Vintage are decent for that kind of money as said. My pick for a starter guitar would probably be a Yamaha Pacifica, the 112 range are great for £199, spend the rest of your budget on lessons. If you want to spend a bit more, Ibanez make nice axes for £300 or so upwards, the ART series are pretty nice for the money, bit more of a ‘metal’ sound.

Try them out though, when you first start you need to want to play, so get something you like above all else.

Latest Canon 600d is on ebay from their refurb outlet, with lens for £399. search ebay for ‘canonoutlet’

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Canon-EOS-600D-Digital-SLR-Camera-18-55mm-II-Lens-Refurbished-/390483574700?pt=UK_CamerasPhoto_DigitalCameras_DigitalCameras_JN&hash=item5aeaa27fac

I run RQ 2.2 BC’s front and rear, great setup tried quite a few others but really like these.
Approx £70 a pair from bike-discount.de converted from €.

I’m similar frame – found the ‘tailored’ ultra slim fit shirts from tyrwhitts a pretty good fit, if a touch boxy. Would imagine suits would have a similar fit, i’d be tempted to try one of their cheaper suits out at the sale prices but I wasn’t very impressed by the longevity of their shirts, I only got a couple of years out of them. Don’t forget to buy a 2nd pair of trousers!

I’d be thinking about http://www.raja-fashions.com/appointment/tour.php?tr=2512

Fitted in a hotel room, expect a handmade suit to appear a few weeks later. Will cost between £3-500.

I’ve got a Western Digital Livebook duo, 2TB useable space in mirrored raid. Plugs into the router in the cupboard, sits happily feeding all my videos, music etc out to my mac/iphone etc. all wirelessly. Works really well but not cheap at about £270.

http://store.aquapac.net/

Aquapac – get from cotswold/amazon etc. My car key doesn’t leave mine, spend most weekends in the water with them and never had a problem. Just make sure you close them properly.

I buy a new one every 12 months or so just in case, but not had a failure yet.

You have pretty good rights as an EU customer, depending on what it is your talking about – more info?

DSR applies, as do any returns policies/guarantees the company offer.

Jeb Corliss?

There’s another one called grinding the crack which is pretty awesome.

CRC have 7.5wt rock oil in stock – £5.99. Sounds pretty agreeable to me!

http://www.chainreactioncycles.com/Models.aspx?ModelID=8399

Will need a service every 3-4 years, you’ll probably be looking at £2-300 a time. Not a huge deal. Just don’t buy anything quartz for omega money.

Think of it like this, most people think nothing of paying that kind of money for a car service every year, on an engine that’s hundreds of parts which is expected to do maybe 1500 hours of service or so a year, but jib at the same amount every couple of years for a precision instrument with thousands of tiny parts that you expect to work perfectly non stop 24/7 365 days a year.

Not to mention the skill level of the horologist working on your watch who probably spent 10 years learning compared to your average volvo mechanic. (No offence to any mechanics ;-) )

So yes, it’s expensive but not unreasonable. Yes you can wear a Seiko and it’ll keep time as well, but it’s just not the same!

One thing to mention, if you want to rely on a sat nav get a current map before you go. I drove back from Germany via Eindhoven/Antwerp last year with a couple of year old sat nav and Eindhoven was a completely different city and the main roads around Antwerp were also completely different.

Aside from that it’s fairly short hop, as long as you don’t go through the cities at peak times should be no problems.

If you want to stop Bruges is well worth a visit if you’re into looking around historical cities, I wouldn’t bother just stopping for lunch though, not worth the detour, traffic etc unless you’re going to have a proper nosey.

South of Oslo – Birmingham in one go (about 26 hours all in). 1600km back with a few hours stop in Denmark due to a breakdown and 3 short ferries along the way. Longest unbroken section would be the 850km across mainland Europe from Fehmarn to Dunquerke. Epic drive….

Edit my first post: it’s the Roadlite AL 6.0 I was looking at.

I think it’s gotta be a quick bike first, with long distance comfort a priority due to a bad back (hence the idea of a more touring biases bike), and then panniers etc 2nd. Would rarely get used for that, but the idea of a long weekend on the bike with a small tent/kit appeals, without having a car. Reality would be it would probably get used with a car anyway, so maybe not so important.

Basically the requirement is just like a niche bike frame builder would need if he supplied complete bikes and sold direct to customers and wanted to manage the build progress from customer order, cutting, welding and painting a frame from scratch, and then building it up with parts into a complete bike. So order management, production planning, stock control and in an ideal world the VAT and management accounts. It would be nice to be able to show customers an online order progress page too.

Doesn’t sound cheap and simple to me! If you’re asking on here about this then you definitely don’t want to be going down the path of doing your own thing with accounting stuff. Mistakes there are costly. A good compromise might be sage line50 which will take care of the important stuff relatively cheaply, and then working on a database system like filemaker using ODBC links to sage to build the rest up. Benefit there would be you can slowly add to it over time. You could have all the basics in Sage, then use the database to hold the extra parts details, requisitions etc for customer orders, print picking, job sheets etc and reports to see what jobs are in what stage etc.

You could also fairly easily get it to give online order statuses.

I’ve used these systems before to give decent results on a budget, but it gets very tedious.

For the damage thing – see if you can get some of these: http://www.shockwatch.com/monitoring-devices/impact-sensor/impact-indicators/

If you pick up your bike and they’ve been set off you know there’s been a drop. You’d need to work out what a sensible rating is though to avoid them being set off without impact.

I’m sure if you hunt around for an app you can find something to do it with a phone, apple have used similar stuff for years with laptops to detect drops and prepare for impact.

GPS on a phone shouldn’t be a problem – i’m sure plenty of people get on planes and forget/don’t bother to turn them off. Bit like the thing with using a phone at a petrol station. I suppose the biggest issue you would have would the phone staying on long enough whilst maintaining a connection so you can trace it 24 hours after you’ve stuck it in a hold and it’s flown halfway across the world… also would need an active connection (i think) to report back a location which could be expensive if it roams and starts using data for a couple of days abroad!

Would have to be rugged for me, i’d go for the lumix ft3. My ft1 was one of the first, must be 3 years + old now and it’s still going strong after a lot of abuse, dropped, hit, chucked in bags full of wet kit, videoed underwater, bounced around on the bike etc…

If you’re comparing those 2 – look at Astra. More room in the back than either, hold value worse than Focus or Skoda which would be good for you if you’ve got a 3K budget as it’ll buy more. Swallows bikes easily with front wheel off, you’ll get 3 bikes with in front wheel off standing up and wheels around with room for 3 in the car and you’ll get the entire boot space behind the 3rd seat for kit. (Enough for a trip to the trails… a week’s biking 3 up ain’t gonna be much fun though!)

Essentially you’re on a 3 month trial, then 6 months probation and then happy days in your case. Nothing wrong with that – 3 month trial fairly standard.

You have pretty much no comeback against dismissal in the first 12 months anyway (as long as it’s done properly), so that’s not something that should overly bother you – the fact the contract highlights your probation/trial periods is pretty good.

The mini chilli pies with polenta pastry out of the Hairy Biker’s pie book. Om nom.

Possibly the best book in my kitchen!

You can get one of the SLX cranksets from actionsports.de or bikediscount.de for under £80 + shipping with the current good euro rate.

Deore’s from about £43 + shipping.

I had an SLX group from actionsports.de last year, £203 which was cheaper than anywhere in the UK by quite a margin and it was with me in a couple of days. Would happily use them again.

Try a different pump if you can, I had a similar thing with mine using my old shock pump on new dual air rebas, it would pump +ve but not register once the pump taken off. Soon as I put any pressure into the neg, it just sucked up.

Bought a new RS pump before blaming the forks, emptied all the air, got a brew and checked all the instructions and online tuning guides and it worked perfectly. Seem to recall having to do a couple of pump cycles before it all sorted itself out but been fine since. May not do anything for you but worth a try?

Par for the course at Cannock, I ride there a couple of times a week and you just live with them and enjoy it for what it is, end of the day it’s a red route used by hundreds of people a day if not more – it’s going to happen. I really don’t get the amount of threads on here about bumps on a mtb trail!

If you want less of that kind of thing hunt out some of the off piste stuff or head the extra hour north to the Peaks!

And it’s not just the foreigners who show you up, I was ending a lap heading back to the car the other weekend when an old boy followed me up from the train crossing, overtook me up one of the hills a couple of km later and then waited at MD to thank me for inspiring him to keep up with me at the ripe old age of 60 (over twice my age). Needless to say I was suitably embarrassed and skipped the usual pie and pint on the way home…

Depends on quite a few things, but yes, for video editing then the benefits become more apparent especially when working with gopro HD stuff and other large files. Just speeds up the data coming through/being written. It’s not a massive leap though, compared to jumping up to some of the SATA III 10k/64mb stuff or SSD. Like I say, it’s kinda one for you – if you think you’ll need the extra space then go that way, if you can afford to live without the space then get a better drive for the same money.

Depends what you want – the 750gb drive will perform faster but has a chunk less space, almost as much less as your current drive has in total. Performance differences won’t be hugely noticeable between the two, depending on your usage and how much you work with large amounts of data. Given the choice between the 2 i’d go for the smaller faster drive, as it’s still big and it’s a laptop, but if you think the larger size will be more useful to you then go bigger.

Although my personal opinion now is smaller and faster, i’ve got a 128gb SSD inside mine, a couple of external HDD’s for use out an about when I need more space and a 2TB raid fileserver at home for main storage and less risk to data.

Scan normally good value – they have a 750GB WD 7200 16mb cache for £75 which is pretty good.

You might struggle to get anything good in 1TB below £80. Also check Dell haven’t got a proprietary connector on your laptop.

Astra or Ashtray? ;-)

Astra drives nice but not as good as the focus, loses money faster which can be good or bad depending on the age of car your buying.

Personally unless you are buying new for company and taking advantage of the corporation tax relief, i’d go the bit extra for the bigger diesel if estate, fine if hatch.

I’ve got one – no problems after a bit of faff getting the chainline set up. Never dropped a chain on it, although i’m not blasting through rockgardens and probably don’t take off anymore than 1-2ft or so.

It’s probably not the best bit of kit, but it’s doing the job perfectly well for me. For xc/light am it should be fine – I’d have another one.

Assuming you’ve got a converted 1×10 on your trance, is the single ring central to the guide?

Aerobed – had one as a spare room/travelling bed for about 5 years now and it’s great – more comfy than my regular mattress. One puncture – aerobed sent me a repair kit FOC and perfect ever since.

That’s the way they work, my 2012 rebas probably lose about 10-15% of travel with my normal setup of about 5-10psi extra in neg, but it’s the small bump compliance I want out of them for most riding. A quick tweak changes that when it gets rougher/bigger, I really like the system but do find it a bit hit an miss sometimes (but that’s mainly cos I don’t know what i’m doing…)

I run a similar setup which I put together on a budget to try it out on a 120mm stumpy so similar bike to yours.

Superstar BB mount chain device £16, no bashguard required, single ring short bolts £5 from hubjub and a stainless 32t ring £15 from on-one.

Well chuffed with it, saved weight, made room in the cockpit, saves all the crap in the front mech and i’ve climbed everything at all the trail centres, local xc and peaks without a problem. I’m not even fit – you need a bit of determination to get up some of the peak hills after 30K though…. ;-)

You don’t say what you’re playing but if something scoring like rugby, then you could do 3×3 round robins, 3 winners go through and then the best loser on points/pd goes as well? Gives you enough time left over for a wooden spoon as well….

Gives you 18 pool matches, 4 finals matches (2 semi’s, final and 3rd/4th) and possibly 4 wooden spoon matches. Rest of the time can go toward longer games/longer rests.

Although that does leave 1 team out of any extra games..

Ta, just ordered a white one.

Hoping it doesn’t go the same way as the white grips did…. Dark bike with white spangly bits really was a bad colour scheme to build up for UK riding….

Yeah I was looking around and most places were about £15 a bottle by the time post was factored in for mtb oil or fully synth fork oil – ended up finding rock oil from CRC – £12 for both job done so ordered that.

Found the CRC oil after posting the topic but thanks for the reply anyway, as it was cheap i’ll change the oil in the damper at the same time. Was just being a bit tight when faced with spending £30 or so…. :wink:

PeterPoddy – what’s the app your using to monitor your car costs? I’m after similar.

TBH I’d question the idea of a 1.0 ecoboost in an estate depending on what you’re doing with it.

I’ve just got a new focus estate with the 1.6TDI engine, and it’s not great. Fully loaded it’s rubbish on MPG with no real power, If it hadn’t have been for the tax incentives I wouldn’t have bothered with it and got the bigger engine. Granted it’s not worn in yet and it gets 51mpg ish with just me, but it’s normally 4 up with kit inside and on the roof!

I’d suggest a 1.8/2.0 diesel would be a better bet if buying privately as they’re more suited and should return a better MPG – if company car then the smaller engines can really save a few quid all round.

I think the little engine would be fine in the hatch or similar smaller car. However, if you’re taking the estate because you just want to get a dog in the back and not really use it for load carrying then should be good.

Yes, you’re entitled to reclaim the Duty and V.A.T. on the items provided they are duty & V.A.T. paid in the first place and have been exported for repair. Talk to HMRC.

http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/vat/managing/international/imports/opr.htm

In honesty, if it’s £30 that’s probably not worth the faff as it’s a pain in the backside and i’d imagine £10 of that charge is Fedex deferment fees which you won’t get back.

I’m not sure exactly how you’d go about it as an individual as all my experience is as a company but ask them.

I’ve got a ’10 HR comp as my hardtail, all i’ve done is change the fork for a RS recon silver, and put SLX hydraulic brakes on it.

£100 for the fork and £140 for the brakes and it does the job for me – although if I rode it harder i’d change wheels and drivetrain too but I can’t be bothered as it’s mainly for canal towpath/other fitness duties.

Mosey – just on the off chance you’re in Birmingham I have a proper wheelset box sitting next to me waiting to be taken to the recycling man. Yours if you want it / are local.