I’d think it’ll be fine. I run 160mm on the back of mine without any bother.

You don’t. Mines been ridden unprotected in mud over the two years and is still fine.
If you are worried I’d suggest a bit of cleaned up old inner tube slipped over from the bottom of the post and zip-tied in place. You’ll need to allow air in and out somehow so it can breathe or it won’t re-extend.
Lovely bike.

160mm with the caliper bolted straight to the mount.
Love my 5 Spot, great bikes.

+1 on wanting the suspension working best when I’m descending. I set the sag on both ends of my bike standing with all my weight on the pedals. Stand up, bounce it up and down a few times, let it settle and then check it like that. As you say, just sitting on the bike the forks don’t sag much at all. Done like this, the bike comes out feeling very well balanced front to rear when out of the saddle.
I run about 30% rear, 20% front set as described.

Yes, that’s normal. And no you don’t need to change anything, as soon as you sit on the bike, the force that the spring exerts on the collar is so high (probably nearly 300lbs just with you sitting on the bike, near 1/2 ton at full travel) that friction will prevent it moving side to side.

Give it a shot and leave the cable a little long in case you need to move it, worst case it doesn’t shift very well and you need to tweak it a bit.

If you are bothered, give it a wee rub down to smooth it off and paint it black. It’ll only rub off again though so best just look on it as the kind of patination that shows you actually use your bike.

Same as for any other front mech, ideally so that the cage passes about 1mm above the teeth of the big ring as it shifts up onto it, or as close to this as you can before it touches something else.

Totally fine, the part that’s missing wasn’t really carrying any load.

Yup, it’s your saddle. I’ve had a Flite do this to a reverb clamp. It’s not the actual leather that does the work, its the grit that gets all over your saddle that does it. It doesn’t wear the leather as the leather is soft and the grit becomes slightly embedded and stuck on so it moves with the leather and all the relative movment happens against the metal. Its the same mechaninsm that allows plastic cable outers to wear a notch into an aluminium frame. Once you wash the bike all the grit goes and evidence of what happened is gone.

Heat will help the penetrating oil do it’s thing too, so if you have a hot air gun it’d be worth alternating through soaking the lock with penetrating spray, heating it up as hot as you can and belting it with a rubber mallet. If nothing else the hot smells and steam/smoke make the whole process look more exciting.

The poma at the back of Glas Maol is a rite of passage for Scottish snowboarders, everyone is off the ground for the first 6-10 feet. Once you get the hang of leaning back and going with it it’s fine though. The real killer is icy poma tracks that slope to the side…

Backpack. As others have said, I’d pick a helmet light over a bar mounted light any time, it’s really nice to be able to look into corners plus it’s a big boon for spotting “that wee trail off into the trees somewhere around here…”

I’m more worried about destroying the shorts!

No danger provided you follow the instructions and the washing guidelines for the shorts. The worst case is that they don’t end up any more waterproof or that it washes straight back out next time.

Yup, that looks about right. We didn’t video ours but the sight of her trying to stand on no feet was pretty funny. It didn’t take her long to forget once we started throwing her favourite toy though and you could see the glee when she realised she could skid stop on concrete without it hurting.

I’ve checked out the ruffwear grip tex, expensive but cheaper than regular vet trips and I’ve just spend £140 on boots for me and the missus. Dogs eh, more expensive than bikes

We got some of those for our dog, they do work but I’ll just suggest that if you get some, have a video camera on hand the first time you put them on the dog…

I work in the oil industry in a small company doing R&D type work and I can confirm that there is a lot of effort and money going into developing better, cheaper ways of extracting the more difficult to access reserves of oil and getting moe oil and gas out of the existing reservoirs. There’s an awful lot that could be done even without drilling more holes in the ground but it becomes more expensive so it’s all driven by the economics. Once it becomes economical to go get that hard to get oil, we’ll do it and we are already figuring out how.
As others have said it’s very likely that in reality the price of oil will rise sufficiently to make other options economically more attractive before the actual oil runs out.

Gotama, have a look at the wiki link further up the thread that explains trail and rake, it’s got a good diagram that shows exactly the situation you are looking at.

trail rat and orangeloy +1
Either space the green bit out if possible or see if you can get a slightly shorter axle BB.

Grease on the tapers, and do the bolt up tighter :wink:

Double post.

Clean the inside surface of the tyre first with meths then roughen it up quite heavily with some abrasive paper. Clean it again and then try. Use a reasonable layer of evenly applied adhesive and leave it until it feels touch dry before pressing the path on.

As above then, try a local tyre place first off and see if they can get it right.

Does it pull to the side or does it drive straight, but with the steering wheel squint?

http://www.fuelly.com/car/bmw/330i
Probably not going to return 39mpg.

Maybe it depends where you ride then

To be fair, I think this is the crux of it, in some locations there wouldn’t be any need. Our local trails are fairly undulating and there’s bits of super technical gentle climbing and contouring where it’s nice to drop the post an inch or so without needing to stop and descents which go from pedally to steep and technical and back without stopping where it’s very nice to be able to adjust on the fly but a bit too bumpy and fast to want to reach back under the nose of your saddle. Here it makes sense.

Get the headtube reamed to take the whole depth of the deep insert cups, that’ll give you at least some engagement that’s the proper fit to hold it central. Then add plenty of JB weld and press it in and leave it somewhere warm to set for a good long time. It’ll be completely fine, I’ve fixed a badly ovalise headtube by JB welding the bottom cup in before and that was on a bike that used to get a lot of very hard use (big drops and jumps etc), it was fine, didn’t even creak.

you don’t use it that much

…because you’ve not got the remote. If you did, you’d use it far more :D
I’m firmly in the remote camp, I’ve had both and as others have said, a dropper without a remote misses at least half the point.

In my experience, if you are having the randomly pulls to the bars problem you need to rebuild the lever, not just bleed it. Bleeding will fix it for a while but the real issue is that you are getting air into the fluid in the reservoir via a leaky seal or the wee bladder thing that forms the reservoir. Because of the way the taperbore system works, if you get air in there and then tip the bike on it’s side you can get a master cylinder completely full of air and no brakes. Rebuilding the lever and then bleeding will properly fix it.

Missed the sarcasm. I’m staying out of this.

In contrast to what most of the replies will say I’m sure, I’ve got Avids on both the bikes in our household and find them fine. Excellent power and feel and no real reliablilty issues. I’ve had to rebuild the rear brake lever and fit new seals on both bikes after about 2 years in both cases, not a difficult job using a readily available kit of seals. If you get the Avid bleed kit and carefully do what they tell you then bleeding is fine. Lever feel wise you do need to line the calipers up by eye as per Hope’s instuctions if you want them to feel right, the squeeze the lever and do the bolts up trick doesn’t get it close enough.

Beat me to it Somafunk.
The downside with those was that you got quite a lot of wear and tear on the post and frame over time. It still has a lot to be said for it though and the proper Hiterites also keep your saddle lined up as it goes up and down. It works best with a proper old school enclosed cam QR lever though.

This problem is always easiest to diagnose with someone else there to ride along behind you watching the chain, although if it’s quite predictable you might manage to do it yourself by looking down if you can find a big enough area to try without risk of riding into something.
If it’s the gear adjustment or play in pivots or similar it’ll be jumping sideways as if it was trying to change gear, if it’s the cassette it’ll not move sideways, it just rises up a little and jumps forward a tooth.

Gears seem to be set up right and work when the bike is in the workshop but jump when under heavy load immediately points to one or both of the chain or cassette being worn out, or at least not matched to each other in terms of wear.

Denise Richards as Dr Christmas Jones in that Bond movie. Worst performance I’ve seen.

Either the cable is too tight, or, more likely if everything else looks o.k, the cable is sticky and needs cleaned and lubed, or replaced.

Don’t know about the DW-Link versions but the older Turners are designed for easy routine

The DW link ones are too, all the same features and after two years of use all year round including lots of mud and wet rides, I stripped the pivots on mine for the first time at the weekend. Still like new, no visible wear, no dirt in the grease, absolutely no play or problems.
So in answer to the OP, Turners will tolerate that use no problem.

Another one here who uses a 2010 5 Spot for everything and doesn’t find it too steep or too high.
For what it’s worth I run 150mm revs on the front and set the sag on the back a bit more than Turner suggest (18-19mm at the shock with me standing on the pedals rather than the 17mm seated that Turner say in the manual), so mine is running slacker and lower than it would be with the stock set up and 140 forks. I’ve considered getting a slack set or offset bushings but when I thought about it I couldn’t actually think of anything that felt wrong about it as was, so I left it.

Seems to work fine for this kind of stuff for me:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3QdVKfuTv6k

I’ve got a pet theory, backed up by my own experience that most people would be happiest overall on a bike one step down from the ones that they aspire to when they consider the top end of what they ride.
You want enough bike that you won’t ever have to back off something that you might realistically ride for fear of breaking your bike, but you’ll have the best overall bike for the vast majority of your riding, if the very top end of what you do you are pushing the limits of your bike a bit.
For example, I used to race DH, and every now and again it’d be nice to be able to push it a bit on DH courses, hit some bigger jumps etc. An all around bike picked with that in mind would probably be around 160mm travel. I’ve had a bike like that and it was too much, I’m now riding a 5Spot which is right on the edge of what it will tolerate when used that way but it’s a much, much better bike for me most of the time. It’s about more than just all up weight of the bike.
Another way to look at it I think is to look at what tyres you would happily ride around on all the time and pick a bike on which they are appropriate, i.e if you will normally want to run a Rocket Ron on the back for speed, you want a 120mm bike max, and at the other end, you don’t really want a 160mm bike unless you would realistically consider running a dual ply tyre, as everything that a single ply tyre will cope with, a 140-150mm bike will do.

Yup, you are right, it’s either to the top of the seat tube (C-T) or to the centreline of the top tube (C-C). Never the top of the top tube.