Went from a 30lb Explosif and took it done to 27lb, dropped that via a ScandAL to 26lb and then 25 before going carbon at 22lb. Then went back up to 30lb with a Marin Wolf Ridge. The Marin, like the explosive, is just a good bike to ride and will do anything I'd ask my hard tail to do, and feels great too. Nothing wrong with a 'standard' weight bike.

Trouble is, when the Marin was out of action for a bit, I built the ScandAL back up from being a hack to it's 24lb best, took it over the hills and…it was utterly fantastic. And when you hit the Tarmac at the end of the ride: wow.

Light is good too.

Pop it in one of those presentation bags you get in WH Smith. Less formal but still denotes 'effort'.

Apart from the usual 'weight forward' stuff, my tip would be to spin the same RPM as you do on the flat. I know it's almost impossible to do that off road, but even trying means you're working efficiently. That way, if I'm faced with a series of climbs (Glentress Tower Climb or Sleepy Hollow for example) I use less steep climbing sections to 'rest' without loosing overall speed.

The other thing to look at is weight. The average hydration pack is often 500g or more. Pop in a big pump, two inner tubes and a waterproof coat…don't forget your helmet's weight, too much water and a multitool full of bits you'll never use and you're already carrying over 2kg of equipment. Then there's the tyres. They can easily weigh in at 800/900g each.

There's a loop from Ulswater up onto highstreet and back down into ulswater again via some nice stuff. The Route I took, however, was nothing short of nightmarish. Indeed I still have nightmares about the last section. Exhausted, out of water and food, hauling a Marin Wolf Ridge up a cliff in failing light… 🙁 not my finest hour.

After years of buying cycling specific gear, I now mostly wear running gear. 3/4 tights and fairly loose technical fabric tops. In general they're much more comfortable and tend to be better quality for a like price.

Miserable malnourished runts the lot of them.

God almighty. I'm in the wrong end of town these days. This is depressing. 😥

To quote someone or other:

Light Strong Cheap: Choose any two.

I highly recommend this powerful and simple piece of software:
http://www.xara.com/us/products/webdesigner

Try the demo.

I love bike porn. It's great, and it's like F1 and supercars. It all feeds back down in some way or another. But nobody needs to spend 7K on a bike. In fact, I'd say that overspending on bikes is a good way to kill your hobby. By spending less and trying different frames, or wheels etc, you develop that vital deep-down knowledge of what makes a bike a bike. There's nowhere left to go when you spend £15000 on a bike. That's the cycling equivalent of a full stop.

A high-end carbon bike is fantastic fun to ride, but as an ancient trail guru once said:

'The best bike in the world is the one you're currently riding' (BR 430BC)

Wise words, although clearly he hadn't tried my Giant Stormbreaker. I mean, that was sh*it. Totally Sh*t!

I've found exactly the same thing recently. The gears have gone west on the full susser, so while I wait to take it in for a fix, I've resurrected the hardtail. The first ride was a bit 'ouch', but within two days the veil was lifted from my eyes: Hardtails are brilliant! Great climbing, great across flat ground, fantastic on singletrack and…well, okay, not so quick going down hill but on everything else, I had more fun. And when I hit the tarmac at the end of the ride…wow, it was amazing!

Full susser may be appearing on ebay soon, and I'm already saving for a Ti frame. 😀

http://www.onyourbike.co.uk/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=204704

http://www.madison.co.uk/productinfo.aspx?&catref=CG2013521

http://www.swinnertoncycles.co.uk/Giro-Atmos-Pads-Large.aspx

I fear birds, ever since palaeontologists realised that Raptors looked like this :-0

Next you'll be not lining the tyre labels up with the valves

🙂 Excellent. And says it all really.

My Soul in Builder's Tea. Fox RL120s, Hope, XT, Thomson, Nobby Nics (Snakeskin). Love it.

Builder's Tea. That's a great colour! I was very tempted when I saw on in the Lakes.

Lovely with white forks.

Actually, that IS fast. perhaps the MD was visiting the US and took 'em with him? 😉

I count 7 days as 'quick' for delivery to/from the States.

This is still a worry in 2010? I thought the bar end/ riser bar question had finally fizzled out on the Bike Magic forums in 2003.

If you want the positive effects of bar-ends, then you'll benefit on flat or riser bars equally.

Hope you learned a lesson too.

your point escapes me.

I've come across this thing before. Nothing makes me angrier.

At Whinlatter, my partner stopped to wait for me to catch up and had a stationary clipped-in fall, cutting her knee quite badly and leaving her so tangled in the bike that she was effectively trapped. A bloke in cycling Lycra was sitting some 10 feet away from her and just sat reading his paper. I got there 3 minutes after the fall to find her, in tears, still trying to untangle herself.

I made damned sure he wouldn't forget the day he made the moral decision to 'not get involved'…

For God's sake, I stop to make sure someone changing a flat is okay, let alone a prone rider at the side of the trail.

Point it where the sun don't shine and pull the trigger. Dry off with the paper towels provided…or bring your own! Very hygienic in fact. I predict that you'll get PLENTY of practice ;-). Ameobic dysentery will see to that I'm afraid.

would you take a dog onto a motorbike,quad bike track or car racing circuit after all…………….

I've lost count of the number of shepherds with two or three dogs running beside (or riding on) quad bike around here (Peebles). They love it!

But it's the whole obstacle thing isn't it? I've been mixing some lovely road and xc routes over the last month and the amount of times I've had to swerve sheep straying on the roads…

To be generous about dogs at trail centres, at least I only encounter them on the up routes, so no emergency braking has been needed, even when they weave around my bike.

I've recently bought a rear, downtube and fender Crud catcher and they are the most dismal set of bike products I've owned. The rear crud is extremely badly designed ( I had to cut it off in the end), the downtube is over long and doesn't take cable routing into account, and the front fender is a permanent fixture due to the fiddely screws.

I've gone back to an SKS mudboard for the front amd one of their rear guards. They go on and off in seconds and work perfectly.

🙂 good to hear you're enjoying it. I'd go back in a flash given half a chance. Don't miss the car horns though! Hope you've got a hat. I was burned so badly while trekking on the Deccan Plateau that my forehead started bleeding!

Wonderful country and wonderful people.

:-0

I find you guilty of crimes against ScandALs.

License is hereby revoked.

A Passion Play- Jethro Tull

😉

This weekend when confornted by a burly samoyed on a remote forest road:

'The dog's fine, just ride past slowly'.

Reassuring advice. I've been bitten three times by dogs while riding and been chased more times than I care to remember.

Gotta love 'em though, eh?

This is one of the extremely few forum threads to change the way I look at cycling. Not through the arguments of either side, but from my own research because of the thread.

It's been eye-opening. Thanks guys…

..Still just bought a Catlike Whisper Plus though. If I'm going to have my brain stem rotated in two, I want to do it in style! 😉

your scalp moves against the skull effectively lubricating the skull/ ground junction

That really did make me throw up in my mouth! 😥

Perhaps you need to take a more pragmatic approach to trail safety? 😉

Didn't stop us getting some verbal from fully armoured warriors

Just disgusting behaviour.

I'm certainly guilty of GT as a personal fitness centre, but never at the expense of someone else's riding experience. To me, it's a constant source of wonder to see family groups attempting the Blue like this. It's how the great riders of tomorrow are shaped.

LHS is long gone. He's too busy mucking around with stuff like this 😉

The new F-35 helmet. Just being trialed in the UK in advance of our first batch of…f-35s. mmmmmmmmm….

http://www.cyclehelmets.org/papers/c2023.pdf

An interesting article that can be used as ammo by all sides of the argument!

My understanding is that a 'roll cage' in the helmet holds everything together, prevents contact and spreads impact energy across the entire helmet. Not sure how that would work in reality but it's a good theory. Certainly haven't seen it before.

The Catlike Sacana is designed around a crumplezone concept. It's an interesting idea, if a bit 'directional'

Who's going to be the first to say it…no one? 😉

Helmets provide little protection against major injuries even when they have worked properly

So let's say that Simwit landed on the stones without the helmet. The effect would have been similair to being struck with a ball pein hammer. That sort of impact would have certainly caused significant trauma to the tissue around the impact point. There would also be a chance of a fracture to the skull (no matter how small), or, in the worse case, an indentation in the bone.

What part of that isn't serious?

Al Jazera! No really, it's excellent!

Motor sport generally doesn't require pedaling, so the heat generated is much less. Even on a cool day a cycling helmet can get very hot, so it seems impracticable to me that 'piss-pot' or ice hockey style helmets could be used on a bike without compromising the experience from a comfort and safety perspective. Cooking your head in an enclosed design is going to be dangerously distracting. It's similarly clear to me that many road helmets successfully take this compromise into consideration.

It's a good, long, big effort AM trail. The first half climb is worth the entry price alone. Very rewarding. Mad stuff at the end in the shape of North Shore stuff but that's avoidable. I think the 'black' rating refers to the fitness levels required more than the actual danger involved, though it does require experience to ride it well.

Tricky one. The bottom line is the portfolio. Get that right and you'll just have to sit there while they make you offers. If there's any hesitation or sucking of teeth, then the sort of work you're presenting isn't hitting the right tone.

I've no idea what sort of stuff you're presenting, but the main reason for having work rejected is because it's either not good enough or it's too mainstream. I'm guessing it's not the first and I'm certainly not saying it's the second, but…Working professionally means that you generally have to pull back on the really interesting stuff. It's hard to be cutting edge when you're preparing designs for tooling and manufacture. My partner worked in the packaging industry for years. Although she was an RCA graduate, all she ended up with was a ton of tray and box designs. Regardless of how you dress that up, it's just not that interesting. To create the sort of show-stopping designs that'll get your foot in the door requires a huge amount of effort on the part of the designer, and usually entirely at the expense of their own time. After a day at work, it's very hard to sit down at the PC/sketch pad and do another three hours work…every night, but that's how I've always got my jobs.

I've had two crackers, and both of them were secured on work that had never been seen before the interview. I set myself projects and taught myself the software and techniques in the evening and at weekends. I chose a series of three month slots and produced whatever I could in that time (3 months learning software, three months producing work based on that learning). My latest job wasn't even a design job. I went along as a trainer and took some 'fun' illustrated slide packs with me. I was hired because of the slides and became the principle CGI designer for the company.

It's vital that you believe in what you're doing, and are able to convey that enthusiasm to others. Part of that is immersing yourself in the design world. That means subscribing to design forums, magazines and exhibitions. You've got to build up a library and submerge yourself in the history, present trends and theory of future directions. You have to completely live and breath your design work.

Finally, beware of big companies. Right now I'm in a very small (but big hitting) company and I have almost total freedom. It's extremely rare for that to happen in the design world, and almost unheard of in big companies. However, it's not uncommon for me to work 24 hour days, and on two occasions, 36 hour days.

One final thing…always have a copy of Withnail and I on hand for post-interview failure therapy. It happens to everyone. 😉

But rather, which design solution should we be wearing?

I think Solo has it right. Most helmets are tweaked road or actual road designs. This make sense because of the physical effort involved in cycling, and if anything overheating is more of an issue in MTBing, making Road helmets an even more attractive proposition. Their ability to prevent cuts and laserations is excellent. Their ability to absorb impacts is clearly limited.

It's hard to see a good alternative solution that wouldn't be unbearable to wear. Much like almost all forms of bike armour in fact.