There’ll be a bolt inside the hub that can be turned with an 11 or 12mm allen key. It’s a standard thread but you’ll probably need a big lever (old handlebar?) on the end of the allen key to turn it.

Normandy is excellent for mountain biking. There’s a region called Swiss Normandy that is around the Orne valle South of Caen. The river has cut through limestone making cliffs and valleys that give good riding. The region has lots of routes marked out by the FFC, the French cycling organisation, that are marked out like this:

Numbered routes are graded according to distance and climbyness rather than technical skills needed. Hence blues are flat and short while blacks are long and hilly.

The trails are pretty much empty as the French tend to ride in clubs on Sundays, so there’s nobody out on any other day.

You can order a bunch of maps of the routes in that region here.

If you’re looking for French OS type maps (IGN) online, go to http://www.geoportail.fr, search for a place and select the IGN maps.

Swap the chain.

The worn chain isn’t just wearing the cassette, it’s taking the chainrings and jockey wheels with it, too. Common sense says that the timely replacement of the chain means two chains before the cassette needs swapping and you’ll probably only need a middle chainring instead of the set.

My prediction for “organic material hitting Froome” today is dog turd. There’s a huge amount of it in Paris.

Click here.

The upper window shows a 26″ x 2.1 wheel bike with the normal 22/32/44 triple and 11-34 cassette. Each cog is shown against each ring on the triple crankset. For a given cadence (90rpm) each gear is shown with its mph figure below.

In the lower window, I’ve set up the same 26″ wheel with 1 x 10 using an 11-36t cassette and a 32t chainring. You can see that the 36t (easiest) ring on the cassette will give you just over 6mph at 90rpm. Compare that to the tripe setup in the upper window and you see you’re losing the three lowest gears on the granny ring (22-26, 22-30 and 22-34). You’re also going to spin out earlier (21mph) on the 1×10 setup as you lose two whole gears (44-13 and 44-11) on the triple.

You can click on each window and chainge the settings for that window below. The trick is to drag the single chainring left and right until you achieve a balance between losing lower gears that get you up the hills and losing upper ratios that leave you spinning out earlier.

Cheers,

Ian

Your daughter is now globally famous. Her picture has been tweeted by Peter Glieck, “Climate/water/sustainability scientist; member US National Academy of Science; MacArthur Fellow” and then retweeted by Carolyn Porco, the head of the Cassini project, the NASA team who have a satellite around Saturn. 😀

You would be hard pressed to get one. Specialized’s shipments don’t show until the middle of January which is a bit daft for a bike that would be ideal for Autumn and Winter riding.

11 speed Ultegra shifts more crisply and is lighter than 11 speed 105. I guess the better shifting is partly due to the build of the mech but mostly due to the cassette. If I get a chance I’d like to fit an Ultegra cassette on a bike with 105 shifters and mech.

Both 105 and Ultegra front mechs have the long arm design that seems to build tension in the cable before suddenly flipping the chain to the big ring. Both also work with Shimano’s low friction inner cable.

He’s called a press conference and everything else is speculation. He could be announcing he’s going to confess to doping, that he’s gay, appearing in the next season of Strictly, got cancer….anything, really.

My money’s on him announcing a sex change as it’s the only way he can win on the Champs Elysees next year.

That chain looks at least a couple of links too short to me. Remember that, in the stand, the suspension is completely uncompressed, so the looseness of the chain on the 10t cog will be taken up by the rider’s static sag. That mech has still got a lot of moving forward to do under full compression and it doesn’t look like it can go much further. For comparison, a Stumpjumper, with 140mm travel, has the mech pointing to about 5:30 on the 42t cog with no weight on the rear wheel.

I’d unbolt one end of the shock, gently move the suspension through the full range of travel and see what happens.

The Specialized Hotrock 24 is £270 and the lighter, better, Hotrock XC 24 is £300 so they’re both within your budget, are better made, probably a lot lighter and will likely hold their value more than the Carrera. Your local Specialized dealer is also likely to employ better mechanics, care about the build and PDI of the bike and might even invite you to drop it back after 6 weeks for a free check over.

I wouldn’t bother with aero wheels unless it’s for specific application. They’re relatively heavy for a given cost (unless you spend a lot) as the deep section is a fairing stuck onto an aluminium rim and they’re not nice to ride in crosswinds. People who buy them tend to run them as a second set of wheels and they use them when they won’t encounter crosswinds but need to go quite fast.

For your budget, an aero rim is going to add weight that will make them slow up hills without giving you much on fast, flat roads.

For that money, I’d go for Mavic Ksyrium Elites. Several places seem to be selling them for around £420 a pair You didn’t say whether you’re Campag or Shimano but they’re available with either freehub.

Weren’t they in the box with the new brakes? Shimano usually ship an olive, a spigot and a hose clamp with each brake.

If it’s a quite thin spacer then no, it came with the Shimano cassette. Wheels with 11 speed compatible hubs usually have a thicker spacer (about 1mm) that you would need to reuse.

I’m guessing you have just the thin spacer that came with your cassette.

The more you spend, the better the frame and the lighter the componentry. Weight savings on the bike are going to make some difference. And if you rode your old 9kg bike with a pair of 750ml bottles full to brimming and half a kilo of tools and do the same with your new 8kg one, it’s still a kilo lighter

Carbon layup is done rapidly and cheaply on mass produced frames, they’re still better than an aluminium frame (well, most are) but they spend very little time getting it right. Layup is so much better in a more expensive frame and it shows. Hence my surprise at the amount of kick that turned into forward motion on a frame that is still comfortable over 50 miles.

Buy a 3 grand bike, spend the other 3 on coaching…

Ha! Yes, that as well. Except it’s more to do with having nothing to blame for the slowness.

I just upgraded from a £1.5k bike to a £4k one and my Strava times up climbs have tumbled for two reasons:

1. It’s lighter, but I don’t think the kilo I lost is so much the cause as…
2. It’s better at getting the power on the deck while remaining a bit compliant for longer rides.

So, yes, I think so.

The 22t granny on the 29er will give you almost exactly the same “gear inches” as the 24t granny on the 26er, meaning that one rotation of the cranks will push you the same distance along the trail.

See here.

So I’d go for the 22t granny so you can keep the same cadence with the bigger wheel.

I think the whole BG saddle thing is another cycle industry solution to a problem you previously didn’t know you had. Bicycles have been around for over a century and were the main form of transport for the majority of people before cars became affordable after the second world war. I’m not aware of Raleigh or Hercules receiving bags of mail in the 1930s from unhappy owners complaining about their penile blood flow.

The trouble with BG saddles is that they concentrate the rider’s weight on two narrow bands and this can also be painful for some people. I don’t think anyone should be as worried about the Specialized’s claims of better blood flow if a slotless saddle is more comfortable.

Ask at your LBS – they bin lots of old V-brake blocks every week so will probably let you have some washers for free or a nominal contribution to the workshop tea fund.

EDIT: Got in too late but I’m glad your LBS was able to help.

Is it a full suspension bike? If so, the front mech position relative to the chain changes when the rider is on the bike, sagging the suspension. You can only set up a front mech on some bikes by getting it roughly right in the stand then going for a ride round a car park with a bunch of tools in your pocket.

What bike is it and which cranks, mechs and shifters?

Countries like France have a huge club XC racing scene that the UK doesn’t – British MTB riders seem to prefer riding alone or with a few mates rather than join clubs.

French riders go out in big packs at the weekend on designated routes and they’re competitive because of it. The clubs are all affiliated to a huge national organisation (the FFC) and there are frequent races with decent prizes.

Praxis’ BB adaptor is good but I believe it uses expansion, rather than just push fitting, to fit into a frame. As a result, manufacturers may not honour BB related warranty issues if the carbon in the BB area cracks or fails because of it.

She’s had so much done that I wasn’t aware that there was a part of her left that was capable of dying.

It works very well. I’ve fitted a standard XTR threaded BB to a Whyte C29 and it was no problem. Like you, I think the Hollowtech cups are better than the press fit stuff and the SRAM cups seem to be a good way to convert a frame.

Shimano brakes are easy to shorten hoses on. Mount the lever on the bar, undo the hose bolt and pull the hose from the lever (keep the hose upright at all times), use cable or hose cutters to cut the hose to length, thread on a new olive (supplied with the brake), open the hole in the end of the hose a little with a small allen key, clamp the hose upright in a vice (using the clamping blocks supplied), tap a new spigot (also supplied) into the end of the hose with a small hammer and bolt the hose back into the lever.

No need to bleed!

The bottle might have been clearly labelled….but in Norwegian. I believe there were a number of competitors from other countries, the UK included. And it is called “Active Sport”.

But surely anyone entering a race would wear their own kit and consume their own nutrition yet I’m always amazed by the number of people who wear the race official T-shirt/jersey they bought at signon or the Expo the day before and who buy gels and drinks they’ve never tried before to use in the race. So, consuming all the stuff in the goodie bag is probably just an extension of that.

I pity the poor bloke who’s washing all his kit with the contents of a gel sachet.

Take them off, put them through the X-Ray with your hand luggage and walk barefoot through the arch.

Your cranks were made for BB30 bearings and your frame accepts these in a PF30 shell, so you need to but the SRAM direct replacement. Wheels Manufacturing have a version but you’d probably only buy theirs if you wanted to go to angular contact or ceramic bearings.

PF30 bottom brackets can be easy but occasionally a complete pain to remove. I’ve had them almost fall out of the frame right through to one that was so stuck, it broke up and had to be drifted out in pieces. If you buy a replacement PF30, you’ll see how the cups fit together which will give you some indication of where to drift out the old one.

Superstar sell a BB30 installation tool that will press the new cups in. You can use a headset press but make sure it’s either pressing on the plastic cup or the bearing outer, not the inner race.

That’s an Octalink bottom bracket. Your crank tool is probably for a square taper BB and has a smaller button to push on the spindle, You can use a coin in the hole in the crank arm to push on the splined shaft. Experiment with a few different sizes of coin.

I got an 11-34 cassette working comfortably on a Specialized Roubaix but it was a long cage 105 mech and the longer of the two choices of Roubaix hanger. I think the longer hanger is about 28 or 30mm between axle and mech bolt centres. I’m sure a 36 tooth cassette would have worked just as well as the mech didn’t need much B-screw.

There are threeish ways to go tubeless.

1. Tape the rim to seal the valve holes, put sealant in a tyre and inflate. This works well for compatible tyres and rims but can go horribly wrong with other rim/tyre combinations. Stan’s marketing would have you believe that this method “burps” air as you ride.

2. Rim strips (Stan’s, Joe’s) that fill the well of the rim and seal to both tyre beads, completing the circle so that the tyre plus strip makes a tube. Again, you add sealant and inflate. This can work with a wider range of tyres on rims that aren’t tubeless ready.

3. Ghetto tubeless (Google it) is similar to the above but you take a rim, fit a smaller inner tube (eg 20″ on a 26″ rim), slit the inner tube around the rim and flap the edges over the edge of the rim. Now, when you install a tyre, its beads press against the tube on each side of the rim to complete the circle. Add sealant, inflate and trim the excess tube back to the rim edge.

Either way, any significant damage to the tread or sidewall won’t be sealed by the sealant. Carrying a tube and sidewall patches is a good idea if you’re likely to get stuck in the middle of nowhere.

Lots of things to check – derailleur hanger alignment could be out, it could be a cassette spacer issue (is it 10 speed on an 11 speed compatible freehub?) or play in the cassette or freehub. Also, I’d be wary of running a new chain on a 400 mile cassette if the previous chain was well worn.

They put carbon forks on aluminium bikes for a reason – aluminium is a stiff frame material and doesn’t absorb vibration or bumps easily. Carbon fibre can be made as stiff or as flexible as required and in different directions in the same tube. Most current carbon frames from manufacturers with a good reputation will out perform most aluminium frames.

In short, go for the Giant Defy Composite, even if the groupset is a notch or two lower than the ally bikes.

The no name brakes on Specialized bikes are lousy. The 105s have better pivots, more leverage and better shoe material.

See my post in this thread. It’s the same method for Juicys as for Elixirs but Juicy pistons tend to get stuck more.

Mine’s under the chainstay (Roubaix). It means the arm is trailing away from the rotation of the wheel so, if you kick the sensor, it’s flicked back out by the next spoke, not dragged in and trashed.

All the tools I use (mostly Park) are supplied by the shop. I wasn’t aware anyone in the bike trade bought their own (except the ones who do stuff out of hours to pay the bills). Does anyone in the trade have their local Snap On man turning up regularly?

My Specialized Body Geometry (TM) saddle has up to a 100% improved penile blood flow. And my lycra shorts make it very difficult to hide anything. So, I try very hard not to think of women when I ride.