To echo what others have said, if you follow the RYA/youth squad/blah route you’ll need a big shiny motorhome to go to regattas in and a selection of powerful binoculars through which to watch your lad racing while tutting, shaking your head and making copious notes ready for the unnecessarily aggressive post-race debrief 🙂

Keep it fun. Having a laugh in cheap knockabout boats FTW.

Still miss this 🙁

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Fireball Worlds 2005[/url] by MikeDavis[/url], on Flickr

there’s a reason top guys are using new laser hulls

Because if you’re on the new boat/finance cycle it’s hardly any more expensive to get a whole new boat than to buy a new sail 🙂

OP: Is this a sailing club or a watersports training place? If he wants to race then go with whatever there’s a big group of — racing against the same kind of boats teaches way more than handicap racing. It’s unlikely that he “needs” a £1k Optimist (and at 11 he’s pushing the top of the Oppie age range already — they sail them to 14 but they look a bit daft 😉 ), but as others have pointed out, boats hold their value well.

Tough to beat Toppers for kids, really. Good racing if he wants to, but also sturdy enough for mucking about. The “how many people can you get on a Topper before it sinks” game never gets old 🙂

You can’t even fit a towbar to a Ka 🙂

TBH I think the OP needs to look at a slightly larger car, as in “small” rather than “tiny”. It’s not like something in the Fiesta/207/Corsa arena will cost meellions of pounds to run.

Tow ball weight is the critical one. Just the bikes are going to be over the weight, and there’s the rack on top. Personally I wouldn’t.

Must be a very tiny car — tow ball weights are usually 75-100kg even on middling cars.

don’t understand why they don’t do a 10″ version

Not sure what the point would be, given that any child too small to get on a Rothan would be too young to do anything with it anyway. Expensive? Pfft. Ours is being used by second child now and it’ll probably still get £60 on ebay when he’s finished with it.

a normal child’s bike with seat right down and pedals removed works well

For taller/older kids, yes. You won’t get an average two-year-old on one, though.

We’ve got a Good Housekeeping book — it’s a general cookery book but there’s a good cake section in there. It’s not rocket surgery, really — make cake roughly the right shape, cover in icing, add details in marzipan.

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Birthday cake[/url] by MikeDavis[/url], on Flickr

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Birthday cake[/url] by MikeDavis[/url], on Flickr

Mount on RHS – uses carbon in compression

Which bit’s in compression?

You could just set up your own FTP server. If your company has a website then you may have one already. Or just put the drawings on your web server — you can always .htaccess a folder for a tiny whiff of “security”.

All other Vehicle Enquiries:
Phone Phone: 0870 240 0010

🙂

PLG = van, so not that 🙂

You’re right, 6 is 1.22x5th but 5th is only 1.17x4th (and 7th is 1.16x6th). I’d be tempted to gear it so you’re mostly in 5th, given that that’s the direct-drive (and hence most efficient) gear 🙂

Elastic laces in your running shoes helps.

For me: MTB has 100
Both road bikes have 90, although going to try 100.

You have shorter stems on road bikes than MTBs? FREAK 🙂

The differences between different 29ers are as big as the differences between 26ers and 29ers.

^^ This. Ascribing the same qualities to all 29ers (and, by extension, all 26ers) is as nonsensical as saying that all aluminium bikes are the same, or all 100mm travel bikes, or all red bikes.

it’s down to the individual with what they feel keeps them safe IMO

If you’re riding as an individual, yes. In a group, the group decides.

Wait until they start insisting on mudguards…

Gradually slow down until you eventually come to a halt, they’ll get the idea eventually 🙂

I’ll bet most of you really don’t need to carry half the stuff you “seem to” on rides.

Guilty. I cite epic laziness in my defence — CBA to go through (relatively compact) pack before a ride chucking out things I don’t need or adding things I might, so it’s pretty much in “big day out in the hills” mode all the time.

I often do quick local loops with nothing but keys, though. Only had to walk home once 😉

I’m not sure alternate lines/stop-go penalties/other weirdness is really necessary. There really aren’t many courses out there where a rubbish but strong rider will match an equally strong but non-rubbish one. The more skilled rider will always have an advantage, all else being equal. There are certainly elements of course design that it’d be good to see — I think that sections that are quicker to run than ride should be left for cyclocross 😉 Descents with plausible overtaking points would also be good.

On the other hand, if people have put the effort in to get fast, it seems only fair to reward that come race day 🙂

I built a posh shed at the bottom of the garden to work from. Did six months working from a room in a (rented) house, it was rubbish. Need a space that’s just for work that you can leave.

£10 a race cheap enough?

Spot on. Move the whole thing considerably further south and I’m in 🙂

Cheap, regular, local races have to be the way forward. Beastway, Matchams years ago, that kind of thing.

He also went on to say he and Hermida run the same front tyre pretty much all year round.

You’d have thought the team could run to one each.

I think he was pulling a tear-off from his goggles. Mid-corner :-O

I guess it’s possible that Cube employs a roomful of engineers and gives them CAD workstations, rapid prototyping 3D printers and a mighty armoury of test rigs just to show to visitors. But I suspect it’s more likely that they do, in fact, design frames there 😉

Bike version of the field gun competition — take bike to bits, carry bits over/through obstacles, reassemble, ride back to start.

Use a banana as a baton.

This and random team selection = WIN.

The only very, very tiny negative for me is that the trailer racing was sufficiently delayed to move into “kids tired and grumpy” time. But that’s more an issue with children than the event, and we rustled up a couple of opponents and set up our own race anyway 😉

Having looked at pictures and put names to faces I appear to have Elfin to thank for dissuading Nick from supersoakering me in the face while I was having a little trackside lie down in the sun covered in children, so thanks for that 🙂

I was thinking that a bit of a team relay on the short course could be a giggle.

Anyway. It was very lovely and I’d never have imagined that a bike event could keep the family entertained so successfully. Mrs D rode her bike for the first time in months and has become reenthused, eldest daughter got to the top of the climbing tower twice and raced her bike for the first time, small boy got way better on his balance bike from watching the other eleventy million balance bikes in use. We’ll be back (as will the others we persuaded to come).

Also, I’m almost hilariously local, so if I can be of any assistance for 2012 let me know 🙂

Having said to a bunch of people (some of whom came a reasonable distance), “we’re doing this, want to come along?” I was glad it turned out as ace as it did 🙂 Haybales of WIN, cool course, general relaxedness and the ability to kind of do things or not as the mood took you. Oh, and splendid beer, of course.

Buying it direct is the most expensive way to do it 🙂 Wiggle have it on free p&p, or there’s a list of Real Shops at http://www.privateer.cc/stockists.html

I just got a copy of The Ride Journal from Wiggle which included Haribo. Much to my disappointment, as Haribo’s grim :/

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Still going, although it’s had another complete rebuild since this pic — now has Rebas and SRAM bits and lighter wheels. Still ace 🙂

a pretty much full collection of MBUK

Good work. That’s more than MBUK’s got 😉

(I’ve got 1990-2000 or so, gets a bit sporadic after that…)

Use the recirculating hood and add an extractor fan through the nearest available outside wall?

Currently 27% are over 90kg

A quick Google suggests that about a quarter of the male population is over 90kg, so this isn’t entirely surprising.

RIGID.

Is there a sacrificial communal lake jump bike or do you have to bring your own?*

* this is not to be taken as a statement of intent 🙂

Second-hand Burley here, as Joe says there’s not much to it but the upside is that it doesn’t weigh much. Won’t go on bikes with rear discs, though. I think I read somewhere that there’s an alternative hitch available, but I’ve never bothered looking into it any further. It’d be too wide/uncomfortable for anything resembling “proper” off-road — fine for forest tracks and the like, though.

Have you done all the local shops/clubs?

They have no mobility problems

They usually do if they’re under 12 months, unless you don’t count “unable to walk” as a mobility problem 😉

http://stephenlaw.blogspot.com/2011/01/huge-banking-bonus-due-to-five-year-old.html

They aren’t in our local supermarkets (Asda, Sainsbury and Morrisons in Harrogate)

They aren’t in my local Sainsburys either, but they are in the car park in the picture which was the one to which I was referring. I wasn’t making a general point 🙂