Marshalling at the SDA today, numbers seemed solid (not sure if it’s sold out but it’s healthy), the overall quality of the field is definitely higher than it was 10 years ago, most people are back on dh bikes than a couple of years ago, looked to be more women and young riders and less of the infinite crowd of old dudes that used to make up the numbers.

Sort of ironic with enduro in the valley dying and the good old SDA which has been declared doomed and obsolete and replaced by enduro more times than I care to remember still going strong and delivering awesome racing.

Still love my old freeriders and freerider dlx, nothing fancy, just a good shoe. Wish the waterproofing was better, could wish for a little more toe protection (because of that time i properly broke my toe) but they’re just very very good on the bike and that’s what I want the most, everything else is secondary pretty much except in deep winter

+1 for not being slavishly bound to using all the travel or to having “correct” sag, sag is basically just a good useful starting point. (though some bikes are quite specific about sag for their anti-squat/pedal platform so it’s sometimes more important, even then what feels good and works well is not necesarily what the manufacturer thinks it is, they’ve never seen you ride)

If I were you I’d note what you’ve got now, then fanny about with it. Damping settings are the quickest to fanny about with so start with that, then air. Volume spacers are relatively hard to fanny about with so I always leave those til last, even if you’re reasonably sure it’s the right call it’s still easier to check other stuff first.

TBF volume spacers can be quite unintuitive, because of how they interact with the air pressure. I always say experiment but even more so with volume spacers, there’s no reason to try and work it all out when you can just do it.

No riding for me, still waiting for the all clear for the docs on my shoulder, and also my hand, and also my other hand. So, marshalled at the SDA instead. Lovely day for standing on a hill watching a whole lot of people ride into the same tree.

https://imgur.com/a/KWyZN9l

Art Brut last night in Edinburgh, it was definitely, absolutely an Art Brut show, 2/3ds good quality shouty indie and 1/3ds Eddie Argos entertaining gibberish. Enjoyed it a lot and if anyone’s on the fence about the tour they should probably go, but equally if you’re not into their schtick it has not changed in the slightes for at least a decade.

Plus lots of bootlegged/reshared older roadkill episodes ;)

Stay Tuned can be good too if you like that sort of thing- it’s Tony Angelo who used to be half of Hot Rod Garage, doing his own thing. As long as you can ignore the inevitable youtubeisms- the repetition and cynical episodism that you have to do to make the monetisation work- it can be really good, partly because they have a real budget but also they’re looking for good results, they’re not deliberately setting out to do bad work like so many youtubers are or halfassing it, they’re doing real world projects and filming it. I really enjoyed the “cyclone” truck build frinstance, it’s as close to normal-person car project stuff as it gets while also being reasonably well filmed.

Back to actual jehovah’s witnesses, it’s been reported that in the states the church sends people out doorstepping not to try and make conversions, because that essentially never happens any more, but that the entire point now is entirely to expose their people to angry people and to essentially tramuatise them and make them feel isolated and ostracised and push them further into the arms of the church. Anyone know if that’s the case here?

I was quite tickled to get some at my door, never had it in 40-odd years so I’d almost written it off. We did used to get the church of scotland coming round to try and save us and my mum from my evil apostate dad and bring us back to the faith, that was always quite fun.

This is a game of two halves IMO

Breaking it off in the first place almost certainly means it was seized when you took it to them, ie it was already knackered, it just wasn’t broken but that’s like having already crashed but not yet having landed. Possibly they could have done more to extract it safely but equally, it’s entirely possible they did all they could or all that was reasonable and it still broke. And you can’t prove whether they did or didn’t. So I think that’s basically straightfoward, the problem isn’t really that it broke, the problem was that it was seized enough to break, they just happened to be the people who found it. (whoever last worked on the car might be part responsible but that’s a losing battle)

But the easy-out has made it worse and that’s on them. That’s amateur hour imo, especially on an expensive part. Should have got it off the car at that point and approached it properly. Having said all <that> I don’t agree at all that it’s automatically unfixable at that point, sure the hardened tip is now a total bastard to handle but it can often be handled. Though here you really need to see it to judge- is it going to be realistic to weld a bolt on, frinstance, or, how much easyout is still stuck in there, is going to make a big difference.

So that’s the exact line i’d be taking with them “I understand that things break especially on cars of this age, the problem is not that it broke, it’s how you’ve responded to that”.

timmys
Full Member

also the Stone Roses if John Squire hadn’t famously spanned himself by falling off a mountain bike, leading to the famous Pulp headline slot.

OT but I reckon this is the best evidence of timetravellers going back to change the timeline and make things better. Forget killing Hitler, we’re going to stop the Stone Roses from sucking at Glastonbury, all we need to do is shout “****in pin it ya fairy” at John Squire at the right moment and it all falls together then we get to quantum leap off to Central Park and get Bono.

The AN01 was the classic Superstar Nano. You can still buy the AN01 for around £50, not worth it these days… Still, interesting that they’re still out there for the “never change anything on my bike” people, and you can still get service kits etc.

A lot of older disc-equipped hybrids used qr and mtb standards, because road disc standards hadn’t quite settled and there was a lack of parts, especially cheap ones. Works out fantastic- obviously the bikes are old now and don’t come up for sale that much but when they do they’re cheap, and you can hop them up with old mtb parts that absolutely nobody wants. Though it can be tricky to shop for them of course.

Mine is an old Boardman Comp which was an alright but fairly heavy bike when new, I added some skinny QR-only xc wheels that weigh 1500g, made it 1x, then added some narrow carbon bars, some old 9 speed X9 gearing and formula xc brakes that I had lying around. All just the stuff that nobody wants. I’m probably into it for about £400 all in, it’s super reliable and it absolutely flies, I genuinely wouldn’t change a single part of it and almost any newer flat bar bike would almost certainly be worse.

You want an ork dreadnought? Because this is how you get ork dreadnoughts

Couple of people mentioned Grip damper’d foxes and zocchis, maybe worth mentioning that these are brilliant dampers but lacking in adjustment so some people just can’t get a good setup out of them. I’m too light and there was just no damping setting that worked, they were either reactive but super divey, or supportive but choked. Just a limitation of the compression damper/adjustment, high and low are tied together.

PS, come join the Cult of Coil. Big forks are always better with coils in, always.

Perfectly good wheel that, not exactly light but durable. Fair bit better than what the bike had on it, that’s for sure. Assuming it’s centrelock? You can get adaptors pretty cheaply and keep your old rotor. But don’t commit to the wheel til you know where you are with the fork!

I can’t remember what the headset standard was on these, it’s a fairly large headtube but it always came with a straight steerer fork, definitely that needs checking out before you go further! But also just to add, that’s more fork than the frame is designed for, I’m pretty sure the minimum travel is 140mm and the frame was built for 130mm (the Kraken I think always came with 120mm or less but the exact same frame was sold with a 130mm fork under another name) I thought it rode great with 130mm but I’d be wary of going much further than that.

Sure, but why is that relevant? If you cut handlebars for a living it might be, but if I cut handlebars for a living I’d be doing it with a machine not a hand tool.

(also, my brother partly cuts tubes for a living, mostly he uses a chop saw, sometimes he uses his powered hacksaw, sometimes he uses a hacksaw, sometimes he uses a holesaw…)

DH has the natural problem that there’s more than one rider on track for most of the day, so full runs even if you had infinite cameras and drones are impossible. And it’s a hard environment to film in so inevitably they want to do it with as few cameras as possible, catching as much as possible, which quite often leads to “we now see the riders on the boring bit with no trees”. And especially they always want to get as much of the start and final stretches as possible and I don’t think there’s a race track in the world where the best bits are right at teh start and finish.

But when the coverage and the track and teh conditions come together it can still be pretty bloody brilliant. And easy to read even if you’ve never ridden a bike, there’s a reason Danny Hart and others can go viral. TBH for most of the years I’ve watched dh, most of hte time, the coverage has been more than good enough to enjoy it and understand it but a lot of people seem to want the literally impossible.

The fire brigade still seem to be essentially getting criticised for working on the basis that the building and its cladding should be fit for purpose and that all the essential safety features weren’t fictional. It definitely seems like the reason their action plan didn’t work was because of all that systematic dishonesty, deliberate concealment of safety risks, intentional misleading, and incompetent refurbishment and the culture of buck-passing. No different to, say, turning up at an industrial unit and discovering it’s full of ilelgally stored hazardous chemicals.

me: 60kg, all my bikes = basic mtb tubeless, even the commuter is on old mtb rims and some schwalbe ones.

I think I’ve fitted a tube once in the last year, which was because I broke a valve off at fort william! In fairness I’d had a random air loss problem for a while so I think it’d cracked before and was just resealing, and then when I went to pump it the entire thing just fell off.

Before that goes back a long time, I had to do one on an uplift trip IIRC for a little slice that just wouldn’t stay sealed for some reason and was needing pumped up every couple of hours, but that was only cos I was away from home- normally I’d have patched it properly but I didn’t have any of the stuff for that.

Like joe said, the bigger the fork the better the damper it needs, the basic Domains are the wrong fork for just about everything except smooth park laps. (honestly I reckon anyone that’s happy with a big fork and basic damper on anything else probably should just be getting a smaller bike)

Love the wheels, hate everything else about it tbh. I’ll stick with my Dune and its 4.8s

I dunno, sounds like an ideal job for a cheap tool- sure it’s not done many uses, but it’s lasted 8 years, you’d be a long time recouping the cost of an expensive one at that rate even leaving aside the fact that it’s upfront cost.

(guide and hacksaw is imo a better way to do it btw… Or just hacksaw and care. If you have any old lockon grips that you’re not using, or old grip rings, they make great guides. free tools are better than cheap tools!)

I switched to oko hi-fibre (same as Halo sealant), it’s water-based and water-soluble so as long as it hasn’t completely dried out you can just add a little water to re-dilute it. It seals as well as anything else does ime and it’s cheap.

I keep my bikes in the house and Stans doesn’t like that much, varies depending on tyres too I reckon but it was just drying up too fast for me.

The only way to do a “through axle” in a 135mm rear end is to use a 10mm, 135mm hub and a 10mm boltthrough. A bunch of rear hubs like Hope and DT offered 10mm options in their old 135/142mm hubs (which are mostly the same thing with different endcaps on). But to be honest it’s not usually worth the hassle.

Converting a front “old standard” hub to boost is pretty easy as long as the front is 15mm axle. But not all QR wheels can be converted to 15mm, the stock Carrera ones definitely can’t. Honestly the best option was going to have been to find a quality used non-boost fork, I got a revelation recently which is still a decent performing fork, for £150, well actually i bought a whole bike for £150 and binned most of it ;)

I bet a lot of StW people have entire bikes in their sheds that never get used and have parts that would be ideal for this.

I guess the question is what do you really want to achieve? I had that same Kraken, the wheels if you still have the original ones were alright but not amazing- the formula rear hub in particular can be a bit unreliable. But the frame’s actually pretty nice and would surprise people. But in the end, there’s definitely a point where if you’re replacing the fork and the wheels you’re getting a long way towards just getting a much newer bike instead and that does have a lot of benefits, bikes really have got better.

FWIW the original Nanos were yet another rebadged HT, I think you ca still buy them under that name and maybe also under Exotic? Only the more recent ones were inhouse.

Definitely interested because I’m a total tyre nerd, also tbf schwalbe’s current carcasses are a wee bit crap ime so it’ll be interesting to see what might come out of that too.

Proper top level pisstaking to call it radial though, since it’s just not true, it’s not a radial at all- just a slightly different bias ply. Their PR stuff is full of just straight up lies and contradictions, I love the bit that basically goes “What is a radial tyre? It means that the plies run straight across the tyres. These tyres don’t do that.” WTF guys. But that’s just marketing people not being able to help themselves, doesn’t take anything away from the tyres.

If we can say “bands where someone’s died” then does that open the doors to “bands at a specific point in time”? Cos if so I’m off to Donington Monsters Of Rock 1994. Basically the thing that got me into rock music, I’d just started getting Kerrang and they went really massive on it and I just kind of immersed into that, then it was all on the radio, so many amazing sets and a bunch of bands that I later came to love that were just absolutely at their finest- I’d kill to have seen Therapy?, Sepultura and the Wildhearts that day but tbh I’d love to see every single band there. Um, except Cry of Love, sorry Cry of Love.

winston
Free Member

Live music in a modern stadium is my idea of hell and any money is too much money.

Just once, I went to a stadium show and it was fantastic- Muse, My Chemical Romance and Biffy Clyro, all 3 bands that I love and that could really rise to it and make it an event. And being at Wembley was pretty cool too. Even Simon Neil out of Biffy had to do a day-oh, it’s the law.

Get yourself on youtube, chances are there’ll be a how-to for that exact car that’ll tell you if there’s any gotchas,special tools, random manufacturer ****ery etc and will let you judge it for yourself. Condition does make a difference, discs can be pretty seized on especially if the car’s not done a lot of miles recently- basically if it’s been used then it’ll have had discs and pads, if it’s not then they could have been on there for a long time.

The main thing that gets complicated is stuff like stuck brake caliper sliding pins, and pistons. Pistons can be very sticky but still not quite seizing and dragging and that can be revealed when you go to change pads (because usually they make very small movements but suddenly you’re making big ones). This is where a pro or experienced diy’er can be very useful as they can pick out problems early, and you do tend to lose that advantage if you’re diy’ing it without much experience. But equally nobody started out experienced!

TBH for most cars, I’d say it’s worth just making the attempt, and if you feel like it’s getting out of hand be prepared to back off, the worst that can happen is that you immobilise it on your driveway but as long as you don’t do that, then the second worst is that you just have to take it to a garage anyway so what have you lost? Basically just don’t get in too deep.

Waking up exactly the right amount of time before your alarm so you can go “**** yeah” and go back to sleep

Doh, yep

Re actual dh bikes, I always used to keep one, but now I’ve got a long travel, big coil forked enduro bike which is more capable than my last dh bike was, so I just keep a tough (cheap) set of wheels with dh tyres on instead. Sure, a modern dh bike will be better again but it’s not the difference it was- it used to be not so long ago that even the biggest hitting of practical everyday bikes felt really out of its depth at fort william or glencoe, whereas now they’ll make you a little slower but that’s all. I mean ffs we have single crown forks at red bull rampage. So now big pedallable bikes just make more sense for almost everyone and with the right tyres on can do the job well enough to make little difference except at the pointiest end. It’s not a rejection of downhill though, it’s just progress. We’re riding the same, just way less people feel the need for a specialist bike to do it.

TBF there’s just not that many UK dh tracks where a full on dh bike is a clearly better choice and even then it’s mostly differences that matter at race pace. Most of the modern uplift venues have very wisely built for the bikes people have for the most part. Just once i took my dh bike on a tour of welsh uplift venues (because I lost a bolt out of my enduro bike on day 1!) and there were, ooh, entire minutes in that entire holiday where I wouldn’t rather have been on the other bike. That was the end of dh bikes for me. Not worth keeping one for 30 runs of fort william and glencoe a year (and the rare mad stuff elsewhere that really pays off for a dh bike, frankly I don’t want to do ;) )

Thing is pretty much all materials can be built in wildly different ways. Like, alu vs steel is the classic for mtb but if you blind tested an old Inbred and an original Scandal, I reckon pretty much everyone would get it the wrong way round. I’ve had stiff ti and noodly ti and now I have middle-of-the-road ti, I’ve had flexy alu and rock solid lumpen steel, and carbon can be damn nearly whatever it wants to be with a good enough designer and factory.

But there’s also a bit of, I dunno, determinism too. Like, most companies if they’re making a ti bike will make it light which will usually mean it’s softer (and less durable). Carbon likewise will tend to be light and stiff. Not because it has to be but because that’s what people except. Steel is a wee bit different because making a “steel feeling” frame is actually pretty hard, and expensive, it amounts to “thin tubes” so most steel frames are absolute lumps. But still, steel can be very stiff if the designer chooses too, just, that’s probably less common than the ones that are stiff just cos they’re made out of the cheapest scaffold tubes.

In the end I think you pretty much have to testride. Or just be really good at justifying your purchase afterwards ;)

Just a wee addition, I always rave about the Nukeproof Horizon Comp and I have an ebay alert so I cna sweep up any new-old-stock that appear, they’re absolutely great… but definitely don’t confuse those with the Electron Evos, which are alright but pretty low on grip. Another perfectly well made pedal that’s just not really the right shape, and doesn’t really do anything in return apart from being really cheap. But they’re OK if you don’t demand good grip, not everyone does. Mine are on my shopping bike now, I just couldn’t see any good reason to keep mountain biking on them when there’s so much better out there with no drawbacks at all.

(and don’t confuse those with the original Electron, which was pretty much crap. The Evo basically threw some extra pins and some minor reshaping in to compensate for the axle bulge, which is enough to make them at least not terrible)

Random other option, I got some Thinkriders from Aliexpress, which in shape are a Horizon copy pretty much which is great news but have a slightly different axle, and cost £10. I’ve been using them for a year or so now without any issues, and they are as good underfoot as any pedal I’ve ever used, but I do weigh 10 stone so do bear that in mind :)

I think the most I’ve ever paid for a standalone show was £100, which was Muse at the Albert Hall at the point where they’d started playing stadiums (and by luck was just before Muse went shit), plus travel costs from Scotland. Totally worth it.

It’s travel that kills me, I’m off to London to see Biffy Clyro playing their first album and the cost of the ticket’s going to be like 20% of the cost of that, it’ll be way more than a ticket for Oasis. But again it’ll be worth it.

Just received a Troy Lee Designs Flatline helmet, £40 from Tredz… Ridiculous for the money tbh. They have various colours and sizes (but prices vary)

IMO it’s a bit like night riding lights- any loss of peripheral vision shouldn’t really matter as it’s not anything you need to know about, basically every mtb goggles ever made give you all the field of vision you need just because like sharkattack says you don’t need to see anything else, you’re looking forward.

But, I like the most field of vision I can get, it makes me feel a bit more comfortable , I think it’s probably entirely psychological but that still makes a difference. But ymmv. Most goggles give good field of vision anyway.

Has nobody mentioned the HT PA03A? Nothing flashy, not super thin or super big, but just really bloody good, HT make loads of the other pedals mentioned. It’s the closest you can get now to the old Nukeproof Horizon Comp, which is still my favourite pedal ever- so good they discontinued it because nobody was buying any of their expensive ones.

Didn’t like the oneups much, the grip is just poor and I don’t see what you get in return, they’re marginally lower profile than some but not in a way that makes any real difference imo . Burgtec felt bulky without any real redeeming featues, it’s a really similar pedal to the PA03A but worse. V11 is decent but again it’s no better than the PA03A and ismore expensive (and is probably made by HT?)

Thing is these are all big grip mtb pedals so might be excessive but I don’t think they have any downsides either for you.

I’m managing to simultaneously think “50% increase, that’s ridiculous” but also “that’s still really good value for what it is”. Guess it depends exactly where you are and where you ride but it only has to improve a handful of rides or make or break one or two to be worth it imo.

bigblackshed
Full Member

DT Swiss Cheese? No thank you.

Unusual comment this? Their old (old old) ones were soft as ***** but the modern ones are about as tough as it gets.

Full suss fatbike, and maybe a fat 29er, but that’s about it. Never had a singlespeed but that’s the sort of itch you treat with antibiotics not scratching

I still watch it sometimes, used to watch it religiously but I think I overdosed on it at some point, it started to feel a bit samey (which is a daft thing to say considering that performance-wise we’ve been in a golden age of the sport, but, ah well).

Used to race occasionally, badly so maybe that helps with a bit of a connection, having rattled down fort william in like 7 minutes does help you really appreciate the difference.