The Airport Extreme will allow you to plug in a HD and run NAS. We use ours as the main wireless hub and to back up the laptop wirelessly. You can obviously do the same thing with the the all in one time machine box but having read the reviews there seems to be some problems with the reliability of the hard drives in the all in ones so I felt happier having a separate drive with it’s own fan and so on. We’ve got two of the old design Express units running running streaming tunes and one supporting a wireless printer. All very easy to set up and seamless in operation.

Standard 1.2 Panda, no need for the 4×4 on road. The normal ones are extremely capable in snow with winter tyres on, and will retun 50mpg pretty consistently.

Short mount plate upside down and as low as it will go works for me on an original Go-pro HD. To be fair, I stuck it on a mate recently and on him that position was too high but he is a little more barrel chested than me.
Worth mentioning, when you’ve got the angle right it will look much, much too high when you are standing up, like you’ll think you are going to video the view up your nose high. It’ll be right once you are going though.

If you wear a hydration pack / backpack it helps quite a lot with the go-pro stability if you pull the backpack straps up a bit tighter and tighten the chest strap so that is sits over the go-pro chest mount plate and holds it onto your chest. The other thing is to tighten the chest mount straps right up. I’m about a 40″ chest and run the straps all the way tight, it feels snug when you put it on but that and the backpack straps will help quite a lot.
You’ll never get totally smooth footage on bumpy trails though.
Chest mount as stable as I can get it on bumpy terrain:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZA681JvwzoM
Another mount possibilty (under the bars, well ouboard & pointing back)

You’ll get headaches coming off the caffine by the way, but you will feel the better for it after about 3 days.
Boredom or stress can leave you feeling restless too, you mentioned that you were thinking about a change of job, it sounds to me like it might be a good idea.

Are you not going to be running a lot of boost as it will be a small turbo on an equally small engine.

Well, you can get quite a decent amount of power out a decent N/A 1.4 these days, so comparatively, no you don’t need all that much boost, particularly when you aren’t expecting anyone to try to get more, for rallying / track use etc so you can run the stock set-up much closer to the actual limits. It’s getting lots of mid-range torque that makes these fairly small engines work in fairly heavy cars and you don’t need to push the turbos hard to do that. Plus you are looking for efficiency, not outright power, so you run higher compression, more advance and less boost, whereas for highest outright power you tend to go with lower compression, less advance (too much tends to bring on pre-ignition and detonation) and run lots of boost to just cram a whole lot of fuel and air in there. It’s not efficient but it produces the most power when that’s all that matters.

The advances in engine and turbo technology account for there being little or no boost threshold compared to your Subaru of old, which may also have had a larger turbo shoved onto it than standard

Very true, but it’s rather fun to have the massive sudden kick in a 4wd car tht easily puts the power down, so often they are deliberately tuned to do that as the huge surge on mid throttle / mid revs makes them feel lovely for point and squirt roads. It’s entirely possible to achieve much more linear response with variable vane turbos, twin turbo set ups and so on but there’s a lot more to go wrong and it costs a lot more to do.

However surely there’s also an advantage in terms of throttle reponse in not stalling the turbo…?

Yes and no, it probably depends on the size of the turbo. With a big turbo, the delay for the turbo to spin back up is more than compensated for by the fact that if you don’t dump the pressurised charge, it’s still there waiting to rush into the engine when you open the throttle again, which in turn helps to spin the turbo back up.

They’re normally given a different name, on my car it’s called a ‘recirculation valve’.

Yup, or as fitted to un-modified Imprezas, a recirculating dump valve

O.K, I need to get off this thread before I brain-dump everything I learned about turbo engines playing with Scoobies and hanging out on Scoobynet and bore everyone to death. :D

Yeah it actually slightly reduces efficiency by obstructing the exhaust a little bit. However, in diesels it allows decent performance from a relatively smaller engine which is then correspondingly more efficient when not on boost than a larger one would be. I think, anywyay.

Pretty much. On Petrol engines with a significant sized turbo (scoobies, mitsubishis,RS fords etc) it reduces efficiency because the staic compression ratio of the engine is lowered to allow more boost to be run, which gives lower efficiency and less power off boost but allows the turbo to be run harder and produces more power. This is a big part of the reason for the traditional nothing-then-lots turbo delivery as these engines are only about 1:8 compression so they are utterly terrible off boost, then suddenly the output more than doubles as the turbo comes in.
In more mass market cars where they are using the turbo to allow a 1.4 to make modern golf move properly the efficiency is far better as the amount of boost used is far less so the basic engine doesn’t have to be de-tuned to prevent it blowing up, and you actually do get the benefit of lower weight and smaller internal losses with the smaller engine.
The actual reason for dump valves on road cars is not quite what it’s popularly believed to be. When the throttle is fully closed on a pertol engine the turbo can’t keep

putting more air in, which then gets heated and comes out of the exhaust, keeping the turbo spinning even more and so on

as it’s trying to push air into a dead end, there’s no path for air to flow through the engine with the throttle shut. What happens without a dump valve is that the throttle closes, the momentum of the turbo pressurises the inlet manifold behind the throttle butterfly and then because the exhaust gasses have stopped flowing too (no air in = no air out) the turbo stalls as all that compressed air in the inlet manifold tries to come back out. That’s pretty hard on the turbo as it goes from spinning very fast one way to stopping and probably spinning slightly the other way in a fraction of a second, it also pushes the spindle of the turbo in the other direction against the bearings, which most turbos aren’t designed for. Rally cars don’t have dump valves and just let this happen as the turbos they use are designed for it, that’s what the “chiirr” noise is, not the dump valve, not a waste gate, it’s the turbo stalling. So dump valves are simply to protect the turbo and if anything reduce performance. Almost all turbo charged petrol road cars have one, the reason you don’t hear them is that they dump back into the inlet manifold not just out under the bonnet.

Yup, as above, it only does anything when the engine is working a bit, on very light throttle, low revs or over-run when there isn’t much air passing through the engine, the turbo will coast down a bit. It’ll still be spinning but it won’t be compressing the inlet air, just “free-wheeling”.
When it’s working it doesn’t increase efficiency so much as cram more air into the cylinders, which allows you to burn more fuel, which makes more power.

Another one here. I’ve done this to the RP23 on my 5 Spot with a piece of CD spindle case and it makes a huge difference. You can run a little less pressure and let it sit slightly lower in the travel without it bottoming except on really big hits. Easy to do as well.

How does a 2.2 Rubber Queen size up against the HD?

A little smaller.

Give the mech pivots a good spray with GT85 or some similar water displacer (not WD40 though) before you go out and work the mech up and down the cassette to get it to soak into the pivots. If you can keep water out of it, it shouldn’t be able to freeze up.
+1 for keep it moving too.

Polarised for driving if you can. All the glare off the road and windscreen in lowish light should just vanish. It was a revelation the first time I wore a pair in the car and noticed the shine off the top of the dash and reflection of the dash in the windscreen disappear.

Double ply Swampthings at low pressures are ace when it’s truly awful out; one on the back digs like crazy – but is slow, squirmy and rough on hard surfaces.

IME Barons are at least as grippy as Swampthings in mud, better everywhere else. don’t squirm, roll way better and last really well.

I am going try a Barron on the rear of my FS see how that compares

Watch yourself on muddy corners with them that way round. I’d tend to suggest Baron on the front if you are only ruunning one but it depends whether you are having problems with cornering or propulsion.

How much space is there between the rim and the blocks when the lever is released? If there’s too much you may be able to move the blocks in further. For the brake shown above you would be able to swap the spherical washers around on each block so that the thick part is inside the canti arm rather than outside.

If anything the Barons have a little less air volume. They are excellent on almost everything and in this country would probably be a better shout as an all rounder than the RQs apart from being a little heavier and signifcantly draggier. Over the wetter months when you have to just live with draggy tyres if you want grip Barons are very, very good and will do everything pretty well.

You’re going the wrong way trailhound. Barons are excellent in winter conditions and RQs better once it dries out.
I’ve also found RQs sketchy in mud, Hans Dampfs a little better but both are beaten hands down by Barons as all round tyres at this time of year.

Well, my first MTB 23 years ago was 28/38/48 on the front and a 28 tooth big sprocket on the back, which was normal at the time. We all managed back then, even as youngsters, so I reckon he’ll be fine with the significantly lower 1st that 32-36 gives him. Indeed since he hasn’t got previous experience of something different he probably won’t even notice.

Look on MTBR as been said before, you can ‘tweak’ the std bushes by gently abrading them using a socket and some light grade emery. this was suggested by dave Turner himself. Don’t touch the pivots!!!!!

+1
Fixed mine like this. It needed a bit of work to be fair so if you have some that are still stiff, have another shot and keep at them until they feel reasonably free. Once done they’ll last forever if you keep them greased.

Just on the basis of the equipment I work with and the loads that you can carry with similar sized sections to those seen on bikes, made from similar or weaker materials, there is a very large factor of safety against the simple weight of the rider. I’d guess typically more like 10 than 5.

Fatigue is really complicated. For some materials there is a stress level below which it will last for forever, this is the fatigue limit. Some, but not all steels are like this whereas aluminium always breaks in the end. For things that are working beyond their fatigue limit, there is no easy way to tie calculated stress to fatigue life.
It is very highly dependent on the material, the nature of the stress cycles, the shape of the part, the number of defects in the material, the surface finish, the corrosive substances in the enviroment that the part is working etc… You can make a decent estimate by doing some pretty complicated stress analysis and looking up a lot of tables but it’ll always be an estimate, and for thing like bike where the loading is highly irregular and impossible to predict, it;ll be a very rough estimate. The only way to be sure is to design things so that the worst possible working conditions will give rise to stresses so low as to either be below the fatigue limit or to give a predicted life of millions of cycles.

Impreza Turbo on winter tyres. Unstoppable until it was actually pushing quite a depth of snow with the front bumper. Fantastic handling in the snow too, totally stable off boost and then becomes the easiest thing in the world to drive sideways when it comes on boost. On summer tyres it did surprisingly well but it’s ability to get moving was not supported by an ability to stop reliably 8O

+1 Stop just short of stripped is perfect :D

If anyone has a chain and a vernier to hand and wants to tell me the rough dimensions and thickness of a side plate I’ll do a quick guestimate calculation for you. I do those kind of calcs all day for work on much bigger things so it’s only a 2 minute thing to get an idea of the breaking load for a chain.

I grease those bolts and nip them up by hand without a torque wrench. They’ve never come loose in all the time I’ve had HT-2 cranks, so maybe 4 or 5 years. You’ll be fine without threadlock or superglue. The only things I’d threadlock on a bike would be the fasteners holding the suspension pivots together.
Ex bike mechanic FWIW, and 15 years designing equipment for the oil industry :wink:

Option 1 and see how you get on would be my vote.

That depends, if it feels laboured and struggling continuously I’d suspect something up but if you mean that you put your foot down and the result doesn’t feel as strong as it sometimes does, then yes my 530d is a bit like this. As were the two Impreza turbos that preceded it. I’d put it down as a turbo thing rather than a diesel thing. I could be wrong but I reckon that it is the combination of three effects. First, the actual turbo only gives it’s best once it’s thoroughly warm and has been worked, this is noticable if you have a tuned turbo petrol car rolling roaded, they usually need at least one full beans blast right through the gears to get the hot side of the turbo properly hot before they give peak power. Big turbos sometimes need more than one. So if you have been driving for a while and the enigine is warmed up but the turbo hasn’t been exercised hard the first blast of full beans may not be as dramatic as you expect.
Second, because turbo engines almost always run rich on full boost they are sensitive to air temperature and density as colder, denser air will contain more oxygen to burn more fuel, this affects N/A engines too but compressing the inlet charge magnifies the effect.
Third, the temperature of the air affects the efficiency of the intercooler, which in turn affects the efficiency of the combustion process.
Diesels are additionally affected by how recently they’ve been worked hard, a good blast will clear soot out of the inlet tract and exhaust and help things along.

You’ll just about be o.k but stock up on the smidge just in case.

AM bike for sure. As the others said, there’s some decent DH if you don’t mind pushing but loads of excellent trails on a slightly more climbing friendly bike.

Inside the elbow to the end of the spoke unless I’m very much mistaken. So with a steel rule you hook it over the end and see where the end of the spoke comes to, that’s it.

Cheers, yeah, it’s one of the latest ones. Sounds like a warranty issue if anything then.

3 points, and last time I had one (3 years ago) a £60 fine. Small or no affect on your insurance but do tell them.
By far best just to pay up if you did do it, it won’t actually affect you in any way and the alternative will be a lot of hassle.

Baron. A bit like a Swampthing but grippier, faster and lasts better. Good on harder surfaces / rocks / roots too.

I’m riding a 2010 5 Spot and I wouldn’t be even slightly concerned by the lack of bolt through or tapered headtube. Mine gets ridden pretty hard and it’s the stiffest, best tracking bike I’ve ever owned, including some much “bigger” bikes.

ODI make longer grips in the BMX version of the Ruffians. You need to trim the flange a bit to allow you to reach your shifters but they are a good bit longer on the grip section. I’ve got fairly large hands (XL glove size) and find them ideal. FWIW the ESI gave me sore hands but the Ruffians are great.

Try letting them right down, squeeze the beads in away from the lip of the rim, squirt a little soapy water in around the beads and then pump them up as hard as you dare, say 100psi. Leave it for an hour or so and then have a look to see how it looks. If it’s now straight let it back down to normal pressure, if not, have a look carefully round the tyre to see if there’s any sign it’s not seated, often the tyre has features where the bead is moulded in that more less line up with the edge of the rim. These will allow you to see if it seems to be out of round. If so you can mark the spots on tyre and rim, pull it apart and see if it lines up with anything obvious.

Nobody answered the edge angle question did they?
You angle the base faces of the edges, so that the actual sharp edge is slightly above the base when the board is flat. Ideally you’d also take a little off the sides so that the actual edge remains a square corner, just rotated up away from the board base a little. It just makes the baord slightly less likely to catch edges.

No harm in sharpening edges and doing the first half of the waxing job. Ideally you should scrape the wax once it’s cold anyway so if you had to leave it until another day to scrape that’ll be fine.

A steel rule is too hard. Steel scrapers are used to remove base material for repairs and since you shouldn’t be able to see the wax on the base of your board when it’s finished, you won’t know as you scrape whether you are taking off wax or base after a bit.
Have you got a car window scrpaer with a hard edge? That’d be better.
Other than that, a little wipe to get the old mank off (meths will be ideal), dribble melted wax on, iron in, scrape, brush along the way with a stiff brush to put a little texture on it (it’ll stick to wet snow if it’s mirror smooth), dress and sharpen the edges and you are done.
Watch out if you are using a steam iron as the wax will tend to plug the holes then potentially melt and fire back out, some folks counter this by covering the sole of the iron with a piece of tin foil.