To chuck a spanner in the works, unless it’s a British bike manufacturer, isn’t the retailer’s contract with the importer/distributor who then has another (international) contract with the manufacturuer for the import and sale of their bikes.

Or go by train. Rail Europe can book your Eurostar to Paris and your TGV straight to Perpignan. Call, rather than book online, and they’ll book you on trains that carry bikes. They charge a tenner per bike per train, so £40 return for your bike.

If the rotors are the same size, you could also try swapping front and rear. You could also try flipping round the rear rotor and braking heavily a few times (not locking up) to smooth out some of the ripples in the rotor.

In order of nice smelliness:

1. GT85 – clear winner
2. JetA1 aviation fuel
3. Hugo Boss XY
4. Issey Miyake

Or you could get some Gaultier stuff and she’ll suspect you’re going with blokes instead. But, quite frankly, if you’ve been caught playing hide the sausage before, anything other than dressing like Compo is going to arouse suspicion.

I bought a Spesh hardtail, then a road bike then a Stumpy because of their legendary after-sales and warranty service. But I think those legends were born in pre-recession times. I still like their bikes but I will never buy a bike with Specialized’s suspension – forks or “brain” shocks – as they’re fragile.

I’ll do a couple of miles extra to spend nearly all of the route to work off road. Going home is entirely different – I’ll take up to 2.5 hours and go properly out of the way.

Crotchrocket: 2 rides old it was. A spanking new Arai. I was gutted.

Look on the bright side: I’ve bought four top of the range Arai lids and have used them on every ride but they’ve just made my head a bit heavy and have kept a bit of rain off. Yours did its job 2nd ride.

I do but I’ve got an adjustable pressure lance and I turn it down when washing around bearings. That said, every bearing on my bikes are cartridge ones (for easy replacement and better sealing) and are rammed full of lical grease (boat prop bearings use this) before installation. I strip and regrease stuff regularly, too.

I would ride just to get out there because it’s nice out at the moment (well it is around here) and just the feelgood factor of being out on a bike will boost your recovery. But pick a flattish route, keep the mileage reasonably low and don’t break a sweat. And make sure there’s someone (mate, wife, girlfriend, family member) who can be called up to give you and the bike a lift home if you feel rough mid-ride.

Call Surrey Police and ask for lost property. Stuff gets handed in to stations around the county so it’s worth a try.

Have a look at the loop of cable outer leading to the rear mech. Has the outer come out of the a ferrule and got hooked up? It makes the cable run tight way before it’s managed to pull the mech all the way up to 1st.

How nickable would a bike be without the wheels? Granted a good frame, forks and transmission are worth a lot but the thief has to sell it as a broken bike which many wouldn’t be prepared to. So why not keep the bike in the shed and the wheels in the house, under a bed or somewhere out of the way?

I pay a small fortune for food from National Trust café at Hindhead when I ride through their land on the way up there at weekends. One tea, one coffee and two cakes and you could have driven to Afan for less. 🙂

It might have been more conventional to show some concern when you were there, rather than on an internet forum.

How do you know he didn't?

They've got airbags in motorcycle leathers. Can't see why a motocross style neck brace with airbag built in wouldn't work.

The innovation I'd welcome the most is a big "Steve Peat" button in the middle of my forehead that would disable my sense of self-preservation when things got steep. I could hit the SP button and ride down stuff instead of slamming on the brakes, dismounting and carrying the bike down like the big Wendy I am.

I hope not. I'd like to think that there'll be a revolution in cheap, mass produced components in carbon like its got cheap and mass produced for frames. New processes mean that better carbon weave and carbon alternatives will make their way into bike design. Materials being developed for clothing are already generating electricity to charge personal devices like phones so you could generate electricity from fork movement or frame flex to power monitoring and management devices. How about a bike that uses GPS, wheel and gyroscopic sensors to change shock and fork travel, seat height or even frame geometry to the terrain as you ride? And smart frame materials could electrically be stiffened or relaced to vary handling and comfort. We could get bottom-bracket based transmission with an infinite range of ratios controlled by computer so that cadence remains constant whatever the gradient and however much force you pedal with.

You could even have rear proximity sensors that play the funeral march through your earphones literally seconds before you're run flat by a daft old biddy in a P-reg Peugeot 105.

Are we talking about the benefits of tubeless here or the benefits of latex solution? I've run slime filled tubes on 3 bikes for 2 years and haven't had a puncture. I know they're working because I swapped tyres that had been on the slimy tubes onto another bike and used standard tubes – the tube was riddled with punctures as soon as I inflated it from the thorns that remained in the tyre.

I've only just gone ghetto tubeless on one bike and love the lack of rolling resistance and the way the tyres seem to grip more than they did with tubes. But I didn't do it for puncture protection as I've had that for years.

I believe CRC ship them with 14mm instead of 12mm nipples. Have you allowed for this in the calculations?

When you said "bolt through axle", I was presuming you have the DT Swiss 9mm bolt-thru skewers. If they're 20mm hubs, the bearing size may be 6804-2RS but, again, check the old ones before you buy.

Possibly these, although read the small print at the bottom of the page about Stout hubs varying from year to year. They recommend getting the bearing code off the old bearing.

Try Amazon for Garmins or http://www.heartratemonitor.co.uk

41.8 x 30 x 7 45degree is the campag standard – I think they're the same bearings as BMX headsets.

You could make a killing maybe 1 or 2 days a week, parking your van outside the railway station and spannering the ride-to-the-station bikes the commuters use.

This is what I have on my 2002 Z1 Dropoff forks for Juicy 3s and a 203mm rotor.

This might help.

I'd say no as there are no threads for you to fit a standard BB.

Now, is there a tool to unclip my shoes from the pedals? 😉

Amen to that. I've read numerous posts about powerlinks literally falling apart if you had the technique but I've failed dismally to master it. Lots of other people clearly haven't got this magic knack either as Park make a tool, too.

It's worth checking your pedal bearings and that your shoe doesn't rub the crank when you're giving it the berries.

I'm sure this happens because people don't tighten the bolts correctly. You have two bolts pulling on the same bit of metal so, as you tighten one bolt up, it loosens the other one. The tight bolt acts as a pivot for flex and the loose one lets the crank arm move a little, wearing the splines on every rotation of the crank.

You have to alternate between the two bolts, tightening them up a bit at a time until they're both fully torqued. You're meant to retorque them a couple of weeks after first fitting them, too.

A lot of their staff are at Eurobike right now, so they may be a little slow in answering the phone.

I called them yesterday about carbon 456 availability. If you're waiting for one, they land 9/9/2010 in a raw state and are going off for paint and lacquer in the UK. They expect to be shipping finished frames around 10 days later.

It's statistics. Take out the failures caused by numpties, the grey area fails where someone might have done something not covered by warranty but they honoured it anyway, the failures caused by consumables (wear and tear on seals) and the failures that occurred because the owner didn't service within the service schedule and you're down to not many units. I'm still impressed with only 2 failures but out of how many units sold? Not many bikes come with OE Marzocchis and they must sell a fraction of the volume that Rock Shock or Fox shift.

I imagine the failure of my Specialized shock, even though it was clearly a warranty issue, didn't show up on their warranty stats as it occurred a month from the "one year or 150 hours, whichever is sooner". Spesh said I could send the shock for warranty work (2 weeks) by which time I'd be wanting to send it for service. So I ended up paying for an early service during which the bit that failed got replaced anyway. I bet this sort of stuff goes on a lot, too.

To summarise, don't believe stats when they appear as part of marketing bulls**t!

Can I recommend this stuff to put in the bearings. I never fit bearings now without carefully prising out one seal and hosing this Lical grease in there. It's used for boat prop and trailer bearings and so doesn't wash out if you're a bit handy with a jetwash!

Take the Inbred, before you go get a US online supplier to ship a rear wheel with Alfine hub and shifters to your wife's place, ride, bring wheel home, sell wheel on eBay for same price as you bought it for over there.

My Rockhopper frame has just gone off to BETD for the exact same reason. If your local bike shop can't rechase the threads, BETD can insert a sleeve and thread that for £45 plus postage. Their turnaround time is two to three weeks at the moment.

I jacked my Vito van up, put wood, frame, headset cup and more wood under the towbar then lowered the van slowly with the trolley jack. Worked a treat.

Stans website has the ERD of the rim. Hope's hub dimension chart (current hubs) lists the other dimensions you need. Chuck it into DT Swiss's spoke calculator and Bob is your mother's brother.

I've spent over £5000 on bikes from all three of my most local bike shops, £4000 of which was two bikes from one shop in the space of four months. I'm known by the staff of this shop and the owner has told other customers, in my presence, that people like me start off being customers and very rapidly become friends. Despite this, they've failed on both occasions when I've needed them to back me up when the manufacturer wasn't honouring warranty (and even failed to send a part off for repair until I hassled them), can't "fit me in" when I need some urgent repair work and sell me everything at the over-inflated, labelled price (most recently £30 for 36 spokes).

I'm now fairly proficient at spannering my own bikes and I've come to view a bike as a collection of consumables bolted to a frame, so it's very unlikely I'll use them again for any bike purchase. I tend to go in for manufacturers spares (mech hangers, etc), stuff I need really urgently (which is rare) and odd items of clothing that I need to try on. If I got a smidge of discount (I'm not asking them to match CRC) and a bit better service, I'd be in there all the time.

You'll need an SRAM X series rear mech to work with their X series shifters – grip or lever type. SRAM shifters work with any front mech, though.