cp – Member

I’d consider different shifters – I had 5600 105 which look to be the same shape as yours (tiagra/sora?).

Huge pain where you’re suggesting you get it.

Fixed by changing to 5700 shifters which have a much wider flat area to spread the load

They are indeed Tiagra shifters, the bike is 2010 model, I’m unsure what model that makes the shifers. An upgrade to a full 105 5800 groupset is planned (principally for the better brakes, these ones are woeful), I just wanted to make sure that I’m definitely back on board with cycling and that the bike isn’t going to end up gathering dust in the garage before making that sort of investment.

deviant – Member

Rotate the bars up slightly and fit a shorter stem, I’ve had similar problems to you and recently fitted a Deda 70mm stem as opposed to the 110mm one it came with and things are much better.

Cheers, I’ll give that a whirl.

So the entire bar needs rotating back a bit? I just kind of assumed that the flat part at the bottom of the drops should sit parallel with the ground. Shape wise, they’re Easton EA70, so I would have thought a big manufacturer like that would know a thing or two about what shape to make them and wouldn’t be unlikely to get it drastically wrong, or have I unwittingly bought a known ‘lemon’ in the world of road bike bars?

Replacing the frame with a smaller one seems very drastic (not to mention expensive), especially given that Evans reckon a 56cm is spot on for me. Surely there must be a multitude of adjustments with bar/lever position, stem length and saddle position that can be played about with first?

In what way?

I’d be involved in some form of motor racing, live somewhere hot and have a sizeable garage with several nice cars.

Mavic Open Pro.

Flapjack.

Pink Floyd
Queen
Elvis
Martin Luther King’s ‘I have a dream’ speech
Any amount of Churchill’s quotes (“…you, madam, will still be ugly.”, “…best way to spoil a good walk.” etc, although I’m dubious of how many of those we see published and credited to him actually left his lips).

My Shimano RS11s had a slight buckle on the rear wheel straight out of the box, I just put it down to them having been knocked in transit and will get a shop to true them up at some point.

jonba – Member
25mm at 110psi? How heavy are you. At 70kg I run mine about 90 – much more comfortable.

mrblobby – Member

Oh yeah, and about 80 on the front and 90 on the back for me (about 70kg too). They’ll feel even nicer.

Hmm, looks like I may need to make some adjustment. Being a complete roadie novice, my perception of road bike tyres is(was?) that they’re supposed to be pumped up as hard as they’ll go. Hence, my shiny new 23c Michelin Pro 3 Service Course have got 115 psi in them, as that’s what the sidewall marking said is the maximum. I confess that on my first (and, so far, only) ride, I felt every little bump in the road and actually got a wierd ‘claw’ cramp about halfway round where I was struggling to release my grip on the drops to move back up to the hoods; I put this down to me not being used to the vibrations of a rigid road bike but assumed it was something I will acclimatise to and no longer suffer the cramp.

I weigh around 13 stone and the bike is a CAAD 8.

Another vote for Osram Nightbreakers, best I’ve used short of HIDs.

We’ve got one of those Hive jobbies and it’s set to 21 degrees between 0530 and 0730 (so it’s warm when we wake up and until we go to work) and then again from 1400 to 2300 (from when Mrs Wife comes home from work and until we go to bed). As we live in Glasgow, there’s not many days it doesn’t trigger.

My brother lives in West Didsbury, I’ve just sent him a link to this page and asked him to keep an eye out.

Had my beloved 1996 Kona (steel hardtail, full XT, Fox forks, dripping with Hope) nicked in Waterloovile in 2011, scoured eBay, Gumtree, local classifieds etc for over a year but never saw hide nor hair of it. :cry:

Bring back the Panaracer Smoke and Dart! :cry:

eddie11 – Member

that alpinestars is to avoid chainsuck. a whole frame engineered to avoid chainsuck but made weaker and heavier and flexier in the process. that’s all we had back then. simple times.

Let’s not forget the most important bit though, it looked cooler than a polar bear’s paw!*

*To a teenager in the early 90s

Phew, I was feeling a bit old!

Am I the only one who saw this

and instantly thought of this?

:)

Yep, my money’s on wheel balancing. Nice and cheap to investigate.

Not on a Mk4 Golf (too old to be affected) and not on a GTI (wrong fuel). Ashley’s in the clear. :lol:

Sounds like an imbalanced wheel, to be honest. Any tyre fitting place should be able to balance all four for £notalot. Also worth having your alignment checked if you’ve not had it done recently, although this is quite a bit more pricey (it’ll save you more than the initial outlay in avoiding premature tyre wear, mind).

Blazin-saddles – Member

Hope sell upwards of 50,000 hubs a year. You think they’re all failing? when you make stuff, some stuff fails, even the best designed product in the world will have a few failures if enough are produced.

My marker of a quality product/company is not if I have a problem or not, but how a company deals with it. obviously if the same problem persists over and over again then it’s an issue. I’ve never had a broken Hope part and I’ve used a hell of a lot of them.

This. The thing is, if something breaks, particularly something expensive, people are going to (quite understandably) moan to the high heavens about it. When something doesn’t break and just gets on with working, then we don’t tend to hear about it so much. The working-perfectly components made by Hope, Shimano, Volkswagen, Apple and countless many more manufacturers vastly outnumber the faulty ones, but bad news travels faster and further than good.

Dirt

richmars – Member

…Edit, maybe 900km!

Gary M – Member

No, 913.20 miles so far plus another 21 on the way home. But that’s it for the month as no riding tomorrow.[/quote]

8O I say again, wow! Massive respect for you Gary, I did a 17 mile ride yesterday in just over an hour and felt very pleased with myself for having done it; I can’t even comprehend riding 900 miles in a single month, I’d be amazed if I did that in a year!

I’ve just snapped up a Minoura B60-R on eBay for £43. I went after that particualar model after reading all the reviews I could find online, specifically looking for comments about noise (I’ll be ‘riding’ in my kitchen). The Minoura seemed to be regarded as the quitest mag trainer, and things can apparantly be improved by using a dedicated turbo trainer tyre with a harder/quieter compound, also by placing insulation between the underside of the trainer and the floor. Someone on bikeradar said they’d had good results with Kingspan insulation from B&Q for about a fiver, so I’ll be giving that a try.

Link

failedengineer – Member

It really annoys me to see a house with an English and/or British flag ‘proudly’ flying and a drive full of German cars.

I have the St George’s cross on the number plates of my Ford*, but my wife has an Audi. Sorry about that! :oops:

*Actually manufactured in Flat Rock, Michigan.

Gary M – Member

…past the 900 mile mark for the month

8O Wow!

DHL are fairly reasonable. I had them post a 32″ flatscreen TV to Germany a few years ago and it was £17.

Are Pace still going? I always used to like their stuff. I’m a big fan of Hope, too.

+1 vote for the Cannondale.

howsyourdad1 – Member

Oh yeah I’d forgotten those black widows . They look cool actually.

What were the ones that actually looked like a meat tenderiser hammer?

Odyssey Triple Traps?

A mate of mine had a set of Odyssey Black Widows on his ProFlex, I recall they were equally merciless to shins!

spacemonkey

Why not secondhand?

I decided a few weeks ago that I not only wanted a road bike but was actually going to get one. Had lost touch with any previous knowledge of the dark side so I looked at reviews like those above etc, and made a shortlist (all pretty much £800-£1200 bikes). Looked on eBay and set up some alerts. Ended up with a barely used, mint, upgraded 2014 105 CAAD8 with spare wheels/tyres for £500.

Bargains can be had. You just need to be diligent (and sometimes patient).

Very similar here. I’ve decided to give road biking a go but didn’t want to spend a fortune only to find it wasn’t for me, I scored a 2010 CAAD8 (Tiagra triple) for the princely sum of £216. Mind you, an attack of ‘shiny new kit syndrome’ followed shortly afterwards and a further £164.25 was splashed on a pair of Shimano RS11 wheels, Michelin Pro Race 3 tyres, an Easton EA70 bar and tape and a new cassette!

CountZero – Member

I haven’t bought a bike mag for some years, but I’m still aware of what’s going on.

Well done Sir, mark my paper D- ‘must try harder’. I personally had never heard of a 650b wheel until about a fortnight ago or a dropper post until it was brought up in this thread. Single chainsets were, to my knowledge, the domain of downhill bikes, usually coupled with chain guides instead of front mechs. Things move on, I get that and I’m sure it won’t take me long to come back up to speed, but just at the moment I’m a little behind the curve. I came on here to seek advice and guidance from those in the know.

Mr Muffin, that’s a lovely bit of kit you have there. Titanium?

Ha ha, I’d forgotten I’d even posted that! The Caldera mentioned in that thread was the bike referred to at the top of this thread, which I sold because I wasn’t using it anymore. As you may be able to tell by the level of bikes I am now looking at, my finances have improved dramatically over the last three years, mainly due to the job change I mentioned.

650b and 27.5″ wheels, dropping seatposts and the disappearance of triple chainsets are all new developments even since this last thread. Having evolved comparatively gradually for 20 or so years, mountain bike technology and trends seem now to have gone into warp speed, I fear the bikes I’m looking at today may well be obsolete by the end of the year!

Ah, so the post comes back up remotely too? Now that I can see the merit of!

JoeG – Member

Also, you absolutely need a dropper seatpost, OP! :-)

These seem to be essentially a quick release seat post but with the lever remotely located on the handlebar, is that about the size of it? Seems a bit like having a remote control for a car stereo; it works… but the original control method wasn’t exactly a chore!

JoeG – Member

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatbike

I think I’d need a large red nose, white face paint, stripey trousers and a squirty flower to ride that!

JoeG– Member

OP needs a fatbike! :D

A what now?