you can’t scroll around the map, so if you want to check out alternative routes , or get lost/off course it isn’t really any help. I also need to work out how to send routes to it from my phone, it seems to rely on my home wifi at the moment.

errrr 3,869 miles 225 hours and 181,000 feet of climbing, mostly outdoors but a fair chunk of Zwift, on target for an 8000 mile year, definitely not as fit as those numbers say I should be though, need to make more of those miles have a goal I think…

I don’t think so, but if you can sell it, either privately or to a dealer for more, you can just buy it out yourself, I did this with my DS3 to a citroen dealer, so they did all the paperwork, think I made about 800 quid extra in the end.

Yeah, though, you might need some pipe lagging on the ends of the bars if they are really wide as they can rub on the roof… though I no longer care… It’s not going to have any resale value when I’m done with it anyway :)

Assuming you’ve taken the seats out? I’ve just put a couple of zip ties through the top mount for the passenger seatbelts which I leave in place permanently. Then when I put the bikes in I loop a small tie down strap (it’s about 60cm long) through the zip tie loop and round the saddle rails, doesn’t have to be super strong, it’s just enough to keep the bike upright….

Novatec CXD’s genuinely come in at less than 1500g a set, can be got for just over 300 quid, tubeless ready and I’ve thrashed them for a whole cx season and they are still perfect, oh and they come with adapters for just about every axle standard there is.

ah fair enough, in that case don’t get the combined one anyway, the magnets have to be so close, it’s an accident waiting to happen :)

I had one, and the battery never seemed to last more than a few weeks, it got destroyed when the sensor moved on a bumpy road and the wheel destroyed it, got a panobike one now which has rare earth magnets so doesn’t need to be so close and that’s much better… The wahoo hrm I have on the other hand is really really good.

novatec cxd’s ? 1500grams a set, tubeless if you want it, supports every bolt through qr combination you can think of. really impressed with mine, been using them for cx all year and they seem pretty tough. unless you were after deep section carbon race wheels, I’d go for them.

Character encoding issue at a guess, those weird ? in a box characters are used when the font you are using doesn’t support some weird character or other, either because it is some obscure foreign/accented/emoji character or because someone has accidentally used a character that looks like a normal character but isn’t (smart quotes instead of normal quote marks being the classic one)

Ha I got passed, by someone who’d done 260 miles averaging 5.0w/kg who apparently weighed 60kg last night…. now that’s properly cheating, assuming the distance was real why would you fake the rest of your figures? “Dear Strawberry” if anyones interested :)

Those are socket sets…. it’s the combination spanners I’m after, never sure if they don’t do them any more or it’s the usual problem that whoever puts products into their site can’t spell and constantly put’s stuff in the wrong categories :(

wish they’d bring back the 25pc halfords advanced set, they did those for 50 quid a few times too… broken too many cheap ones now, to buy anymore.

half a potato to get it out, works a treat, cut raw spud in half jam on broken bits and twist…

I’ve got a few pairs of howies jeans, they last a lot longer than the £30 Burtons ones I used to wear, wear them practically every day and not worn them out yet, so they are good value, £145 quid ones will have to do pretty well to last longer than them…

Cycling kits been good, though the 3d knit stuff is not flattering on me at all.

Polo shirts where a bit rubbish, dye either washed out really quickly or got sun bleached really badly with one day on the line, gave up on them.

aaah, that explains my confusion. Always Liked Howies, havent bought anything from them for ages, guess I’m not their demographic anymore :)

I made my own, there’s so many possible combinations of features you may or not want, none of the ones you can buy will do everything you want, it won’t be any cheaper mind you :), loads of designs out there for ideas…

Sounds like you need to get the Tacx utility app which is the only way I know of to determine how tight the roller should be, and it’s much tighter than you think in my experience, almost to the point of ‘I’m gonna break the lever’ tight…

I’ve got one of the original morris minor blue 104’s and its ace, I lost a bolt out of the slidey dropouts a few years ago while I was on holiday in Scotland and they sent me a new one for the next day. Done 1000s miles on it no issues. Never did run it singlespeed though :)

I’m short, according to %90 of the female population, apparently that makes me a no, stopped caring a long time ago :)

I have a pair of 2015 Scott Spark’s 900RC.

Why do you have two? [/quote]

Couldn’t decide between black or yellow grips by the look of it :)

Really impressed with my Wileyfox Swift 2x, can’t really see what the pricier options give you anymore…. Quality wise it’s up there with Samsung and HTC etc. and except for maybe a better camera there are no features I’d actually want

If I hear a car behind me get over to the left

that statement needs to be seriously heavily qualified I think, there’s no way you should be doing that if there’s any doubt at all about the dirver behind you being able to make a safe pass, I would practically never do that in an urban environment. If there’s no traffic coming the other way then I want them in the other lane, and if there’s traffic coming the other way then most roads aren’t wide enough to allow them to pass safely…

Behave like a car, take the lane, don’t squeeze between lanes of traffic if there’s any danger of it moving while you are still amongst it. Don’t jump lights, use pavements, cut junctions, anything that doesn’t look like car behaviour puts you in a position where car drivers won’t be looking, and they’ll drive straight into you. You are going to get shouted at, mostly by dicks and it’s an opportunity for you to reflect on what you were doing at the time, but not an indication you were doing something wrong. If you get shouted at it usually means they had time to see you, wind down the window and construct a sentence, you can’t have been doing anything that dangerous if the driver had that much time to act…

Try not to let your mood affect your riding, if my self esteem/confidence is low that day I find I tend to ride closer to the kerb and generally stay out of the way, which invariably means I get more close calls and dangerous passes.

Don’t let anger accumulate, if I get wound up about the action of one driver I invariably end up having more incidents on my commute that day, it’s partly because you become hypersensitive to every pass being a bit close and partly because I start riding more aggressively and get more and more wound up.

Try not to react, something I’m really bad at, been chased twice now, it’s f##king terrifying, anything more than a slight shake of the head even if they deliberately tried to run you off the road seems to elicit murderous rage in some of the dicks in Birkenhead…

Been a long time since I had anything to do with DB2 but, could it be that when the table was originally set up it was thought that A,B and C were required to make a row unique, but at a later date it was realised that actually only A, and B were required. If it’s a large table changing the primary key of a table can be very time consuming and could mean down time or delays you couldn’t afford, but adding a new index that effectively enforces A and B as a unique key for a record would be done in the background and not have any significant affect on the systems performance while it was being created…