Clutch mech will help
Also, I strongly suspect its chain wear not ring wear that is the problem. The ring doesn’t actually grip the chain, it can’t, it’d chain suck something rotten if it did. All it does is make it hard for the chain to swing far enough sideways to drop off the side in the length of a single link, which means that even when the chain bounces, it has to land back on the ring as it’s lined up. If the chain gets worn and more flexible sideways, it’ll be easier for it to move over and fall off.

Depends if you are planning to run a 40/42t add on cog. If you are SRAM will shift better, although the new One-Up replacement mech cage will probably fix that. Because of this I’m currently running SRAM on my bigger bike that has a 42t sprocket on. Otherwise, the shimano kit is nicer and the ability to change up two gears at once is great. I’ve got one of the One-Up cages on order, so if that fixes the shifting I’ll be going back to Shimano, although probably with a Saint shifter as I find it a little too easy to over-shift on the XTR shifter when it’s very bumpy as the action is so light.

I didn’t think I had particularly short arms.

You probably don’t. The taller you are, the further back you’ll want the wheel. If you think about it, a tall person seated with arms and legs extended will have a longer horizontal distance from feet to hands and so will need the wheel further back. It’ll be set to be tolerable for most people, which in order to accommodate very small women at the bottom end of the size spectrum will mean it’s probably a bit far away for average to tall men.

what would that do?

Think of it as adjusting the sweep, moving them forward will give you less back sweep and more up sweep, moving them back gives you more back and less up.
I’ve got Easton bars on one bike and Race Face on another and in both cases I like them rotated just a little forward so that the main rise of the bar either side of the stem is just a little forward of vertical. This gives me a bit less back and a bit more up, which I like as it encourages me to keep my elbows up and out. Riding with my elbows in and dropped tend to make me too fixed on the bike and inhibits moving around to get the bike leant into corners.

Out of interest why would you want to wear 3/4 shorts when its warm?

I do it because I usually wear knee pads for big descents and they are comfier over 3/4s. If I’m not planning to wear pads on that ride shorts are fine but it’s nice to have the option.
To the OP, Endura FS260s are pretty good.

Try a click or 2 more compression damping?

This and try to learn to pedal a little smoother / not bounce when you are climbing then just run D all the time.
Personally I prefer to just set-up my suspension for the part of the ride where I want it working well (the descent in my case) and then just ride it set the same way all the time. It may occasionally be a minor compromise but I don’t like to be thinking about whether I should adjust the suspension when I should be thinking about riding the bike, plus there’s the chance of forgetting to set it into descend mode and slightly spoiling the performance on the fun part of the ride.

Also colder air is more dense, thus to maintain air:fuel ratio you need more fuel…
Not in a diesel..

Nor in a petrol engine, for any given required output it’ll require a more or less fixed amount of fuel so you just need a smaller throttle opening for the same result when the air is dense. The same affect in reverse causes competitors in the Pikes Peak hill climb to have a significantly lower peak output by the time they reach the summit than when they leave the start line.

Edit:
Depending on the journeys the OP does I’d guess another significant factor is that many diesel engines take an age to warm up in winter and are less fuel efficient until they do, so if you mostly do shortish journeys, your fuel consumption in winter will be higher.

Then buy a 27.5 inch turbo to make the engine come alive

:D

I’m usually about 3 days for CRC. Interestingly my experience of paying more for guaranteed next day is that what it guarantees is that it will not turn up the next day. It’s never worked for me, and a friend has had the same experience.

IR35 alert

Indeed.

Oddly I’ve found, and also seen it recommended, that once you can stand it, it’s best to sleep lying on the sore side.

contracted rate != take home pay

This, if he has his own limited company the rate you are seeing is what his company charges. Assuming it’s exclusive of VAT, he still has to pay 20% corporation tax off that before he gets to money that he can potentially pay himself. Then he has to pay his own pension and benefits that are built in for you. As a contractor you’d expect him to be making more than you are, and it doesn’t sound like he’s getting as much more as I’d have expected.

the glass you put in front a sensor controls the depth of field, not the sensor itself. this is the same for film as it is for digital.

For any given sensor, but the size of the sensor, and therefore the focal length required for a given field of view is critical. and you just can’t get a long enough focal length to get a small depth of field with the tiny sensors in phones and many digital cameras. However, as mentioned above, that isn’t why it doesn’t look steep.

In answer to the OP, part of it is that you have no reference for the horizontal in video so POV shots look rubbish because you can’t tell if you are looking up or down. Off the bike shots look rubbish because the majority of us simply aren’t riding anything worth photographing ;-) A low angle will help though if you are videoing your mates, as will wide angle and getting really close (not an option with a phone)

Even the normal 10 spd SRAM mechs are like this, the jockey wheel is a little offset from the pivot for the cage. It makes them work a lot better with big adapter sprockets than Shimano set-ups.

Ooh, I thought about doing that myself but never got round to it. I’ll be having one of those.

Smidge

They have a very good mechanic but again potentially only good with roadies.
Doesn’t sound like a “good” mechanic to me, sounds like he only knows half his job…

No indeed, the rules are the same for road bikes, and if he thinks that MTBs are different or know so little about bikes that he thinks that could be the case, he’s not a good mechanic.

About the same delivery as CRC, or maybe one day longer, plus the fun of getting a package addressed to Herr Your Name. Plus obviously the cheaper prices.

Those are fatigue cracks, not gross overload cracks!

The bottom one maybe, the top one, I don’t think so, it’s raised around the whole length of that crack, that’s not just been a little by little crack propagation over a lot of load cycles.

Yep, the fact that there’s a big ole in the rim!

Oh, no doubt, it’ll always go at a spoke hole, but why those specific spokes though? :-)
And I stand by my assertion that the spoke tension is very likely on the high side of acceptable for those rims, albeit it’s not an absolutely direct leap from the cracks to there.

New rim either way.

failing at a weak spot doesn’t mean the failure is something specific to the weak spot.

From an engineering point of view, it does, something has caused that to be the failure point(s)

a decent amount of hard use wearing out the wheel to the point it cracks.

Really, this is what I’m saying in fewer words. This is the sort of cause of failure detective work that I often see at work and at some point, something specific has happened to those spoke holes that hasn’t happened to the others to make the cracks occur on those specific ones.

FWIW, I tried the ESI chunky grips and found they made my hands sore, despite the recommendations and the fact I’ve got pretty big hands. I much prefer Ruffians and my new fave Race Face Half Nelsons.
I’d 2nd the option of don’t change just before a big trip but it might be worth playing with the bar angle a little and making sure controls positions are as good as you can get them. Are you wearing arm armour? I used to find that having anything even slightly tight round my fore arms caused arm pump pretty quickly.

No it doesn’t, the spoke hole is the weakest point on the rim so simple wear and tear/fatigue could easily account for it too.

i.e knocking the wheel out of true a few times has overloaded some of the spokes, initiating cracks which have grown over time? Could be. It shouldn’t be straight up fatigue if the spokes aren’t wildly slack as the load on them shouldn’t be varying too much. The OPs assertion that the tension is bang on the limit makes me wary of over tensioning though, going right too the limit is pushing things a little with the accuracy limitations of a spoke tension meter and there’s no way that all the spokes in a wheel as beat as that are at the same tension.

Either way, if you are planning to ride it hard, a new rim would be cheap insurance for a good holiday.

Spoke tension is spot on the allowable for the rims. I do have a tension meter, and have used it.

I think you may be mistaking the spoke tension meter for an accurate measuring device. The fact that that rim is cracked in many places clearly says that the spoke tension is well above the allowable value.

You don’t. You remove and dispose of the old starnut and fit a new one.

Why on earth would you do that? You stick a long bolt into the threaded hole and belt it further down into the steerer with a hammer.

Cut it down but always leave one 5mm spacer on top. It gives a little possibility for adjustments and engineering wise I feel happier with the whole stem clamping onto something.

Car tyre works for that too

Yup, it does but I’ve found a bike tyre at higher pressure gets the tricky combos started better due to the bigger initial rush of air. I’m pretty sure you’d not be in any danger pumping a car tyre up to 80psi for this but it’d take absolutely ages to do.

You got over your “illness”? Being hungry / dehydrated won’t help your mood.

The Magic Mary will be wildly grippier almost everywhere, more resistant to pinch flats, draggier, heavier and wear faster. It’ll be a huge improvement IMO and the only question really is what to run on the back.
I’m running two Marys and love them but I’m thinking of trying a spare Hans Dampf pacestar that I’ve got on the rear to speed things up a little.

More tape
More soapy water on the bead

Plus make yourself a double ended trackpump hose with a valve chuck on both ends and use another tyre blown up as hard as you dare (I usually go to about 70-80psi) as a source to get the beads seated. If this doesn’t do it, that tyre and rim set-up isn’t happening.

Maybe I should get more bracing added, then cut it out.

You could add some reasonably long bracing plates between the two seat stays at a couple of points to help them work together as one beam in side loading and provided you didn’t connect it to the main frame anywhere but the headtube and where it crosses the main top tube it wouldn’t have any real affect on the vertical stiffness.
As mentioned above, I strongly suspect that the flex in the Jones rear end is critically dependent on the vertical bend in the seat stays to take away a lot of the compression stiffness of the stays. I don’t know what your stays do out of shot but if they aren’t curved it’ll not move too much I suspect.

My guess (and it’s just that) is that the mech’s not been designed to take up any slack at the front

Yup, the design of the mech relies on only using one ring to keep the b-tension setting right as it varies with the angle of the mech arm.

Yup, you aren’t the only one to notice.

They are all the same fitment, but the more expensive ones are lighter.

Yes, you can. No adapters required. Weirdly, the 142+ isn’t wider, it just pushes the cassette and hub flanges out a bit. 142mm hubs fit fine.

I’m going to go with too much toe-in. That said it’s a fairly common wear pattern on largish front drive cars as the stock geometry is often set for straight line running and traction as they aren’t expecting enthusiastic cornering. If you live somewhere with lots of roundabouts you can easily wear the outside edges first.

I’m unclear how Jones does that, as those frames look quite triangulated and braced. I can see how the Jones seat tube could bend backwards and forwards.

He’s got a video somewhere on his website showing apparent movement while riding, I can’t remember where the camera is mounted though.
Edit- Here it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uo-bastzh7c

I was initially slightly concerned the fork lower “hoop” that wraps over the top of the tyre might look silly if it had a load of fresh air under it

It just looks like Fox 36s always look, you wouldn’t even question it.

Jones-a-like attempt to get some actual vertical movement at the rear then?

The bike does look alot ‘taller’ though- is that a fair comment?

I think that’s just that bike. I’m also running 650b forks and 26″ wheels: