D0NK, I think I did a bit different to the route you describe. Red Pike looks like a good alternative to Scarth Gap though! I didn’t drop down into Wasdale, I climbed from Ennerdale directly (ish) to the top of Great Gable. Gavel Neese looks like it would be hard work, but that trail out of Wasdale to Styhead looks like it might be one to have a look at sometime.

I think I was about 5 hours car to car, it was a hot day and I was started to get affected by the heat once I’d got to Stockley Bridge. That or my brain had rattled loose a bit, I think the symptoms are similar!

Ah yes, I see, your map has a Raven Crag on it, I dropped down to Styhead either on that path or the one by Raven Crag, then down to Stockley Bridge, up Honister and down Warnscale Bottom back to Buttermere. To be honest, I wasn’t aware there were two paths and went down the path that the walkers were all coming up. It’s steep and very rocky at the top, I probably rode 70% of the top section, then all of the pitch-paved path to the bottom. Your mileage may vary!

I did think on the way up the moraines about descending that way. The shape is good, a rollercoaster and a long descent that’s steep in places. Problem is there isn’t a very well defined path, the grass would slow you down too much and it’s very smooth. I don’t think it would be a good use of the altitude.

What I did think though was that that valley would be a bloody brilliant place to put a trail-centre type trail. It’s a big bowl with next to no rideable trails in as it is, but has the potential for a long loop that climbs up very high, down the moraine, then climb back up the side of the valley for some rocky switch-backed descending and some forest trails too. Shame it would never happen.

David, I’m not sure about Raven Crag, the only Raven Crag I can see on the map is off Glaramara, which although in approximately the right ball-park is quite a long way off the route I described!

Anyway, I think you might be looking up to Windy Gap via Aaron Slack? My route is from the bottom of Scarth Gap out of Ennerdale to Great Gable. When I got into Ennerdale Black Sail looked steep and Kirk Fell looked un-rideable for a lot of the descent towards Great Gable. If you look up Ennerdale valley towards Green Gable, there’s a line of glacial moraine that runs down from Green Gable. It looked an easier push up there than going over Kirk Fell. So I headed that way. It’s know as The Tongue, but not labelled as such on OS maps. The path is on the map, though I lost it part way up where it bears right and aims straight at Windy Gap.

It had been my intention to go over Green Gable onto Great Gable, having run it previously. However I had forgotten how steep it is going along Windy Gap, so aborted that idea! If you’ve not been, it’s too close to being a cliff going up onto Great Gable!

So instead, I picked up Moses Trod somewhere around Gillercomb Head and followed that path South past Green Gable, past Windy Gap in the direction of Kirk Fell, then turned left and climbed onto Great Gable.

It’s not a great climb, but I’m confident it’s the easiest way of getting up there from Ennerdale. I didn’t think much of the Scarth Gap descent, so if I was doing it again I’d probably go over Haystacks to get onto Moses Trod though.

Hope that makes sense?

It’s a great route over Scarth Gap, I had intended to do Black Sail and over Kirk Fell, but Kirk Fell looked like a cliff and Black Sail was steeper than I remembered, so I turned left and went up the tongue to the foot of Green Gable, contoured right and then turned left up to the summit of Great Gable.

Down to Styhead Tarn is really good, very testing though, especially at the top! From Stockley Bridge I went up Honister Pass, round the back of Fleetwith Pike and down Warnscale Bottom and back to the car.

Great day out.

Just leave it the **** alone?

I’ve come off towards Souther Fell once upon a time, was pretty cool.

See if you can find the hub standards, then measure your hub. a 15mm hub is narrower than a 20mm hub, so the conversion will depend on whether the hub design leaves enough room to run narrower end caps or not. Once you know that, you’ll know if there’s any point in trying to find some adaptors. In theory a lot of adaptors might work.

Well, it’s arrived!

Had a good look at it and it looks like a fantastic buy at £78. Paint work isn’t perfect, but the frame isn’t damaged, weighs next to nothing and looks really good. Absolute bargain!

What is it though I hear you ask? I still don’t know. It looks genuine, it doesn’t look like a respray at all. All the stickers look like they’ve been done at the factory. I’d say it is a Principia-sourced frame. BUT, the sticker with the frame details/size on states it’s aluminium. Did Principia just stick the standard stickers on it and send it racing, or is it a really good fake? If it’s fake, why would you do that!

All very strange. Just need to get the BB out and give it a blast….

I have the SS/Trials Hope rear wheel, it’s basically a 5-speed cassette body, so better dishing and scope to adjust chainline.

Mine is the bolt-in version rather than bolt-through, which I have found makes it a lot easier to remove and install the wheel, because it can be quite difficult to drift an axle out against the chain tension. Definitely worth getting that feature if you can from my point of view.

Don’t know if there are more points of engagement as it’s the only Hope hub I own, but it’s a proper chainsaw noise that comes out of it.

Not sure what’s about, but if you buy through Quidco Vodafone will give you £160 cash-back, which will help.

The bit I don’t get is the outrage that seems to posted on internet forums when people don’t do a turn. It’s almost as if people don’t want to work hard and get fitter and faster?

I mean the tri bar guy, who’s he cheating; only himself?

I’ve ridden in a group a while ago where someone would be off the back on all the inclines for 50 miles, then come flying past on the last 10 miles downhill after sand bagging all ride. Annoying? Yes! But because I wanted to be on the front working hard, rather than being sheltered. The problem is, if someone does that, how do you go back past them a minute later without them thinking it’s now a race or that you’re a ****?

I got some Ultegra 10s for around the £100 mark on CRC not so long ago. I picked up second hand bits to complete the conversion to 10s for under £150. I’m sure you can sort your issue cheaply if you look on ebay etc.

I’ve got 32:16 on mind, which gets ridden in the hills between Manchester and the Peak District, just bought a 15 and a 14 as well as it’s getting a bit spinny as my fitness improves.

28 zipties couldn’t hold it! In fact it’s so well seized on that if it could I wouldn’t be able to turn the axle anymore! It’s properly stiff to turn with all those zipties on, but still manages to splay the legs.

Fortunately/Unfortunately I’ve discovered that one of the dropouts is cracked, so I’m not sure how much of an issue it is now! Anyone got any spare lower legs? I guess not as they all seem to crack eventually.

No ratchet straps, mind you most ratchet straps have a ratchet that is wider than these forks….

Did think about some sort of grindage, the hub isn’t worth much, but the bearing will be very tough, I expect I’ll manage to make a mess!

I do have a g-clamp, might not be big enough though.

It’s a 20mm Fox screw in axle, not a Maxle. It’s threaded in and the axle cannot be unscrewed far enough that it can be hammered out.

I’ve belted the crap out of the hub, it’s the hub that is stuck to the axle, no movement. I would want to hit the forks as hard as I’ve hit the axle and it would have the same effect anyway.

Stopping the forks from splaying might be an option, however it might be easier said than done. not sure my vice is wide enough or stiff enough to keep the legs together. Any ideas for immobilising the fork legs?

I get lower back pain from being too stretched out, just to contradict anc!

For road bikes certainly I think the problems with discs are the torsional force trying to twist the fork and the rotational mass of the rotor itself. Both mean that there is a weight/time penalty that is unlikely to be outweighed by a braking benefit.

The answer would be to fit tiny multi-piston calipers to both sides of the fork on very small rotors.

It’s a square taper BB isn’t it? I’m 98% sure my cranks are octalink and I don’t want to change the cranks if I can help it. Would Retro Bike be a good place to sell the BB rather than eBay?

If there’s one brand I know nothing about it’s Principia. Actually, the same applies to a lot of road brands. How come they often have Italian sounding names but are from different countries? Principia must be Italian right?

Like I said, it’s a short-term swap that will become a winter bike in due course, so not really bothered what it is, so long as I can get that bottom bracket out and make a few quid selling my old frame it’ll cost me next to nothing.

Seller is happy for me to collect, but it’s too far away, so have paid for postage.

Yeah, it’s a similar principle, with the main pivot on an eccentric bearing so the pivot point moves with the suspension, but it’s not I-Drive as it is a linkage-driven-linkage actuated shock, rather than the bottom bracket being suspended in no-mans land between the front and rear triangles. Looks good, though Brant has tweeted a passing resemblance with a Decathlon Rock Rider of all things!

Sorry:

http://www.lfgss.com/thread38369.html

I’ve got two keyboards on the desk and keep using the wrong one!

Yeah, sorry, not sure how I got that link wrong! I found a better match though:

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=260796568873&ssPageName=STRK:MEWAX:IT&autorefresh=true#ht_602wt_1139

Looks identical to me?

If it’s not legit the transaction is covered through PayPal so I’ve nothing to lose I don’t think. It does look more like someone that hasn’t used eBay before rather than someone that doesn’t know their bikes I think.

Does look a lot like this:

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=260796568873&ssPageName=STRK:MEWAX:IT&autorefresh=true#ht_602wt_1139

I did actually think the bonded dropouts looked exactly like those on my 1998 Trek OCLV carbon MTB frame when I first looked at it.

I say it’s clearly Carbon as the Principia’s all appear to have been aluminium with clear welds and no hydroforming, so the bottom bracket area doesn’t fit at all.

If you think it’s a Trek OCLV, that wouldn’t be a disaster, so long as it was the one Lance road!

In fairness, I’ve just realised that I’m missing a CRC order and 4 eBay orders as well, so it looks like the Post Man has arsed everything up again. Did some snow fall somewhere last week?

Still waiting here……

Just under 90 miles at Hit the North last summer, been up to 60 miles on my road bike this year and 50 off road riding from Bamford to Manchester. Am doing the Keilder this year, so hoping to get over 100 at that and hopefully between now and then on the road as well as part of my prep.

Looks like your ride wasn’t all that awesome as they’ve got the servers running again!

What bike does she have? Can it be DH’d up perhaps? Eg, short stem, wide bars, bigger brake rotors, big tyres, different forks, seat post out of the way etc?

The reason you should make your own is that you can decide what you want it for, what is useful for you and what you want to know etc. You can also look at the information you are recording and setup the sheet around that. That way you’ll end up with something simple to use and clear in it’s output that might actually be useful. Rather than something that’s a pain to input data to so you don’t use it for long and has an overly complicated output so you get no real benefit from the information.

If you only record time and distance then anything more complicated than a mileage and pace log will be largely useless for you. If you have altitude, temperature, calories, average heart rate etc, you might want something more complicated.

For example, you might ride road and mtb and want some sort of equivalence output so you can track your training taking into account which bike you’ve been on. Eg average MTB speed is 11mph, average road speed is 18mph, so have an output where mtb mileage is multiplied up to an 18mph average. Then you might want to factor altitude gained into the equivalence and reduce the 18mph based on how much climbing you do.

Best to just make your own I reckon, it’s not hard in Excel. I’ve done a fairly simple one that I input a weekly summary into from connect.garmin.com, then it highlights the top 5 weeks in each category i’m interested in and does rolling averages for distance. It also totals everything up and tells me how many more training weeks I’ve got until Keilder and what percentage of the time from when I started training for Keilder has gone. It’s not overly complicated, but it could be if I decided I wanted to know something else as well.

The obvious thing to add would be a log for each ride that would then feed the weekly summary, but using a Garmin to record training emans it’s easier to use connect.garmin.com and then just pull the weekly summary out. I’m not bothered what I’ve done each day, so long as each week is consistently decent. I’ll probably add a monthly summary as well for tracking longer-term fitness.

Jeez, isn’t everything just loads betterer than when I were a kid?

Disc brakes = brilliant
Tubeless = brilliant
Droppers = brilliant (the ones that work anyway)
Suspension = brilliant
Maxle = Brilliant
Etc etc

You can keep your retro nonsense!

I don’t have a dropper, but need one on at least two of my bikes. I’m happy to ride my race bike with the seat up and never move it, but that’s a function of where I ride it and the desire to be used to riding down stuff with the seat up as I won’t be dropping it in races. Flowy upydowny trails, such as the Ciaran Path woudl be so much more pleasureable with an uppydownerjobby though!

Me? I’d be starting in Buttermere, going over Scarth Gap to Ennerdale, up The Tongue to the foot of Green Gable, then contouring round to the right and up onto Great Gable. Down to Styhead Tarn, down to Stockley Bridge, then ride up Honister Pass. Through the mine and up and drop down Warnscale Bottom.

True that, the armchair engineers are very quiet!

(To be fair, i’m sure we all learned something from the second picture)

What does it cost for the SQT sessions and what does bike hire cost?

Yeah, the bikes are very good, no issues, but n+1 and all that……

Cool, ok, will crack on with the Accreditaion process and let my Girlfriend know I need another bike. Don’t worry, this one will be cheap, it’s got no brakes or gears………….