BTW it’s no coincidence that the most popular mass singing events occur at religious meetings, where oppressed and helpless people try to make themselves feel better by “bigging up” in song some completely arbitrary and entirely made-up god in the vain hope that there lives might get a bit better (rather than actually doing something that might actually achieve that effect)

And of course the religious leaders make a tidy packet out of their sheep, er, sorry, i mean, flock don’t they…….

Two important points that should be noted:

1) Britian is only “great” because for hundreds of years we basically press-ganged an Army and Navy together, and set off round the world in an orgy of murder, rape and pillage, and basically invaded other countries against their will and stole all their stuff. (go have a look in the “British” museum if you don’t believe me)

2) Mass singing is an absolute indicator that those people who are singing are helpless and doomed. Sat on the Titanic, in the middle of the cold atlantic, waiting to die, no hope of rescue, yup, lets have a sing along to pass the time till we all die slow horrible inevitable deaths. Same for the Blitz. Waiting for a bomb to land on your head, nothing you can do about it? yup, a quick sing song will pass the time till all your internal organs are burst and plastered around and made external by the shock wave of a 1,000 pounder going off close by.

If you have any actual power as a member of public when it matters, don’t blinking well sing, get up and out and sort your self out

;-)

Hats off boys and girls, there are some GREAT pics in here!

I thought TracyH did a great job in the commentary box, not always easy with things changing so fast and Warner in full swing with you :-)

smashes the “like” button…….

What sealant for dogbites?

I think it’s because trails naturally tend to be made harder, because once you can ride the trail as it is now, you want to modify and change it so it’s a challange again, which leads to the trail itself getting harder slowly.

Most of my local cheeky trails start with a simple single line through the wood. It gets slowly discovered and more and more people ride it. Then someone perhaps builds up a bit of dirt here, pushes a fallen log across there and makes some small features. Then later, someone digs out the middle after the log, building up that earth to make a bigger take off, and suddenly we have a gap jump where previously we had nothing.

At some point, things get too extreme, gaps get too big, jumps too indimidating looking, and now, suddenly the only people riding the trail are the more extreme riders. The bulk of riders who bascially kept the trail open by riding it are now gone, and the trail withers and dies and returns to nature.

This is the natural life cycle of the trail….

(or alternatively the FC comes along and flattens it)

God what a sheltered life i have lived! I had NO idea that such things existed and assumed this thread was a typo on “sweep”……..

crappy story Bro……. ;-)

SO, bascially our actual trade offering is soo bad we have to bribe other countries into doing business with us. Sounds like a good long term solution to me.

Ah, once again proud and strong Great Britian stands united to steam forwards at full ahead into the 1950’s.

The rest of the world have moved on, we haven’t……..

Instagram influencer pose:

26 ain’t dead

Broken promises

Three important factors with choosing travel IME:

For any given budget, you will probably get a lighter bike with better components with a shorter travel version. If you afford to throw >£5k at a bike, then you can get a big travel (>150mm) bike down to a light weight. If most of your riding is not gravity riding, and you actually pedal places, then trading down in travel is perhaps going to be better overall.

Big travel really just means you can ride faster through stuff. Within reason (ie normal people riding bikes not Rampage style huckin), i can’t think of anything i can ride on my 180mm bike that i can’t ride on my 150mm bike, it’s just i’ll be going quicker on the bigger bike. The big bike also allows one to be a bit lazier with line choice and get away with it.

Comfort. My 180mm travel bike can be run with significantly more sag, ie run deeper into it’s travel, and that travel can be more linear for longer, because it is less likely to hit the hard end stops. This means my 180mm bike actually rides softer than my 150mm one, because i can run lower rates for springing and damping. On long rocky days out (Peaks, Lakes, north wales etc) that helps keep my feeling fresh and less battered about. Which at my age is a good thing (i’m not actually very old, just really patheically weak, lol!)

Not sure that actually answers the question, but it perhaps gives you something else to consider :-)

I really want to engineer some “pop” into that trike!

It needs a pneumatic cylinder on the front suspension, so as you go up a jump’s ramp, you press a button on the bars and the cylinder fires and pushes the front up, in effect, the same pop a fully able rider does with their legs, but obviously impossible for those with paralysis.

That would be super cool, enable super sends, and i think Mr Ashton might be brave and skilled enough to be able to test it out :-)

I’ve just sold my absolutely mint, 2 owner 11 plate 335d tourer, and that was very low miles because it was only used for long distance trips (we have an EV for local stuff) and that had done 68k. I know that was genuine because i bought the car from a BMW main dealer at 1 year old with just 6.5k on the clock, and then owned it for nearly 10 years, simply because there was little to replace it with.

If i was offered a 2008 car, 3 years older, and the seller claimed “60k” miles, i’d be looking very, very, very closely at the history to see if that’s a genuine mileage !

a 58 plater is a second half of 2008 vintage, so it’ll be a pre-LCI E91.

if it’s only done 60k miles in that time it’s probably been clocked.

or is it actually a 68 plate car? (in which case it’s an F series car with 4wd, which means it’s a bit of an nose heavy bus….. ;-)

So far this spring i have “definitely turned the heating off for the last time this year” about, oh, 23 times so far…….

Ok, enough, please stop raining now……..

Hadrians “Hole in the Wall” ???

As we move to Electrification, vehicle mass becomes less of an issue (because EVs have bi-directional powertrains) and aero and rolling drag hold the key to decent range with an affordable sized battery.

Unfortunately, we are not yet, as a society, ready to forgo our large, square, practical, easy to park, safe to crash, comfortable to sit in passenger cars for “aero pods”

As many people have tried, like the Aptera or the Riversimple Rasa, and failed and will keep on failing.

What could change is a sea change in the cost of energy. We have grown lazy and greedy on the glut of very cheap hydrocarbon fuels we have spent the last 80 odd years pulling out of the ground. Fuels that allow the average user access to MW levels of power and energy consumption (remember, a 250kW output engine actually burns around 1MW of fuel!)

But, if the energy we use becomes expensive, either due to taxation, or due to scarcity, then this will change. Suddenly, a car that can do 300mpg (already easily possibly for an aero EV) will have a market.

When is that day? no idea, sorry…….

Round Louises place……..

I suspect that at the high end, lets say 3k and upwards, Ebikes are taking the lions share of the market?

Wait what, i need a Personality?? oh crap, i’m doomed!

Thanks for the advice everyone, it gives me a much better idea of what to google and research :-)

All good and interesting stuff!

How hard do you think it will be to get in for a typical interview with no previous marine experience?

It’s actually pretty easy driving a car on the wrong tyres where there isn’t much grip ime! Far harder in rallying terms is driving a car which grips like **** to a blanket, right up till the point it, er, doesn’t.

I turned an £50k car into a ball of scrap in about 5 seconds due to such an issue at Epynt many years ago……………

Welcome!

Has the ST Towers buscuit fund been commensurately boosted to cope with your arrival or is it now, more than ever, a case of first come, first served?? :-)

news wise, i’d like to see news items on how the MTB community is reaching out to other trail / country side users post lockdown, to make sure we all are represented out their fairly

I personally have no idea how any “extends” any reasonably nippy modern car for fun?

I’ve just sold my 335d, which by modern standards is pretty mild in all honesty (180 bhp/ton approx) and yet, with just 8 or 9 tenths the thing would be deep into 3 figures on pretty much any road you can name.

Seperating 0-60 in 4 from 0-60 in 6 is irrelevant ime. you can’t “get away” from a 6 second car in a 4 second car on the public road.

So, choose by the way it drives, not how fast it goes……

(i’d pick a 120bhp MX-5 over any S3 / AMG45 / GuffR everytime, or if i had the money, i’d pick an Alpine A110 tbh. More, than fast enough, much more fun)

“Fast”, or “fast and fun”? Big difference!

Plenty of “fast” modern cars, but very few fast and fun ones…….

Frankly, i have no idea why you want a car that’ll do 4 seconds to 60? The only reason i can think of is to brang to your mates how fast your car is?

I’d much rather have a slow car that feels fast and is fun to drive!

Has the Nutcracker got a lot easier recently, or have bikes just got a lot better!

I hadn’t ridden it for years, when i used to ride a 100mm hardtail, and remember it as FIERCELY steep and technical, but rode it again recently (on my 180mm gnarrpoon) and frankly wondered what the fussy was all about??

I’ve been deliberately riding some of my local easier features “wrong footed” which feels all kinds of bad, and i certainly wouldn’t yet want to get my wheels too far off the ground like this, but it’s really helped my balance on the odd naggery turn where you’re pedals are out of sync with the turn and feature!

Also, when you’re waiting for your phaffy mates to get ready (everyone has at least one right!) practise things like trackstanding, endo turns and the like ;-) Try not to look too much like you’re showing off, so fall off at least once during this process……

Where i live, to get to any decent trail that isn’t just a muddy slog around a field edge, i have to drive. However, that doesn’t have to mean a huge carbon footprint:

My solar powered i3, with my 2012 bike, and yes, they are colour matched! (not on purpose, honest….)

er, i believe i casually joked “and of course we’ve all got our passports” at which mrhoppy went initally very quiet and then swore a lot!

Still setting off for the south of france by turning north up the M1 is character building right…… ;-)

I like how Boris “bigs up” the successful lock down.

is that the one that both completely paralysed the entire country AND was ultimately so in-effectual that abuut oh 140,000 people died? That one right??

Also, read “Carrying the fire” for an exceptional well written and rather moving account of his Apollo missions

Looks like we had a resonable amount of rain last night, although as the gutter above the bedroom window is currently a bit wonky, it leaks, and the water, er waterfalls out and splashes on the window sill, which makes any rain sound quite significant…… One of those lockdown jobs that slipped through the net

Hello to my fellow Woburn riders, Despite not being on this forum much recently, i’m deffinitely in the “Old guard” when it comes to woburn having first ridden it in 1999….

(back when “3 drops” in the back woods was so secret you had to quietly sneak past the viscous guard squirrel, slide carefully past the spiky holly bush and physically push part the drooping branches of a small ash tree to gain access to the start of the trail, which was just a thin single tyre width of sand winding off down between the trees!)

Lets face it, nobody likes their butt to be too dry do they……

Yeah, could do with a nice 6 hours of medium rain over night, clearing to a perfect blue cloudless sky for tomorrow!!

The early overcast melted away into a perfect blue sky and another beautiful day in the Woburn woods:

it also turns out, i have accidentally colour co-ordinated my new car and my old bike:

This is the exact reason i won’t vote for ANY politican, because the system has entirely become about THEM and not US!

They should represent us. But “they” have fallen for the cult of celebrity, and hence now spend more time in-fighting and arguing amongst themselves than actually getting off their fat, corrupt bottoms and getting on with the job of running the country. Lies, distraction, blame-anyone-but-myself. Frankly if they were children you’d bang their heads together and tell them to f-ing well grow up, and send them to bed with no supper…….