The Hope clamp linked above is great. That’ll fix your problems. Much nicer looking than the rubber band mounts too.

Stems should be torsionally stiff. Titanium isn’t stiff.

It is 70% stiffer than Aluminium for the same size and shape of part, which this pretty much is as compared to the Thomson. The problem is that the Thomson is plenty stiff enough, there’s no need to make it heavier and 3x as expensive.
Ti frames are only more flexy than Alu ones as the tubes are smaller and thinner than you’d get away with using for an Alu frame.

35g heavier than the Thomson it resembles, and at least £100 more expensive!

Nice, they say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery…

This. It’s nice looking but I’m not sure what the point over an aluminium one is going to be. Titanium is about 50% heavier than Aluminium for the same volume and that doesn’t look like its going to save enough volume of material to make that back.

Disclaimer – I own a DW link 5 Spot.
It looks fine, and it’s a bike I’d like to own but DW link Turners aren’t brilliant looking. It’s actually just as well it’s a non-driveside photo, Turners look better that way as you can’t see the weird looking elevated stay on the drive side.
Based on what my 5 Spot is like I’m quite sure it’ll be great to ride, near indestructible and very well supported by Turner but other companies make better looking bikes. I’d still seriously consider one, but I’d also seriously consider a Pivot Mach 6.

One thing I do reckon though – it won’t look half as nice in a bigger frame

That’s at least a medium in the photo. Turner use very dropped top tubes with a long seat tube and a brace. The stand-over barely changes between the sizes and it stops the larger sizes looking too ungainly.

Yup, doesn’t really help for thorns but is heavy and rolls slower.

robin, that would be very much appreciated! Email in profile, thanks.

Done.

As above. Exactly 1″ The part the grips and controls go on is 7/8″

I’ve got a spreadsheet that allows you to add up all the costs (fuel, insurance, maintenance, deprecation etc)for different car options so you can see the totals over a year or 3 years. I can easily e-mail it to you. I’m sure you could do your own but it might save a little time.

I paid a little more for the car, second hand, than my bike cost new but now, a couple of years later, I reckon I could sell the bike for more. If the car hadn’t picked up a couple of dents in that time they’d be about equal in value.

Your current car will be nicer to drive than any of those, you’d be swapping a very nice older car for a significantly less nice newer car. Once the novelty wore off I reckon you’d miss the 330i. In your shoes I’d keep the BM and hold on to see if anything better comes up.

Double post.

Stairs won’t necessarily be using the high speed compression circuit, it depends on the shape of the steps and how quick you are hitting them. Rattling down the stairs so you are skipping over the edges will be high speed compression but if you are hitting one step at a time onto the flat between the steps and then the next step and so on, the forks will be compressing quite slowly and it’s really the low speed you need to play with. I’d also suggest looking at the rebound too, or possibly even before adjusting the compression.

I remember lusting after those many years ago!
What’s going on with the bars / stem on that one though? The bars look like they have a huge rise, angled forward.

Just sounds like it’s tracked badly that ride, were you carrying it somewhere different than normal?

As above, or if you are worried, mix some of what you want him to eat into what he wants to eat and over a few days change the proportions until he’s onto the new food.

These?:
Women’s Tennies
Much less clumpy that the biking 5.10s and lighter, but the tongue isn’t sown in so they are quite leaky in the wet. Not too much padding though, so they dry quite quickly. Same sticky dotty soles though.

My ‘05 e90 has gone electricity bonkers recently. I’ve lost the heater fan, cruise control and now it’s shouting at me that I have a flat tyre (I haven’t)

A dying battery can cause all sorts of weird electrical behaviour in some BMWs. It’s certainly worth checking out before delving into replacing anything else.

For the OP, I’d bet on an ABS wheel sensor.

You’ll find advice on the Turner website on the currently recommended grease, you want something quite thin and slick, I’m still using the Manitou Prep-M that was recommended when I bought mine but I believe they’ve changed to something else.
On the Grease gun, no, you can use any normal bike one. Worst case is that you have to undo one end of the shock to get at one of the zerts if you don’t have the Turner one with the long nozzle, but you don’t need to do it often so that’s not a big deal.

Because of the stretch, the bolt will loosen after initial tightening to below the original torque spec. By using the above technique, the bolt will remain at 45 N m and the cranks will not loosen subsequently.

This, the stretch in the bolt will push the crank up the taper a bit more as it works, meaning that the tension in the bolt is reduced.

I always used to wipe with a greasy cloth then tighten them right up, they stayed on, tight and creak free and came off again fine when required. The crank extractor threads just aren’t strong enough in many cranks to deal with pulling the crank off if they were dry and had corroded at all. Copper grease / anti-seize would also be fine.

My understanding is that the use of grease causes the crank to slide further onto the taper than designed, deforming the crank/axle interface on the softer crank to a degree.

I was always kind of depending on that. You’ll never get a better fit between the two parts than you get if you get a little compressive yielding on the contact faces of the crank. Machining tolerances mean that the only way you can guarantee full surface contact is to yield the crank slightly. In my opinion this is much more desirable than leaving it sitting on the high spots and vulnerable to fretting, the risk of splitting the crank is much smaller than the risk of ruining it by means of the taper being damaged as it moves on the axle if it isn’t really tight.

Folder backgrounds and the control centre backgrounds are translucent, so they will show through the colour of your desktop. So if you don’t like the colour of the folders you can fix it that way.
I do wish you could change it independently though, my previous nice beach scene that I had as my homescreen wallpaper gave a horrid american tan folder background.
Other than that, I like it, and the appearance had grown on me.

Some cheeky bugger has knicked my Safari “google” search function in the toolbar.. (iPad 4)

It’s now like Chrome and the latest version OSX safari, you just type in the address bar to search via google.
Edit: too slow…

To give an alternative point of view, I’ve shortened two without needing to re-bleed.

So do the pharmacists counter in our local Tesco.

What to go for though if your trails are an equal mix of mud AND rocky/loose rocky trails?

Conti Barons. Grippier than a Swamp thing in mud, but rolls much better, lasts longer and works not far off the default dry trail choices on dry trails / roots / rocks / loose surfaces. I’ve not encountered anything else that covers all the bases so well over the winter. Indeed, barring the freakish months of dusty trails we had this year, they’d be a good all-year choice, at least in Scotland.
Obviously, if you like XC whippet-y type fast rolling tyres you’ll find them slow but otherwise they are superb.

Yup, you aren’t remembering very far back if you think it’s harder now. Threaded headsets, quill stems, square taper cranks with non cartridge BBs, cup and cone hubs, stems with no removable face plate so you had to thread the bars through, no lock-on grips, screw on freewheels…
All of these and more were total pigs to work on and many of them required specific tools. It’s never been so easy to build a very reliable, easy to maintain, capable bike and take it apart again.

Would be good to get a decent volume tyre that coped well with UK winter gloop

Have you tried Barons?

I’d suggest Conti Barons in black chilli as working very well in mud, well on anything else and rolling and wearing well. The downside is they are expensive and hard to set-up tubeless.

http://www.avalanchedownhillracing.com/application.html
This might be useful, there’s a few bikes using that size on the list.
Banshee Spitfire is one. Several Turners too.

Fair enough! I can’t really comment there but I’d think that anyone (who isn’t top of their game) would learn something if the ‘instructor’ was a pro racer or the like

Presumably they don’t need to be a top racer, they just need to be a very good coach. After all, the top DH racers still benefit from coaching, but must be more capable on their bikes than their coaches, otherwise the coaches would be the ones racing and winning.

Ah, there you see, I was thinking 17″ diva but as hatters missus is a beautifully proportioned 5’4″, this shows it will be too small for a 5’8″ lady..

Not necessarily. My wife is 5’3″ and needs a XS (14″) frame. I’d expect a 17″ to be about right for an average 5’8″ woman and only o.k for one of 5’4″ if she has proportionally long legs.

I’m running a GS mech, my dad has a SGS on his Superfly so I might try that and see if it shows any improvement

I tried the same thing with my wife’s SGS mech. Much the same.

I’ve used both Shimano and SRAM, SRAM currently, and I honestly don’t remember when I last broke a chain. Pushing on 20 years ago I think. It does make me suspect that there’s an issue for some folk with either how they fit them or adjust them or shift gears as some riders break chains all the time and mine seem to only ever die from wearing out.

One possibility to help, if you’re using a Shimano mech is to replace the top jockey with a non-floating one.

Do the 10spd Shimano top jockeys still have float? I don’t remember noticing any. Either way, SRAM doesn’t do any better.

Any thoughts anyone?

I’ve been through the same thing with mine. After trying swapping parts around to try it with SRAM mech and shifter, long cage rather than medium cage Shimano rear mech, new cables and a different cassette, I’m convinced that it’s simply due to the B-tension setting required to keep the jockey wheel off the big sprocket, the mech is too far from the sprockets in the middle of the block.
I reached this conclusion when I tried swapping in the standard top three sprockets instead of the General Lee ones without adjusting anything else. The shifting was still less than ideal. Adjusting the B-tension to suit the 36t sprocket fixed it straight away. I’ve got mine working acceptably but you need to finesse that particular shift by pushing the lever past the click until it climbs up. I think the only thing that might fix it would be DIYing a version of the XX1 fix and offsetting the top jockey wheel back behind the pivot so that the rotation of the tensioner arm caused it to track the cassette better. I may give it a go.

Mcmoonter, bigger than this?

And this is a decent sized bolt:

not sure what you mean by dated the wiring

Pretty sure that’s an autocorrected version of damaged.

My wife’s car was broken into (to steal my bike but that’s beside the point) and it was a similar story, no visible damage but the door wouldn’t unlock on the fob. The problem was that one of the lock linkages inside the door had been knocked off by whatever they had shoved down there to pop the door open. Once I fixed back on it all worked fine again.
In your case it sounds like some wiring has been damaged too, either way I’ll bet if you take the door panel off you’ll see what’s up.

My wife has an XS Pivot mach 5.7, which is both short and low. Santa Cruz do short but not particularly low, as mentioned Orange Divas come very small, Turners in the small are low but not all that short. Kona do some very small frames too.

+1 for damage to wiring (and possibly the lock mechanism) inside the door during the process of shoving a coathanger or equivalent down between the seal and the window to pop the door open.