The reason for my original post was to see if I could get free tax if I taxed 6 months.

Well if the options were £20 for a year or free for six months wouldn’t everyone just go six months at a time for free? Why would they offer that option?

Do you mean £2/3/400 a year on tax is a small proportion if your paying £500 a month on finance and a similar amount on fuel?

No, he means that for many people, changing cars to one that was newer, more fuel efficient and cost less to tax would cost them far more over their ownership of the car. The idea of total cost over your ownership being more important than cost per month seems to be one that a lot of folk don’t get.

You have to be a bit of a loon to still have a car that isn’t cheap(under say..£180) to tax.

So I’m supposed to pay loan interest and £1000s more in depreciation each year to drive a car that costs £200 less per year to tax? You’re right I’d have to be a loon not to…

Make sure you get her clipless pedals as it will be more efficient going uphill

:D

Sounds wonderful, just checking you have met women haven’t you?

+1
If you do this, you need to accept that rides with your other half are, for the forseeable future, about riding WITH her, i.e alongside or right in front or behind and chatting, not about going ahead then letting her catch up. And don’t push the pace. At all. And don’t offer unsolicited advice. And make it a very, very easy ride, both technically and fitness wise.
If she comments that it was fun you can ask if she’d fancy going further, trying something trickier or whatever, but if you want there to be a chance that she’ll get into it, she needs to be making the calls on the progression, and at least at first it’s a social activity. You’ll be out on your bike, but if you want to push yourself, you’ll need to find a way to get out on your own or with your mates, at least for a while.
If you are lucky she’ll get into it and you can get the best of both worlds but if you push it at all you will not be looking at a happy face at the end of the ride.

So you bought a new (or very nearly new) car because you don’t like to waste money? Seems like an odd thing to do.

+1

It means that they assume that if you can afford the depreciation and other costs of a new car, you can find £10 more to tax it for a whole year.

Specialized for bikes as a whole, they’ve consistently produced good bikes, often class leading or simply out on their own and their geometry has always been way ahead of the industry as a whole. Look at all the fuss over the geometry of the new Kona Process. Have a look at the geometry of a 2011 Enduro. Look similar?
This even despite the irritation of things like the propitiatory shock mounts, headset fits and so on. It’s a double edged sword, and some of it I disagree with, but it takes some nerve to move away from existing standards in order to get a substantial advantage, and they have done that a few times.
Other than that Shimano. Indexed shifting was a big change but freehubs may have changed MTBing more. Nobody made a hub that could stand up to hard use before that, bent rear hub axles were very common. Then Shimano produced the first freehubs and bingo, near enough indestructible rear hubs and much easier changing of cassettes.

If it has an inch steerer it is a fire mountain or hahanna if that’s any use.

I’m pretty sure they just changed steerer size across the whole range one year. My old Cindercone had a 1″ threaded steerer, as did the Lavadome and Explosif that year.

Wouldn’t the world be a different place if you had to know the real facts and be able to present a coherent, scientifically correct argument before you were allowed to protest against something?

Looks pretty short reach wise anyway, any smaller would be too small, plus the standover wouldn’t be much less on a smaller frame, it’s being driven by the size of the front wheel and forks which won’t change on a smaller one.

Deore wasn’t low spec in those days, the only thing better in the thumbshifter era was Deore XT.

Nikwax Down wash on a gentle cycle in the machine here then tumble dry with tennis balls again and again and again and again until its fluffy. If your tumble drier stops when it thinks the load is dry rather than using a timer it’ll stop far too soon and you’ll need to re-start it several times. It takes at least two hours tumbling in ours to dry a single jacket properly and fluff it back up. It seems pretty dry before that but the down is still a little damp and clumped up. When it’s really done the jacket will be puffed up like a balloon.

Fair enough. A normal chainwhip will do but the big adjustable or similar fixed spanner is compulsory before really going at it if you want to come away unhurt.
If you have local shop it’s probably going to be easier.

12″ long chain whip, lockring tool located by QR and 12″ adjustable spanner fitted at 180 deg to chain whip. Arrange so you’ll be pushing down to undo, set wheel upright with the spanner and chain whip on the other side of the wheel than you are standing, one hand on each tool, lift the wheel up off the ground and then smack it straight down really hard, leaning on the spanner and chain whip. Never known a lockring withstand more than a couple of shots like that. Mind you don’t go right through and punch the ground when it lets go.
It’s amazing what a sudden sharp impact will shift that a slow apparently much harder pull won’t

As above, it sounds like a shoe compatibility or cleat position issue, Times are usually amongst the easiest clipless pedals to get into. I personally find that I hit the right spot first time most often if I run the cleats well back on the shoes (I also prefer them that way for other reasons) but your preferences may be different.

The chain will do that for you, the chances of damaging the ring are exceedingly small.

Having the forks on backwards makes it less twitchy (more trail)

Only once you are going really quite quickly. At any sort of normal speed this’ll be outweighed by the fact that with the forks backwards the height of front of the bike drops very quickly as the wheel turns off centre, so your weight is trying to push the wheel off centre so the weight can drop. It happens with the forks the right way round too, increasingly so with a slacker headangle and is the reason for dodgy steering at low speeds on very slack headangled bikes. Normally the fork offset counters it a bit but in this case it’s making it worse.

OP, I’d be tempted to simply fix it and say nothing. He hasn’t noticed it being wrong, what’s the odds he’ll notice the change?

Chain going slack is usually a sticky freewheel but why it’d be doing it when braking but not when coasting is a mystery.
What happens when you back pedal?

How would that work with a 3x Shifter?

You’d have a click that doesn’t do anything. Assuming that you’ve adjuster the mech end stop screws that is. If not you’ll have a click that drops the chain.

“six of one and a dozen of the other.”

I have a friend who does a different variation of that, saying “it’s six and a half”. My wife and I have now adopted that idea, referring to two similar things as “five and three quarters” or “seven and five eights”.

Personal pet hates were an American colleague who used “I could care less” and “irregardless”.

^ This. The local council usually has a depot that does the servicing on their vehicles and MOT tests. They can MOT test for the public but not do repairs, so they tend to be strictly by the book and fair as they have no interest in it either way.

Easiest thing will be to get a cheap road cassette and a cheap MTB cassette, take them apart and make the combo you want. It needs to be the cheap ones as the more expensive ones use clusters of sprockets on spiders, not a stack of loose sprockets.
Will it work? Probably but it might not shift very well on the big jump. You’ll need an MTB mech too for the range.

As others have inferred, in my experience paying extra for next day from CRC more or less guarantees you won’t get it next day. I occasionally do on their regular free delivery but usually its the day after that.

Set the rear first by dumping your weight on the saddle like a sack of spuds and seeing what it does. Start with little enough rebound that it compresses, overshoots then drops back to ride height, then add one click of rebound at a time until it no longer overshoots. Once you find that point, go back one click.
Once you’ve done that, set the front just slightly quicker by bouncing all your weight straight down into the pedals (either hop and land flat if you can, land flat off a big kerb, or simply actually jump off the pedals and stomp back down onto them). The bike should compress at about the same rate at both ends and by about the same amount, but the front should rebound at least as fast, or slightly faster. It can be hard to judge, so get someone to watch, or ride around in front of a big window and watch your reflection.
If it’s a hardtail, set just enough rebound damping to stop the bars feeling like they ping back at you, or just enough to stop the compress, rebound, overshoot, bounce feeling when you go off a single bump like a kerb.
Better to err on the side of faster at the front and slower at the back to keep the front end up and the back down after big hits.

What sag do you get at 110 psi? can you run less pressure?

Either use SPDs, or use flats. There is no in between

+1 Don’t imagine that trying to ride in flat SPD shoes, unclipped on a platform SPD pedal is, in anyway similar to riding on flats. It’s not something you’d do by choice. The platforms do provide a bit more support if you miss the clip in but you’ll still want to get back in ASAP.

The weight limit will be for the rider, taking into account that he may have all his weight on one foot, while standing on the edge of the pedal and going over a bump. You weigh less than the weight limit, so that should be fine.

a rental strata duo,

I think he’s looking to buy…

yes, slightly.

Indeed, but the OP asked if 30-40 was easier. The answer is no, but it’s only very slightly harder.

‘s more or less nothing in it.

literally less than an inch.
but 30-40 is slightly harder than 26-36.

Just run it into the ground at this point. It’ll go a lot longer yet before it stops working. The chain won’t break, the chain wear is play in the rollers, not stretching of the sideplates.

I’ll grant that the smaller rider will likely have a lower stress in their bones at the same acceleration since bone cross section will increase roughly on the square of height while weight is more likely to be on the cube, but I’d contend that looking simply at that is reducing it to a consideration of survivability, when what we are implicitly trying to consider is to do with tolerance, i.e, assuming the riders are similarly fit, and therefore have a similar strength to weight ratio then the issue is to do with stress in their muscles (in the true engineering sense of force per unit cross-sectional area). It seems reasonable to assume that at the maximum tolerable limit of load bearing, any size of rider will have approximately the same stress in their muscles, since everyone has pretty much the same kind of muscle fibres, the larger rider simply has more. Providing the riders have same strength to weight in order to have the same level of fitness, they will therefore be able to tolerate the same level of deceleration, which brings you back to needing the same length of travel to slow them down.

Now, you might, probably correctly, assume that in general the smaller, lighter riders will in fact have a higher strength to weight ratio, and indeed at maximum fitness this tends to be true (as evidenced by the fact that top rock climbers tend not to be all that tall, nor hugely muscled and therefore heavy). That would imply that the smaller rider can actually stand more impact and might therefore need less suspension but from watching different sized riders at DH races, it seems to be an advantage to be tall and reasonably heavy, at least in terms of enabling you to smash straight through rock gardens. Watching Steve Peat at Fort William a few years ago compared to smaller riders, he was clearly able to use his longer limbs and greater weight to allow the bike to kick around under him more without himself being in danger of being bucked off, so perhaps the answer is that smaller riders can land bigger drops and larger riders can straight line the rock gardens better and on balance everyone needs about the same amount of suspension but sets it up and uses it differently.

The mouse vs elephant thing is just a red-herring in this context, the size differences we are talking about are far smaller and terminal velocity definitely doesn’t come into it here.

I think, in amongst doing the maths, which I haven’t checked (although I suspect that if it stands up, you are calculating the wrong thing), you have forgotten that everyone falls at the same rate, so on your drop example, regardless of the weight of the rider, they are falling at the same velocity when they land from a given height of drop. Therefore in order to all experience the same level of deceleration, everyone need the same amount of distance to slow back down to zero vertical velocity and that distance is provided by the suspension travel. So if the smaller rider has less travel they will experience a higher g-loading when they land, just like you will on a shorter travel bike. The actual loads may be smaller, in whatever units you favour, but as a proportion of their mass, it will be higher.
Also, you are missing that the point of suspension in an ideal sense is to allow the wheels to move up and down sufficiently that riding over a bump doesn’t cause the rider to accelerate upwards at all. The wheel travel relative to the rider should be exactly the height of the bump. this is independent of rider size and reducing the travel for the smaller rider simply limits them to smaller bumps before the suspension is overwhelmed and runs out of travel.
In short, you are wrong, or missing the point ;-)

Another +1 for theflatboy. Unless the smaller riders ride smaller trails, their requirements are the same.

Fords that age rust like crazy, have a careful look all over.

Diesel BMW of whatever size you fancy.

Tipping points rather than progressive changes.

Could be that. I had my 5 Spot feeling fine on a standard headset by means of plenty of sag at the back, not too much at the front and a slightly longer fork than the geometry is quoted for and I can feel the extra degree that a slackset has taken off, but it’s not a big deal, it’s probably gone from 67.5 to 66.5, or maybe 68 to 67. However, before I got the sag set right at both ends, it didn’t feel so nice but I interpreted that more as a problem with the relative heights of the saddle and bars at the time.
I think your bike history may have an effect to, I learnt to ride off road on rigid steep angled hardtails twenty something years ago, with the bars slammed and the saddle always up, most modern bikes feel very stable.

I suspect the answer may be that your dog is healthy and doesn’t have an oily coat so it isn’t smelly and that the perfume smell may be related to someone who smells nice having cuddled your dog, or it’s rolled in the fresh laundry and picked up the fabric conditioner smell.
Our dog isn’t smelly either (smooth collie / spaniel cross) but she smells like a dog, in the same way that a clean person smells like a person, not an objectionable smell in any way but just warm and alive. On the other hand our female cat smells like biscuits, which is weird because she licks herself clean and her breath smells like fish. I have no idea how that works.

Also 650b and 29er forks have more offset as well, which makes the head angle feel slacker

Not quite that simple. More offset will reduce trail and therefore, at speed it’ll actually reduce stability. At low speed though, it’ll reduce flop, which is where the front wheel wants to fall over because the front of the bike is actually highest with the wheel straight so it’ll make the bike easier to ride straight at low speed. It’s a balancing act to get all the attributes you want.