+1 for the Forerunner 305. I've got the HR strap, bar mounts on three bikes and the road bike has a cadence and wheel speed sensor. I'm doing a duathlon next weekend and have just been reading up on setting up a multisport workout so it separately logs running time, transitions and cycling. Battery life is about 10 hours of solid use. I use Sporttracks on the PC and Garmin Connect to share workouts.

Gorrick[/url] races have a class for 8-9 year olds.

We rode an all day circuit around a bunch of tracks I picked off the map in the Loir valley. Some went close to farm buildings and past houses but everybody we met smiled and said "Bonjour". We didn't encounter anyone who disapproved of us being there.

Where are you planning on going?

Thanks all for some good advice. If the snow melts, I'll go out on Sunday and ride/run the course and see how it looks. I think I'll ride it on flatties with my off road running shoes on and, if I don't get on with them, I'll do the race in SPDs.

I'm a runner and occasional MTB racer – just not on the same day! I think it's going to be pretty tough as it looks like the equivalent in effort to a half-marathon.

Gilles – try Runners World's Event Index

Cheers,

Ian

I changed the bearings in my KTM motocross bike's engine a while back. The advice I was given was to put the engine halves face-down in a hot oven (over 200 deg C) for a while as aluminium expands faster than steel. The bearings literally dropped out of the aluminium onto the floor of the oven.

I reckon heating a HTII bearing shell should do the same. Have the replacement bearings in the freezer at -20 so they should just drop straight in while the ally shell is still hot.

Much kinder than hammers, sockets and the like.

It IS the fault of most fat people that they're fat, if they're over 18 years old and in charge of their own destiny. I drink too much and I'm in debt, both of which I am entirely responsible for.

That doesn't mean that it's easy for them, or me, to change our ways, but to say it's not their fault is taking away the burden of responsibility from people for their own actions.

And there are far, far more people with alcohol problems, debt or obesity than there were 50 years ago. It can't all be hormonal.

That BMI chart is a useful guide for average bods but shouldn't be taken more seriously than that. I think the US military have a system that measures shoulder width and other dimensions as they're more an indication of the frame of a person – ie, how big boned they are.

Pinch tests are also a much better indication of fatness. The Special K ads were right.

Nope – it takes a lot more than a bit of snow to stop the people of Surrey from killing anyone to get to work a second earlier. I came very close to being run flat by a 4 x 4 on the A3 today.

Update:

Well, we didn't go on Wednesday as planned and then the snow came down. So we went today – the best thing you can do on Christmas morning is ride mountain bikes – and had an excellent ride. The boardwalk was interesting in frozen snow, the Chainslapper lived up to expectations and the swoopy stuff through the clearfelled section was like a ski run with snow on the trail.

My girlfriend has now ridden her first trail centre so I'll take her to Swinley, next.

So, thanks for all the advice and thanks to all the people who put the hard work in to make the trails we rode today.

Cheers

Ian

Thanks.

Should've said – I'm from daan saaf and have never ridden it before so I have no idea what it's like and whether it stays rideable when it's frozen solid.

I was quoted £600 to de-rust and respray both cabin doors, one sliding door and the body round the fuel cap on my van. £600 for one scratch is silly money.

You could put it in a Vac-Bag[/url]

I was out in the snow today for the first time and I'm stunned at the grip levels. As long as I wasn't somewhere a car or an awful lot of feet have been, it was grippy as hell. I rode up stuff I'd normally expect a bit of a slip in the wet and it stuck like glue.

So, look after your personal warmth – good gloves, keep the feet dry, warm fluids in the Camelbak, etc and you'll be fine.

But nobody told me SPDs freeze up! 😯

South Downs Way
Fort William to Blair Atholl
London to Paris on the road bike
A cross country run/MTB duathlon in January

South West Trains are fine with bikes and have cycle spaces on the trains going to/from Guildford. They only bar bikes on trains that arrive in London before 09:30 or leave London after 16:30 on working days.

The government should spend time reading another report they commissioned.

+1 for Sporttracks – import the track then split it using the edit tool.

Nicole Cooke – made of win

Is the war still on? I thought the only reason for carrot in cake was as a sweetener when sugar was rationed.

Still using powdered egg, too? 🙂

I love the X-0 – a thing of beauty. It's not right to drag it through muck and filth. I'm thinking of taking mine off the bike and sticking it on the mantelpiece.

The wheels are a bit garishly stickered. Why put a sticker on that says "VALVE". Is it not obvious?

Lovely bike – lose the wheel stickers and it'll become so stealthy, it'll never show up on radar.

I think the 405 is a runners only unit. The 310 is a triathletes GPS with run, bike and swim modes. It's also waterproof.

If you want a cheaper alternative to the 310, a Forerunner 305 has run and bike modes, talks to HRM straps, cadence/wheel speed sensors and has multiple bike profiles (with weight setting and sensor settings for each). The 305 is almost identical in function to the Edge 305 but has the running mode and no barometric altitude. They're usually £140 with HRM strap, the bar mount/velcro wrist thing (for quick change bike to run for triathletes) are 15 quid and the cadence sensors are £35. Try Amazon, for cheapness on lots of Garmin stuff.

There's a place near me where motorcycle enduros are held and the sand is well known for being like grinding paste. A set of pads lasts about 2 hours, bedded in or otherwise. Some riders run these rear discs. No holes so the crap that gets chucked onto the rear disc by the front wheel doesn't get carried round to the caliper in the holes. And the unvented rear disc builds heat better in cold weather.

My exhaustive survey (2 minutes on CRC) seems to show that solid rear discs aren't very available for mountain bikes. The Avid roundagons seem to be about as solid as they get.

3 bikes, all running Panaracer Fire XC Pros front and rear, summer and winter. I'm as unadventurous in the tyre section of my LBS as I am on the trails! 🙂

Thanks for all the help.

It's a long cage mech, bought secondhand on eBay but seems to have had an easy life. It's definitely not the shifters or cable because there's a big, flappy bit of loose inner at the mech when the shifter's all the way up to 9th and the mech's still sticking in 1st, so the shifter's actually shoving cable through the outer but the mech's not taking it up.

In 8th, I can flick the shifter to 9th then move the mech to 9th manually. If I push it back to 8th, it sticks there and doesn't go back out.

I'm not sure what I can do if it's a manufacturing error, except call on the good will of SRAM's UK importer. But I'll remove, lube, refit and check the B-screw and other adjustments first to discount any ham-fisted fitting on my part.

Cheers all!

Ian

Something like this. I think you'll need check valves to stop cross contamination of hot into cold or vice versa.

My LBS tell me that the money they get from the scheme is about 10% less than the value of the bike so they don't discount on Cyclescheme bikes.

I have a Roubaix I'm buying on the scheme. My employer will allow up to £600 through the scheme but, if you want a bike that costs more, you can fund the rest yourself. The Roubaix was £1468 so I funded £868 and I'm paying for the rest pre-tax at £50 per month. I'm effectively paying £30 to £35 per month. I'll have to pay 5% of the value of the loan at the end to own it, so £30. Hence, my £1468 bike's costing me around £1280.

If I'd bought a £600 bike, the saving would be roughly a quarter to a third.

My folks went for a 24 hour trip to the fjords to see Orca a few years ago and loved it. I've no idea who they went with but this[/url] is the kind of thing.

TBH, I'd rather go for a long weekend, stay in the area, sample the local food and hospitality and get a few whale watching trips in.

Excellent. She's happy about it, now, as am I. Thanks everyone.

Ian

Before you choose, go to any ferry operator's website and price the different options for the same trip. They charge extra for trailers and silly money for vans. I priced Portsmouth to Cherbourg one way recently and, while the car cost £120 each way, a van (under 2m high, under 5m long) was £160, £40 quid each way more than a car. Considering that the biggest people carriers are nearly 2m high, nearly 5m long and weigh more than my empty van, this gets me properly miffed when I pay more dosh for the same parking area.

Lots of dry and semi-dry suit seals and socks here but all in latex. I don't think I've ever seen neaoprene ones for sale as they tend to build them into neoprene suits, not graft them on afterwards like they do with membrane suits.

Is it the starter solenoid? It should click when the key is turned but, if the solenoid contacts are toast, no power will go to the starter motor.

I used a Mio 168 with Memory Map until last year. It was excellent as the aerial was good so it got a good GPS signal and the screen was perfectly adequate. I used to use it with CoPilot in the car and on the motorcycle, too, with a Brodit mount.

I started using a Windows Mobile powered Samsung Omnia when I started running, to cut the bulk of a mobile and PDA down to just a largish mobile. It's more powerful than the Mio and the screen is a slightly better resolution although smaller. The GPS is buried inside and the trace from a ride through the woods is patchy at best.

I bought one of these for running and it works really well for riding, too. I wore it last night and my ears were toasty.

Yes! It's very orange. My eyes hurt from staring at it.

I did DAS – two days on a 125 and two on a 500 then the test. I remember the relief that I felt at getting on a 500 for the first time because the 125s were just horrible. They'll do over 60mph but they're so light, they bounce and rattle about and you'll swear you're going to die. The 500 is just so stable by comparison. In 4 days, I had a licence and a new Bandit 600. I bought the Bandit because I was advised to by the saleswoman at the bike shop – she said I'd be bored rigid by the 500s within a couple of months. She was right.

Buy a naked 600cc bike (Bandit, Hornet, CB600F) so that there are no fairings to get scraped badly if you drop it. And you WILL drop it. Not proper, chuck-it-down-the-road crashes but slow or no speed, loss-of-balance-when-you-stall-it drops that bend levers and dent pride.

Ian

I switched to SPDs a year ago, by buying a pair of cheapish Bikehut flat pedals with an SPD clip on one side. I used them on trail rides until I'd got used to unclipping. It takes surprisingly little time to automatically unclip as you roll to a stop. In fact, I never had a fall from failing to unclip while I was learning to use them.

After the Bikehuts, I bought Shimano's 505 full-SPD pedals and would the adjusters nearly all the way out to make it easier to clip in and out. Now I'm on Shimano's 540s on the dirt and 105s on the road and find it almost impossible to go back to flat pedals. You don't realise how much you start to use all the muscle groups in your legs. Going back to flats has your foot lifting off the pedal at the top of the stroke and sliding around.

Experiment a little with cleat position and angle. Your knees like your feet to be at a certain angle (ie you might normally ride a bit toe-in or toe-out) on the pedal and it's best to try and replicate that when you fix your cleats.

Mine's so close to being a useable bike, but buying on eBay has its risks and the lack of X-9 rear mech is because my seller took a long while to get it posted. The bike gets muddy for the first time at Swinley next weekend.

I've got a 2000 model Merc Vito 110CDi with the single, flip-up rear door and 2 seat cab. Mechanically it's bomb proof but the doors (particularly the front ones) are very rust prone.

It's a private van and it's getting harder and harder to insure. H&R insurance found a policy for me that insures it pretty much as a car. Everyone else said it had to be used in conjunction with a business. Even so, it costs me £540 per year to insure for me and any driver over 30. I'm 43 with well over 5 years NCD and live on the Surrey/Hants border.

Tax is £160, I think. Fuel consumption is around 32mpg. Parts are pricey for some stuff and cheap for othet bits.

One problem with old Vitos is the glow plugs – they die and are impossible to remove. Merc dealers allegedly soak the plug in penetrating oil, disconnect the fan, run the engine until it's boiling hot then drive the plug out with a 3/8 drive air gun on its softest setting. Any more torque and the plug breaks leaving the thread in the head, then it's head-off time.

Ian

PS First post!