Why? You bleed with worn pads and a bleed block and the distance between piston at bleeding and piston when you’ve pumped it out to press pads against disk is bloody miles.

I wonder where motorcycle and car bleed blocks can be bought from?

I gusset could work. 😀

rocks surprisingly grippy when wet

I have no experience of Giant but have a 2009 Roubaix. I like the frameset and the zertz do make long days on dodgy English roads bearable. But Specialized have used some shockingly poor components on that bike to keep the cost down.

The rear hub is a cup and cone model that dies after not many miles. I have a Roubaix and a mate has a Secteur with those wheels and freehub bearings have failed in under 1000 miles. The freehub then needs replacing and it’s cheaper to replace the whole hub with a 105.

The brakes are awful. There’s far more leverage in 105 brakes, so much so that you have to shorten the cable outer to accommodate the much longer arms.

I used matt helicopter tape from Paragon Tapes on eBay.

Not made in Surrey.

You know what I mean! 🙂 I’ve proudly owned three On Ones and a Titus because they’re “British”, knowing full well that the first they’ve seen of the UK is when I opened the box at home.

Could’ve won an award at a bike show, I suppose. I’ve emailed them, asking for more info. I’ll post it when I get it.

Just the “sneak preview” on their Facebook page for now.

Maybe it’s won it’s CEN test award? 😀

It’s always worth cross checking your results against another spoke calculator. Try http://lenni.info/edd as it has a wider range of hubs and rims in the database.

Email a description and photos to every bike shop in the area, set up searches on eBay and Gumtree for the bikes and their parts and keep an eye on cash conerters website. I hope you find the bikes and the bastards who stole them.

Good luck!

You need an underdeveloped or non-existent sense of self preservation and a mother that doesn’t say “Be careful!” every time you go out of the house.

Have you talked to their UK support people? They’re very helpful. I’m currently getting a Forerunner 305 replaced with a reconditioned one for £50 by them as I drowned the original thinking it was waterproof, so it’s a non-warranty replacement. They might replace your 705 on the same basis (so you’ll have a spare) and may also help with relicensing the maps. They’re on 0808 238 0000.

As long as it has 2 wheels and powered by me. I’m happy.

😀

I’m thinking you need a PC or Mac to upload or download data from either. Android isn’t a PC operating system so dosn’t have drivers to talk to other devices such as GPSes. It’s annoying because a GPS only has a certain amount of memory and I’ve lost day 1’s data from a 5 day ride when it’s been overlaid by day 5. It would’ve been great to upload data every day to another device.

Use an iPhone, Android phone or Windows 6.5 smartphone and Memory Map. That way you have a device that can do other stuff when you’re not riding.

Using a torque wrench on every bolt would be silly, but they’re really good for getting even torque when it’s important that two or more bolts are evenly torqued. The stripped splines on lots of left hand Shimano cranks are testimony to uneven torques between the two bolts.

I don’t agree that the 370/Onyx hubs are hard to maintain. I can turn a knackered, seized, rust filled mess of a 370 into a working one with £15 of parts and one hour of work.

DT Swiss freehubs are expensive but there’s no need to replace the freehub body unless it’s deeply scored by the cassette. The needle cage costs £3.76, the pawls are £4.99 and the bearings are whatever you want to pay for them from eBay shops.

The single bearing in a 370 freehub knocks out really easily (with a socket and an old cassette for support) after removing the circlip. This is so much simpler than trying to get those double bearings out of Hope freehubs. The Hope XC freehub has the inner one held by a circlip, making the outer one a pig to remove as you cant just shove one out against the other.

The pawls aren’t in the direct line of muck if the seal fails, as they are with Hopes, but are inside the freehub body. A mighty amount of grease in there and they don’t get rusty, seize or make any noise.

Charities pay VAT. It’s something successive governments have refused to change. I work for a charity and recently discovered that if we send money to a project abroad, we’re expected to pay some VAT to UK Revenue & Customs on goods bought with it.

We were just discussing this at work and wondering if he has to give the prize money back. As pro tour teams share the spoils amongst their entire staff, everybody would have to pay a bit back.

Also, sorry if this has been posted elsewhere but here’s Andy Schleck’s response.

I run and ride, on and off road. I’d say that running is far harder than riding because you’re supporting your own weight as well as propelling yourself forward, impacting your joints and bouncing your stomach up and down, making it difficult to eat anything other than gels and sipping water. That said, I find it much easier to pace myself over a running race than I do in an MTB race as running races are held on broad courses and you can start slowly and pass people later, always keeping your heart rate below lactate threshold, which for me is in the high 160s.

In all of the MTB races I’ve done, the course was very narrow from the start and I’ve felt pressured into maintaining a fast pace early on to avoid holding up the rest of the field. I’ve had heart rates in the 170s and 180s, which is definitely a bad idea for a 3 hour race. Starting further back isn’t an option as it’s hard to work your way up the field later, when all the fast-starters are getting tired.

I’m now doing winter duathlons (off road run, MTB, off road run) as part of marathon training as they’re typically 2.5 hours long and teach the heart, lungs and energy reserves to last longer. But, because of the cycling leg, they have way less of an impact on my fragile legs than an equivalent 2.5 hour run.

Finish Line DOT5.1 brake fluid at £14.99 for 240ml.

You can get a litre of the stuff in Halfords for £12.99.

The Oxygen Challenge might be worth a look.

Certain footpaths should be re-designated but it should be reviewed on a case by case basis and not be across the board.

Tried that. Surrey CC sent me this:

Unfortunately, at this time we do not have the funds available to bring the
footpath up to standard for cyclists and other bridleway users as well as
doing the associated legal processes to change the status.

What this standard is, I’ve no idea.

As a Vito owner, I’d recommend the Transporter. The Vito engine and transmission is excellent but the bodywork is terrible. Also, check out the insurance costs before you leap in and buy a van. Very few companies will insure a van as a privately owned vehicle and the costs are huge compared with a car. My insurance is £450 fully comp or £300 TPF&T for a 45 year old with no accidents or convictions, 9 years no claims, living in SW Surrey.

You’re also required to drive at 60mph in 70 limits. Oddly, if you convert it to a motorhome (bed and cooker) you can drive the same vehicle at 70mph and the insurance is way less.

Probably temps who are there for the Christmas rush.

Halfords Professional 10 to 60NM, 3/8″ drive
Teng Tools 0 to 20NM, 1/4″ drive

I usually do most bolts by hand but use the torque wrench on stems and crank arm bolts.

One thing you’ll need to watch out for – larger size calipers (Avid Elixir 5, in my case) on 160mm rotors foul the seatstay. They make a crap swapout with the brake caliper vertically mounted but it flexes and the brake squeals like a banshee. Much better to just fit a 185mm rotor and use the standard swapout.

Please tell me you didn’t use the crappy lock attached to the seatpost in the pic?!

No, but I might as well have:

More pics[/url]

The other alternative is heat pumps. We have an air source one that removes about three degrees of heat from a ton of air it passes over an element, like an air conditioner in reverse, except that it uses the heat to heat water up to about 50 degrees. You can get ground source ones, if you have a large lawn or area of land, that do the same but from a salne solution piped throgh a sort of underfloor system in the lawn. The theory being that, even at 0 degrees C, there’s still 273 degrees of energy to take out of the ground or air.

Solar is also good if you have roof area facing the midday sun.

My advice with solar, heat pumps and biomass is to shop around. There are so many companies offering green energy solutions and have got rich quick on the back of government grants but may not offer you the best solution. Some have built up in an almost competitionless environment, so haven’t been rivalled on price or quality until recently. Ask to look at existing installations they’ve done and talk to other customers first.

Yes – that’s a lot of frame for your money and will be immense fun. I loved mine until it got half-inched. I was going to replace it with another but bought the Ti one because it came up on offer. Otherwise I would’ve bought the same again. I was going to buy a matt black one and cut On-One decals from mirrored adhesive vinyl. I thought that would look pretty cool.

Having done a bunch of enduros, hare & hounds and green laning, I’d say that off road is physical but in an utterly different way to mountain biking. Mountain biking is a lot about drive and a little about chucking the bike around. Off-road motorcycling is about standing up, moving your weight about and muscling heavy bars about.

Yes, it’s hard work to chuck the bike around on an enduro course and I’ve seen 186 on a heart rate monitor in the first lap of an enduro, but it was before I learned to ride properly and a bit of skill saves a lot of effort. My first hare and hounds was then the most strenuous thing I’d ever done – I was battered – but this was due to sitting on the seat all the way round and standing a heavy DRZ400S back on its wheels a thousand times. Watch really good riders and they seem to float over the scenery, skipping over the whoops, flicking round berms and generally conserving energy.

The DRZ was my first bike and weighed 130kg or more and I suffered with it for a year until I got a 200cc two stroke KTM. For you, I’d suggest something light, but not the lightest – the newest KTM 250 EXC-F four strokes are a few (as in 2 or 3) kilos more than the two strokes, at around 105kg but include electric start. On a two stroke, when you wrestle the bike back upright, you have to kick the crap out of it to start it up. Electric start saves you this effort but you still get a kicker if you drain the battery.

Get tuition as this will teach you to stand, put your weight forward, use the throttle selectively and drive the bike round berms and flat corners in the correct way. It will save a ton of effort if you learn this before doing any enduros. And do hare and hounds (group start, as many laps as possible in a time limit) as a taster before you try time-carded enduros (individual starts, arriving at checkpoints exactly on time, ie not late and also not early, which tighten up as the race progresses).

But I like your idea of doing an off-road school on their bikes and in their kit as a taster, first. Google the Yamaha Off Road School (Wales or the South East), Wheeldon Farm off road school in Devon (indoors as well as out – good in winter/crap weather) or Ady Smith’s KTM off road school in the Midlands (Rugeley, I think).

Good luck and have fun.

Ian

Hardfronts!

Everybody’s got rigids, full sussers or hardtails. I’m going to take a full suss frame, bang a pair of rigid forks on it and start a new niche.

Just got my calendar and ever picture is excellent apart from Knog’s again. Why are they even in that calendar? They’re a second rate manufacturer of trendy bits for commuters and city fixie riders and have nothing to do with mountain biking at all.

And, if Singletrack justify Knog’s advert, as they did last year with “They’re paying for it, they can do what they like”, then No, they aren’t paying for it – we are, as buyers of the mag, the intended audience of the other advertisers and the likely buyers of these other advertisers’ products.

Go tell Knog to take their junk and naff ads for it elsewhere.

I suffer from this. I get white fingers on a warm summer evening if I pick up a bottle of milk from the fridge. Sealskins gloves only work on warmer winter days so I tried my Hein Gericke 3-finger motorcycle gloves and found they kept me warm – too warm at times – because the fingers aren’t separated. Might be worth a try.

I really enjoyed Follow Me. I love that suspended high-wire camera stuff.

Triathlete’s World have a listings section on their website.

I always wonder how people come to the conclusion that cycling is Green. Cycling as an activity isn’t green unless you’re replacing a journey you would have made in a more environmentally impacting way. It takes a huge amount of energy to extract a metal from its ore, cast and/or machine it into a bicycle part and ship it to its future owner. Steel isn’t too bad but aluminium has to be extracted using electricity and titanium is even worse.

But nearly every part of a bike (carbon ones not included) can be recycled and, while you’re riding your bike, you’re not doing more environmentally damaging things. Although you will need to replace the calories you burn, and food production is one of the most environmentally damaging things on the planet. 😉

🙂

Engagement’s about the same as a hope but they’re way quieter. I was out running at the weekend and a Hope hubbed bike came up behind me on the trail – I heard him long before he passed me and stepped neatly aside for him.

I pack the freehubs of my 370s with grease and they’re utterly silent.

In my opinion, they’re better. Hope pawls are directly behind a seal, which inevitably leaks and the ratchet mechanism gets filled with mud. The Hope freehub also needs two bearings, which are huge, heavy and an absolute sod to replace. The DT Swiss 370 pawls are on a stub that extends inside the freehub and has a bearing on the end, so the ratchet mechanism is out of the way of mud and the single bearing in the freehub is easy to replace.

Most replacement parts are available and, though the freehubs are scary expensive, you don’t need to replace them unless they get badly scored by a cassette or until the ratchet wears out. All bearings are standard SKF part numbers so are available from a thousand different bearing suppliers on eBay.

Ian

Front hubs have very few components so it pretty much comes down to whether the hub is light and what bearings it uses. Since the bearings are toast, they’re going to be as good as whatever you buy to replace them.

I’d replace the bearings unless it’s such an ugly, heavy, nasty thing that it’s worth spending money on a new hub plus the rebuild cost.

I had the same problem, bought the pliers then saw a post on here where someone described what I and lots of others were doing wrong. Now I can unlink a chain in seconds. You just have to pinch the side plates together (across the chain) before the two link halves can be pushed together to release them.