Another vote for Thriva here – flagged up liver function issues.

Results are reviewed by GPs and they are perfectly happy if you are spot on and definitely don’t give you your money back

Have you checked the apps to see how close your nearest slower chargers are that you could leave it over night? Go on zap map and filter by AC type 2 socket and look around your area. We have both vehicles electric, no off street parking (but can run a covered cable in an emergency) – rely on slow chargers. Some are 200 metres away, some are more like a 15 min walk. But walking is nice. We do it all the time anyway.

Haha what a blast from the past. I still have beef with this, it keeps me up at night. Getting marked down on your build kit for specing DHF/DHR when they are the control tyres for many other reviews, and being a miss match of components with ‘all the brands’. If this were an off the peg bike from a major brand, I bet the headset manufacturer would still be different to the bars, and the saddle different again still. In fact the only thing that’s likely to be the same would be rims, they would likely be a full DT wheelset. That said, WTB with any brands hubs is a popular OEM choice. Anyone else think this is a disjointed spec? And I don’t mean ‘what you would choose’ which is obviously different. This was supposed to be our suit-many-best-performing-mechanics-pick spec 🤷 BTW the Chromag rims are amazing.

Frame // Custom-butted, heat-treated 4130 CroMo
Fork // DVO Diamond D1 160mm
Shock // DVO Topaz T3
Hubs // DT Swiss 350
Rims // Chromag Phase 30
Tyres // Maxxis Minion DHR 2.4in WT / DHF 2.6in
Chainset // Shimano Deore XT
Rear Mech // Shimano Deore XT
Shifters // Shimano Deore XT
Cassette // Shimano Deore XT Microspline 10-51T
Brakes // Shimano Deore XT 4-piston, 180mm rotors
Stem // OneUp 40mm
Bars // OneUp Carbon 760mm
Grips // Ergon GA2
Seatpost // OneUp 180mm
Saddle // Ergon
Size Tested // Long
Sizes Available // Long, Longer

The MG4 normal lists a nominal capacity of 51kWh and a usable amount of 50.8, which seems rather close. The long range one lists 64 and 61.7 so in that one they are holding some back. I wonder why it’s not the same the different versions?

This is because they use different chemistry batteries from memory – I think the normal uses an LFP, so is better at handling full discharge cycles (ohh err). It also has no cobalt.

Someone might need to fact check me. Have a watch of the Bjorn video of him driving his mum around Thailand(?) in one. He talks about the battery differences.

Six month lead time on Hopes? Never! I have an H3 in raw carbon XT bike ready to ship and more in both carbon and chameleon arriving in about 6 weeks or so. And those ones can still have their details changed without losing place in line.

Personally I have a real soft spot for non far east carbon, so the Hopes, WeAreOne Arrival and even the Atherton even though I don’t sell those ones should all be top of your list.

I have been on a HB130 for nearly three years and don’t plan to change it any time soon. Ridden the 916 for a few days and it is a lot of fun too, I just prefer trail bikes to enduro style bikes for what we ride. That said it did pedal really well, I wonder what a 916 ‘light build’ would be like :D

People’s car is currently the Niro and in the future might be seen as one of the forthcoming ID2/Kia EV4 etc but honestly they will be too late. Once the second hand prices come down a bit more and all the 2020 ex lease Niros/Konas hit the auctions they will be the sensible choice.

For the Berlingo/Traveller etc, they really do seem like the only choice in that bracket but would be hard to live with. The 50kwh battery is only about 42 usable, and they use the same drive systems as all the other cars and vans, so m/kWh isn’t great and the trip computer calculates range very badly. I have an E-Expert which is about 67kwh usable from what I can tell. If I drive carefully I can get 170m in summer.

Honestly go take a full day test drive in one, see what kind of milage you can get. Then go do the same in a Buzz if you can make the numbers work. I did 144 miles in my test drive Buzz, 3m/kWh, middle of winter starting -3deg.

Has anyone posted the notjustbikes video?

Read the service instructions, look at the tools, see if you have anything that works instead

I would say I’m not an expert in any of this, but I do get to see inside/around a lot of different brands, both ones I sell and ones I don’t. I am doubting myself about the SC country of origin stickers now, anyone with one fancy going to check their stickers 😂

I am stuck at home with my first round of COVID and it’s rubbish, feel terrible. Hence the time for big replies.

Interesting comparisons with the alu Vs carbon frames, from an non manufacturer point of view they seem to have the same issues, as in most of the problems are from QC/manufacturing. Perhaps moreso in alu. Most of the carbon frame failures we see are de-bonding, and most of the alu failures are cracks near welds, likely from mistakes by the welder. In part you can design to reduce this, by not having areas of multiple passes etc but at the end of the day, low paid workers on the other side of the world to where the product is going to be used, being pushed hard to get things out the door, mistakes will be made and things will break in a few years use.

As for ranking alu frames it’s so hard to say, Banshee and Transition are fantastic but both have suffered in the past with the issues above. And both have designed it out now.

Orbea aluminium frames are welded by robots in Portugal, and robots tend to be very consistent.

Perhaps Jameso wants to chime in and correct me as this is really his area of expertise if I remember right.

Over the past few years. Source – the stickers on the bikes

The paint has always been a weak point, the current carbon frames seem a lot better for this. The alu frames do seem to be getting a bit better too, but certainly for a few years there they were pretty fragile. My partner has ridden a Vanquish since launch that has been invisiframed, dropped on her turbo trainer and cracked, protection stripped off then sent for repair, re taped and now another two years down the line from that and still looking great, her Smuggler carbon faired well too, now replaced with a Sentinel carbon.

I have seen some bearing walk too, it’s certainly not limited to TR and IMO all bearings pressed direct into carbon should use bearing fit compound. I do when replacing them. One of the clever bits about SC design actually, all bearings are housed in the alu links which makes servicing easier and is certainly one of the reasons they get less warranties. If I was designing a carbon frame from scratch I would try to not bond anything into it. All bearings housed in links, press fit shell and Trek style elliptical threaded inserts for the axles.

I didn’t read the OP as anything to do with boutique etc, simply quality. You can have a high quality mass produced product and a low quality boutique one. If you want a high quality carbon frame then boutique is a good way to go though, so a Hope, Atherton, WeAreOne, Allied etc. All fantastic production quality and QC.

HB916 for the big bike, WAO Arrival as a trail bike, Allied BC40 for XC duties then an Echo for gravel duties. Then a separate insurance policy for the shed.

Yeah you certainly didn’t seem to get the answers you were looking for. Yes you certainly do get many levels of carbon frame, both in materials and production quality.

This doesn’t mean cheaper carbon frames are a bad thing, they can actually ride really nicely and be a great option. I ride a Marin Headlands gravel frame which is built with cheaper carbon – so to really simplify it lower modulus sheets, more small bits in simpler shapes, where the layup order/orientation likely isn’t paid much attention, and it’s held together with more resin. This makes it a bit heavier than some, but still light in the grand scheme of things yet also rides a bit softer with more vibration damping (mostly from having more resin). They are also comparatively quite cheap to buy. All is good. Same thing with YT really, cheaper carbon cheaper production but all safe and fun to ride, cheaper bikes.

On the other end you have Hope. Japanese fibre, made into the pre preg sheets in Manchester then cut, laid up and baked in the Hope factory. Ultimate control over the production, great QC. I have been selling them for over three years and never had a single warranty, of any kind. My own personal HB130 is the first demo we got, Large 09 I think. It’s so early the size sticker is stuck behind the bottle cage so I can’t see it 😂 They used to be a price premium, now they sit in line or a few hundred cheaper for a frame compared to all the Asia produced big guns.

For Transition and Santa Cruz themselves, I have sold Transition since 2012 so watched them grow and evolve over the years. The Bandit was the new bike when we first got them, a great wee trail bike mostly made from off the shelf tubes but welded into TRs design with a few neat touches. For the carbon itself, the very first carbon frame was the Covert Carbon and I think it nearly bankrupt them. It took so long to get to market and no one in big bike had told them about the plan to go 27.5 that by the time the 26″ Covert came out people were too worried about being left behind. Quality was pretty good though, closer to a YT than a Hope, but solid enough. The first real carbon frame to launch was the Patrol. Great frame, lots of fun, they struggled with some bonding issues around pivot insets and cable tie points but improved them all over the years. Moving onto the round tubed Sentinel etc they had sorted most of that, still a ‘higher resin’ type build so still a bit cheaper than most to buy. Then the current gen frames came out – so when the Sentinel went angular then the Spur, Spire and now the Smuggler. It looks like they moved to a new vendor, the frames look much neater inside and out. Lighter weight and backed up with a better warranty. Very few warranties, still just a few BB bonding issues. But hey you all hate press fit BBs right?

TLDR – Transition pricing has moved up over time in line with increases in their quality.

However, they have now been hit hard with the shipping costs and the pound tanking over the last few months. Which is the main reason you can have a HB916 for £3700 and a Spire is £4000. I would imagine TR are monitoring this and hopefully they can bring it back down in the future.

Santa Cruz I don’t sell but do work on a lot of them. Pretty much the opposite of Transitions journey. Since being sold to Pon like all large shareholder owned companies they are required to maximize returns, so have moved to Vietnam and Cambodia for their frame production both of which are usually seen as cheaper options. Quality still seems OK, perhaps a few more warranties but still very solid. But no quality increase in the last 5 ish years. Any increase in price is just economic reasons or business strategy.

As it stands now I would actually say the TR frames are higher quality than a SC frame. They are also still independently owned.

Not sure how much of this is joking or not, but there seems to be quite a lot of ‘peacocking’ suggestions. Just so you all know, loud fast cars make everyone think you are a bell. Almost without fail. Get a Kia Soul or E-Niro, take the money saved on fuel and servicing to go on some adventures.

Simple, buy an electric car with vehicle to load capability.

I said simple, not cheap.

What’s your highest level on free bird then 🤣 I have managed to scrape through on expert, but E+ is much tougher than some.

Smash drums is also really good. 37 here. It’s a hoot. I bought it to play Half Life Alyx, and now here we are three years later with the Quest 1 sold, a Quest 2 for standalone/rhythm games, a Pico 4 for PCVR and a PSVR 2 arriving next week 😜 It’s worse than bikes

What brand are they quoting for? Lots of different tech doing the rounds it seems. The Tepeo boiler caught my eye.

How through the roof are you talking? And do you run a business or get an EV on salary sacrifice? The ID Buzz would do the same thing and be much cheaper to run/fuel.

If you have a decent bit of space or can take it out in the garden there is a game on App Lab called Tea For God, really fun. Physical movement only generating ‘impossible spaces’ – there is a free demo I think, really weird and very hard to get used to walking around your room with a headset on.

https://www.oculus.com/experiences/app/3762343440541585/?utm_source=oculus&utm_medium=share

Into The Radius and Walking Dead Saints and Sinners are both fantastic full games and really really fun if you want something a bit more in depth. ITR is aiming for a Stalker VR kind of vibe, it’s very good. I haven’t played the Quest 2 standalone version but it’s just a graphically downgraded full PC version. The S&S standalone is pretty good, it’s cross buy so you get the PC if you buy the quest and visa versa. Could be a good way of testing if your PC can run any of this stuff.

You no longer need a Facebook account, just a ‘Meta’ account but it doesn’t need to be tied to a real Facebook page.

I actually use a Pico 4 for PCVR so that’s Bytedance which is even worse than Meta tbh. Great PCVR headset though.

How do you know the heater has never come on? We left ours set to the stock ’10 degrees’ setting but I am assuming the air temp has been much lower than that in the loft during the -5 or whatever. I don’t have any way of knowing how much it has been on for though.

Our house is a bit older at just over 200 years, average humidity was around 75% before fitting, and is 55-60 now. Only had it through this winter. The vinegar is coming out in spring to scrub all the problem spots and see if they come back. It seems to be working well despite the loft being quite wet – it’s really well ventilated but the house vents up the gaps by the walls so much that all the humid air condenses on the lower beams/back of the wooden boarding. I was hoping the Nuair would help with this by drying the house out a bit and pulling more fresh air through the vents. So it’s a negative input ventilation for the loft, and positive for the house.

We really need to re do the loft insulation but if you add anything over the main living space it makes the boards soaking, I’m assuming by keeping the loft space colder directly above.

Next stage is buy or rent a thermal camera and try to find out where the warm air is coming up.

Our expert is a lease, I didn’t want to commit to buying something we hadn’t tested, and the garage were very unresponsive. The Buzz we have put an order in to buy, hopefully if we get sick of the lack of space there will be a decent aftersales value. Anyone want to put their name down for a Buzz Cargo in blue with body coloured bumpers in four years? 😸👍

https://www.stablevehiclecontracts.co.uk/van-leasing/volkswagen/idbuzz/idbuzz-cargo

That was the cheapest I found when looking

Thought some of you might be interested in our demo experience with the ID Buzz Cargo. Currently in a 75kwh E-Expert,for just under two years. WLTP 205 miles, struggling to get 120 to be honest at the moment. Seems like less because of how inaccurate the range calculator is. Loses 10 every time you turn it off, heater tanks power yet there are air gaps through to the cab etc. Had a few software bugs and now my partner isn’t happy driving it out of range unless I am there, which pretty much means Dunkeld or Inners from south Fife. Wrote off the Buzz as too small but with the lease end approaching and no date on the E-Custom (2024 was all they could say) we got a full day demo in the cargo.

Handed over at 80% showing 169 miles. Over the day I drove 144 miles mix of motorway, dual and stop start. Including three stops where the van was turned off. Handed back at 10% showing 29 miles, so a few miles ahead of the quoted range. 2.9 m/kWh average showing. So 223 on a full charge theoretically. Started at -2 degrees and raising to 3-4. Heating on at 17 and using the heated seats a bit. Fairly impressed with that to be fair.

Did a size test in the back, it’s a bit tighter and the sliding doors are smaller, but it works good. Two bikes, two paddle board bags, a bag of snowboards and some kit fits fine. Driving position is great and it handles lovely. But the main thing is that range is night and day, and the reliability of the calculations.

The impact of cold weather on EV range isn’t something I’d thought much about, but living in a cold part of the country (currently -13C) with limited charging facilities, it’s plainly going to be a major issue for me.

Where do you actually go though? Unless you were going to a ‘big city’ you are unlikely to go anywhere near the 200 miles+ winter that any half decent (Korean) modern EV can do.

I can do a sub zero run from the FRB to Glencoe ski centre and home again, without charging and coming back with 30 miles+ left on the range. That seems about as far as I could be bothered to drive in a day? Not in the van mind, that’s a different story. A heat pump makes a huge difference, as expected.

I think anything high end like X01 is likely to be AXS going forward, why not just take a Spur GX or frame and upgrade/custom build? There is good GX stock arriving in the new year

Hutchinson Tundras go up to 45mm and are fantastic, as mentioned the Pirelli equivalent goes up to 50mm

They are both made by Hutchinson, but weirdly the black Tundras are currently made in the far East, if you want the best tubeless fit/reduced shipping miles of the made in France tyres go tan wall. The black Pirellis are made in the French factory.

The Tundras are slightly cheaper.

Use the washers, for brass nipples you can either buy the brass Squorx ones from DT, or use brass Sapim nipples. The head shape is the same as the DT nips, whereas DT standard nipples are not the same shape.

If you are going to use normal brass Sapim nipples you will need slightly shorter than the DT calculator suggests, the thread is in a slightly different place.

Where they are from, everyone drives Tesla’s and they already do it…

But yes it will be coming. It’s already pretty frustrating it isn’t tied into android auto already, and I still haven’t even got the fuel saver update they have been rolling out.

They have a bit of work to do – we asked it ‘directions to Glenrothes Instavolt’ and it mapped to somewhere down south, 6hrs away. We were about 20 mins away and just wanted to check traffic on the route.

Totally, and they could have doubled down and stuck with it, but they got nothing but hassle and internet slagging for it so what’s the point. My 130 has the narrow rear end, but not the radial brake mount. At least now they are a viable frame sale even if you don’t want to run all Hope kit. I have set up/poked at/drooled over four of these 916s over the last few weeks, they look amazing. Had all three paint finishes as well

Anyone keen on the Sono Sion?

Simple, nice size, decent range, covered in solar. Got moss in it. I liked.

The raw carbon finish does wear really well, my 130 was one of the first to be built and still looks great after a clean down. Or get it done with one of the generic kits like a ridewrap Covered kit, gets the most high traffic areas.

Shouldn’t be too long, just been picked up so they will have it tomorrow, hopefully next week sometime but I don’t want to put words in their mouth. I have no idea how they do it 😂

I have seen our first one in the flesh today, it looks amazing. Had a good poke around then wrapped it up to be sent for the Invisiframe template, it’s an H2 so you will be waiting on this if yours is an H2 teethgrinder.

In typical fashion the first one to be delivered is the only one we haven’t pre-sold, so if anyone wants a real treat have a look at this
– https://www.pedalsbikecare.co.uk/products/hope-hb916-stock-bike-h2-air-neutral

The pictures aren’t what it is – you have to read the spec.

In even more typical fashion, our demo (that I will be stealing) is one of the last to arrive and might be into October, so I can’t give any ride feedback/review type stuff yet. Except that it’s very well put together, as expected, same as the 130s.

And stop using Muc off/etc so it doesn’t happen again

This would be a great place to start

https://rapanuiclothing.com/?gclid=Cj0KCQjw54iXBhCXARIsADWpsG8UUQLKTPm3_QAattuPcKTU6ilfUfyYKh1GMTX0-6n2Et_rsXQntREaAjohEALw_wcB

Isn’t the old mill site being turned into a huge development centre with car park/eeeb rentals/massive bike shop etc? That will be the place to park for a round of golf. I would just settle for them fixing the charger by No1.

We were lucky enough to live a mile away from ‘scotlands best bread’ RHS winner a few years running (Woodlea Stables in Fife) before it closed, so had decent fresh bread available over the weekends, which we used until Wednesday and cut the rest into the freezer before it went solid. Now they have closed we have to go a bit further for some of their ex bakers. My partner makes a loaf every few weeks when we have time, again ends up in the freezer as well. If we want something fast then I can knock up Chapatti or flat bread in 15 mins or so. Or a nice pizza base with a bit more time. Flour, salt, water, kneed, pan. Quicker than going to the shop and buying a pack of rubber pitta.

I have, spurred me on to cut out UPF for December 21. Mostly stuck with it, the odd can of non-compliant pop after a ride, or a Haribo if they are being shared out but that’s it. We weren’t big on pre-made meals anyway, and don’t buy shop bread. So it was really flavored crisps, riding bars, squash, fizz and that sort of thing we cut out. The series was really good though.

Have a look at Green Commute Initiative, they can get you set up really easily as a small company. Worth checking out.

Yes we are pedals and yes we have imported some. This was started before the Spur existed and long before Virus started using them, I guess it’s reassuring that Virus trust the frame as well. We have all sizes ready to go with SIDluxe Ultimate shocks and twistloc levers @ £1899.

I have been loving it, great bike. Very fast and a lot of fun.

I don’t think you need Instagram to see it, click the link and it should open in a browser if the app isn’t there