I’m certainly less inclined to ride on roads these days. I feel really vulnerable.

You could wrap the bike in a space blanket if you are worried.

The only issue I see is that the heat will marginally accelerate the natural degradation of any rubber or plastic.

If the rad is so hot it’s boiling off brake fluid or bearing grease they you should probably turn it down lol.

No I’m not in league with the Devil! :)

For that crime alone they should have thrown the book at him – no matter who was at fault in the original collision.

Unfortunately the ‘I thought I hit a deer’ excuse is enough to establish reasonable doubt.

The law needs changing here to mandate that drivers report any collision even if it’s a deer. Then this BS excuse will be rendered unless.

A smashed windscreen limits visibility massively. The fact he drove away in the dark with a damaged vehicle sounds like he knew exactly what had happened and he was escaping the scene. If my windscreen was smashed I’d stop and call for a recovery truck.

That’s because he’s lying. The ‘I hit a deer excuse’ is just a legal fiction. His internet searches make this obvious as does fact that as you say nobody drives home with a shattered windscreen after hitting a deer, you call a recover truck.

Absolutely unbelievable. You will get a several years in jail for a rude Tweet but a hit and run resulting in death gets a community order? This is complete madness.

Also I think he’s a complete **** liar saying he thought he hit a deer.

As I’ve said many times, if you want to kill someone do it in a motor vehicle.

Having said that I do question the wisdom or riding on an unlit dual carriageway at night. I wouldn’t.

How many 50 years old played football in 1930?

None is the answer.

I’m not saying people didn’t ride or race bikes. I’m saying there wasn’t mass participation especially amongst middle classes.

Yes, without them we’d never had taken up football, rugby, cricket etc.

These were spectator sports with participants mostly young at amateur level. Not mass (sports) leisure activities IMHO.

Being sweaty wasn’t particularly respectable outside of the sports-ground. It was working people who toiled and rode bikes.

Cycling was never cool in the UK, it was always a means to an end and mostly associated with working people.

Plus not until the 60’s did we really get consumerism in the UK. Even if MTB had been a thing in the 30’s for a few people, it could never have translated into the act of consumption it is now with all the brands and people building identities around them, a new model every years, etc.

Sport as a mass leisure activity comes from the US anyway. It needed something like running/jogging to become popular first for MTB to gain traction (pardon the pun!).

Surely if you have a weakness, you want to address it not avoid it?

Disk problems pressing on leg nerve.

I have rotator cuff problems in my right shoulder and bench pressing will only ever make it worse for example. It just isn’t the case that you can power through injuries.

I’ve got other priorities than worrying about how to protect myself in 40 years from broken hips.

Most people are fat and sedentary especially as they get into middle age. By just cycling, stretching and doing a bit of core I’m doing better than 90% of people.

What pains me is that I used to love cycling and Armstrong forever ruined it for me as a spectator sport.

Maybe not such a nice guy at times but a villain i think not

Lance would destroy and trash people who got on the wrong side of him. There is nothing redeemable about him in my eyes. It’s an unprecedented duplicity.

One doper praising another?

Personally I don’t have time for either. Lance was a sociopath. It’s not the doping that I detested so much as Lance being a bully and getting off on conning everyone.

Wasn’t Al Carter Townsend’s “premium” brand? Final throwing together / shoving in boxes for all of them was somewhere near Wigan.

Defiantly not in 1991 or so.

As a kid I was embarrassed to own one.

Yeah it’s generally the ****ts who are attracted to the ‘petty offices’ of things like Club chair or treasurer.

It’s the same with middle management at work or the w@nkers who did junior common room or student union stuff at University.

The main problem with cycling as an activity is that it doesn’t stress the skeletal structure

It’s not really a problem. What’s the point of obsessing over your bone density or how much you can bench press?

My back is too dodgy for squatting. It kept me off the bike for years not it’s just about ok for cycling I don’t want to hurt myself doing squatting.

For me now in my 40’s I feel that flexibility and core are important.

Other than that I am just happy to ride.

…and I’ve no interest in pushing some macho big gear. This is one reason I think I hurt my back years ago.

a Muddy Fox

These only existed as legends in my neck of the woods. Anyone riding one of these would have attained mythical status.

The most exotic MTB’s we would realistically see people riding were Raleigh Mirages, maybe with the triangle bag thing in the frame corner for extra kudos.

My first MTB was a Townsend with splattered black over green paint, the “Gas-Pipe Special” to my friends.

I’ll thing you’ll find that was an ATB and not MTB  In our group of friends we had a mix of these and Falcon Cheetahs – if you saw a Muddy Fox or the like, well, they must have been the super rich!!

Yeah Dammit the horrid day glow pinking red MTB I bought in about 1990 or 1991 was actually a Townsend not an Emmelle. I was misremembering.

Heavy steam pipe steel frame with cheap welding and some sort of non branded group set with ultra-cheap chromed chain set. The chrome was so cheap that spots of rust would appear on the steel underneath. Same with the rims. All made in China.

Worst bike I ever owned.

Townsend became a sort of by-word for shit bikes between me and my brother lol.

You used to see lots of Townsends.

Hard to believe that anodized bar ends (or bull horns) were so cool once.

I put some on my Raleigh MTB – in 1994 – and I felt like a million dollars lol.

What happened to Emmelle?

As a kid in about 1991 I bought a really cheap MTB (think it was Emmelle?) Horrid pinkish red paint job with cheaply chromed cranks and chain rings. Weighted a ton due to drain pipe frame material. Made in China.

I had to buy this cos my Raleigh ATB got stolen. That was a better bike even though it was low spec.

My parents pressured me get the Emmelle ‘cos I needed a bike to do my paper-round and they didn’t want to have to take me around more bike shops.

Then that got stolen in about 1993, and they again pressured me into getting another readily available bike with was a POS looking back which I overpaid for again. This was a road bike a size too small and with cotter-pined cranks.

I swapped this for a Raleigh MTB my Dad found in about 1994. This was a pretty decent bike made in about 1991 with ‘rapid fire’? thumb shifters, oval teck chainrings and Reynolds steel. I resprayed the frame and used this until about 2001 when the rear wheel started to fall apart one spoke at a time.

To think that in the late 80’s I was under the impression that Muddy Fox made the best mountain bikes in the world!

I was about 10 :D

This is probably why drivers are so impatient with cyclists (they have to blame somebody), but **** em. Only my failing body will stop me riding to work

It’s because they sit in traffic a lot despite being sold the ‘freedom’ of their expensive car. It makes them seethe with rage inside and cyclists are an easy target because they appear to ‘get in the way’ of motorists who for decades have been the priority for transport policy.

Commuting to work by car basically makes you stressed and angry. I’ve done it I know. I quickly found myself cursing other motorists and getting angry. It brought out the worst in me and I didn’t like it.

I’ve got a 14 mile cycle commute next year when I go back to study. Looking fwd to it cos most of it is on a bridleway and canal path.

Aluminium frames used to feel harsh but they can be made to feel anyway now with hydroformed profiles.

My new ‘gravel bike’ (God I hate that marketing gimmick name!) is a steel frame though.

My issue with aluminium is that it will fatigue even with low amplitude stress cycles.

Steel won’t.

 I am not sure what the phrase means in the context of a pre-pack.  Clearly Evans was not a going concern, so the administrators didn’t have anything that could be sold as such.  Only the injection of further cash can turn it into a going concern.  Would the deal with the administrator have obliged SD to inject that cash?  Or to put it another way, was the business sold as a going concern, or sold as a basket case which was then, by choice of the purchaser, turned into one?

The way I understand it that in this case the business retains continuity which I think some people are confusing for being a ‘going concern’. Clearly if the business had sufficient liquidity it wouldn’t have been sold as a pre-pack by the administrator. Some creditors must have lost out here even if the business is now a going concern thanks to SD cash injection. Ashley isn’t going to pay (old) creditors he doesn’t have to. You don’t get to be a billionaire this way.

When ECI bought Evans they transferred £52m of the £80.4m purchase price immediately back to Evans and charged 12% interest on that “loan”.

I’m surprised this post hoc accounting trick is legal. I guess they call the £52 m an asset or something since they value the business based on the sale price? Semi-criminal if you ask me?

“As discussed previously on this thread it really isn’t the only way forward in the bike trade. I know successful and profitable shops. They just know how to get it right.

As the t shirt says the internet can’t fix my bike still applies to a lot of people.”

Maybe if you want to run a tiny LBS, earn the equivalent of a minimum wage and have all the hassle and responsibility of owning a small business.

It’s been discussed many times that people expect to get bikes fixed almost for free.

An update of sorts for those waiting on an order. Got a phone call and an email saying the bike was at the story being built up and would be ready for collection shortly. I didn’t take the call otherwise I would have been straight around and taken the bike in it’s box! Hopefully everyone’s orders will be fulfilled.

They could be stalling. If I were you I’d go around and demand it built or not.

It was inevitable IMHO. Many of us get all misty eyes about the LBS and then go and shop online at Wiggle or CRC.

Physically retail is dead in the water except for things like Supermarkets.

The future is online.

Sorry to hear that. Are you going to make a full recovery?

The management system?

Pile high, sell cheap.

They are going to need to keep the good staff, keep the good will of the customers and undercut some of the biggest web based bike shops.

Yeah I’m under no illusion about what the odious Sports Direct do. They are basically a massive market stall and as classy as such, and their management is ruthless as **** a bit like Amazon.

I tell you what I really glad I didn’t buy a gravel bike from them on pre-order. I was close to doing this last month before I went overseas to work for 6 weeks. Instead I ordered on CRC and had it delivered to my parents.

Do you think the plan is for them to survive?

Strip, gut, extract and try and cash in on the name for as long as he can. Once the purchase price is recouped then dump what you need.

Yeah basically any value is in the brand. Most people would rather buy a bike from ‘Evans’ than ‘Sports Direct’. So they integrate the brand into the Sports Direct infrastructure and management system.

If you want to laugh inside just picture him in lycra on a road bike labouring up a hill.

People buy one as gravel is what ‘everyone’ is doing and then go back to their road bike or MTB when they find out it doesn’t suit them more than what they were already do.

Well for my TPT, bridleway, road, and canal path commute neither a road bike nor an MTB are as suitable as a ‘gravel bike’, i.e., a rugged road bike with wider tyres. One might as well say the gravel bike is a super-commuter bike for people with a few quid?

A way for bike retailers to get people to buy an N +1 bike they don’t really need? :D

Seriously, these kind of bikes have always been with us though just they didn’t have a name ,and people tended to build them up themselves as appropriate. The only ‘new’ thing is the disk brakes really but that goes for any bike with disk brakes.

Well that sucks. I can’t stand Ashley and his retail model myself.

rydster – its about the rate of change of the acceleration.  When the EPS is snug to your head the acceleration builds up over a longer time than if there is an air gap – think of a slack seatbelt compared to a snug one.

With the seat belt the device is to protect your head and chest from hitting the dash/steering wheel. Given that this is just a few inches away (and the seat belt doesn’t directly constrain the head) an inch or two of slackness would be important, as could the risk of slipping out of the seat belt.

Thought experiment:

You are thrown from the bike and hit a rock exactly 200 cm away from the front of your head.

In one case there is 2.5 cm of foam on the rock, in another 2.5 cm of foam on the front of your head. In both cases your head must travel 197.5 cm until the foam causes it to decelerate. Indeed your head will even have less momentum in the first scenario.

The only issue I see with the ‘loose’ helmet is that it might slip and not protect your properly.

If the EPS is snug to your head then you get a smooth deceleration over the 2.5 cm of the EPS.  If its not you get an impact head to shell.

You still get the deceleration over the 2.5 cm whether you hit a rock whilst wearing the helmet or your bare head hits a rock attached to 2.5 cm of helmet polystyrene.