Yep they are one of if not the biggest camera equipment suppliers in the uk, bought up a couple of other companies- including pro shops like fixation in London, but didn’t destroy those businesses but continued their services to people they are aimed at. I’ve bought stuff new and 2nd hand from them for my work (I’m a photographer), can’t fault them.

Iain m Banks’ works are brilliant. Have you looked at some of his other not so sci-fi works? Check out transitions, a good read and fun concept, and since it’s by him the execution of the story is the familiar style of his culture and space based spin-offs. Sort of sci-fi but not the space bound sort.
Of similar vein I highly recommend works by Claire North, start with ‘the first 15 lives of Harry August’, I went on to read ‘touch’ and have a few more lined up. Engaging stories and in the realm of sci-fi.
If you want a touch of realism in your space opera find the Martian by Andy Weir (they made a Matt Damon film based on it). Enjoyed the book. One step on and I’m reading ‘an astronauts guide to life on earth’ by Chris Hadfield, and have another ‘Endurance’ by Scott Kelly lined up…
For a laugh read ‘ready player one’

Cheers for that, I believe I’ve found the right parts for the rest of the procedure too.
Just wondering, is there’s any merit to moving to the external type over the one that’s died…?

I’m up the north end, trails v dry at the moment all the way through to triscombe. Most places dry including those last to dry-first to fill puddles. Some areas where things all come together like crowcombe gate get muddy what ever at the slightest drop but elsewhere decent enough.
Lots of overgrown braken about though, some of the runs down to holford vegetation fairly much head height!
Quantocks generally drain v rapidly, I’ve been out the day after rain and it’s all dust and rocks everywhere. At the moment Tuesday looks pretty decent on the wether front. It said it would rain today but got nothing…

Hahaha! Can’t believe someone would actually ask about this. Oh well…

Yep. run these, work well. Mine is a 120mm xc/trail type set up and no complaints using them on this after some much lower profile styled treads. Lots of grip, push them hard and you’ll find the edge of what they can do…
edit: they’re pretty light too all things considered so can’t really lose.

I got rid of mine for hope’s but hey…I think the general concensus here is just get rid of them 🙂

get a 3 series touring, can probably pick up a decent 320d or 318d for not too much from a decent dealer. Tons of space, zippy and doesn’t knacker you whilst doing the miles…get something that’s sensible not a hairdryer burning fuel like a mad thing. Look after it and at the end of it you could probably sell it on and come out of it pretty well too!

nope. 3 pages in, still don’t get it. Just shut the hell up and sodding ride.

..I’m sure there’s some sort of bike forum spike on summer wet days like it is today…

as above, used snowcard for both summer and winter. level of cover pretty good, never had to use them personally but reports are they do the right thing when needed and don’t leave you hanging like some…

Cheers for all the feedback chaps. Sounds like the usual ‘keep an eye on moving/sliding parts and clean as necessary’…now, just have to choose the right one of the variants, LEV, LEV DX…
Decent exchange rate on the euro at the moment (thinking bike-discount). Southpaw over looks like so much more sense than the stock one, I’m assuming it’s easy to swap out old for new…

there’s hardly any trails on the OS map…best way is enter Leigh woods from North road and follow the trails in there. Some are marked…quite a few are not.

lets face it, Bristol is awesome for biking

I think that 1 South West site is no longer being managed. Their map section doesn’t work and going by their twitter account there’s been no posts since March 2014… shame, seems like a good idea.

sounds good, big grey clouds moving through at the moment…rain on the way? It’s still pretty warm out though. Have fun! 🙂

There used to be a pump track under the high rise section down by the river near the big red brick buildings…unless it’s not there any more, it’s been a while…

Cool, I’ll check those out, thanks!

7 weeks from getting married?! Ha! Me too and I’ve been getting out most evenings for a couple hours at a time! You’re doing it all wrong…
(I may be missing something here but hey, loving out on the trails!)

As for bristol, trails link up well from Leigh, 50 acres, Ashton court – and further afield if you explore enough. Used to do a decent loop after work in the days when I lived in clifton. Hop over the bridge, awesome trails, done. There’s a trail building group that head out around Leigh/Ashton court, worth joining. Also singletrack reporter at large Barney used to be part of the group and we’d all go exploring round the local trails. You really have a lot on the doorstep in bristol.

As others mentioned its easy to get to Wales for a big more big hill action or head South for exmoor, Dartmoor etc. I’m currently on the quantock hills, they’re bone dry. Lots of loose stones about making some patches a bit hairy at speed – and someone’s been busy building some huge kickers on a trail running down off the top into holford – wasn’t expecting it and went flying. Landed it but was a bit nuts. Quantocks are a bit of a hidden gem, people always shoot by on their way to exmoor and Dartmoor but worth checking out. Triscombe has some DH tracks and was the site of an endure even recently…

but it may not be that they want to stop ALL access, just bikes. but thanks to their actions it could cause that particular route to be barred indefinitely…

I’ve met a 5mm steel cable on a run down a trail in the alps…luckily for me it wasn’t serious as someone had placed it just after a bend, by pure chance I’d slowed to check out the view and watch my line before starting to get going again and – twang! thing was properly fixed.
Tell the police out there and it’s treated very seriously and actively. If I recall they have caught a few people and banged them up.

All these stories make for sad reading. There’s obviously a very twisted group of self-righteous, lonely and grumpy arses out there with nothing better to do than attempt to harm others because their own lives are so pitifully dire.

a stumping instead?

grim stuff.

Its hard to trace the perpetrators of these sort of ‘death traps’ as they probably do it at times they know no one would be about, certainly it probably only takes seconds to set one up and then you’re out of there before anyone realises.
There’s clearly no doubt about the intent behind them; to cause injury – and serious ones at that.
I hope someone does catch one at it and thoroughly rinses them (through the correct legal channels…) as an example for all to see.

Slap on some stupidly extra wide bars and sing ride of the valkyries and head down at peak-rambler time… 😉

in direct answer to the OP, yes probably. not just a fitness aspect to it but as many point out there are many psychological benefits to it all as well.
I used to row a lot, trained twice a day 6 days a week…not done that for a few years now and fitness levels certainly not what they were but I can still head out for a couple of hours and not worry about it. it’s not doing any harm whilst not being part of a regime but the overwhelming result is I feel so much better for having got out on the trails to decompress.
So, unless some berk drives over you or you manage to pitch yourself off into some nettles/brambles/other unpleasant demise…I’d say rides do you some good. Yes. 🙂

valid points. I think it’s a bit easier on an HT as the chain stay length doesn’t change…on most fs it does change a bit as travel goes up/down…

went out the other evening for a gentle ride, first time on the bike since a car crash the other week (car got wrecked by someone pulling out at a junction…grrr!)
Fair to say I returned home feeling so much happier, even if it wasn’t as long as I’d have hoped it was great to just get out in the sun and cruise along the trails. The way I see it having crap winters makes the summers just that bit more awesome…
It’s hard to come home from a ride unhappy.

Ha! I caught this as it broke the other day on twitter via a friend in the area. It’s an interesting – yet unwitting – exercise in how to anger a group of people and receive attacks from pretty much all angles when you have so much of a presence on the web, not just personal but professional too.
When the trip advisor reviews started to trickle in (I only saw two or three, not many had appeared when I saw it first) it was a bit of a laugh, then someone’s rather disturbing detective work on his twitter feed revealed another little fellow…erm…that perhaps no one wanted to know about, though as many have attested as explanation of his outburst etc.
It made be wonder how it managed to escalate quite so much. We’ve all seen these road-rage car v bike go-pro videos but I don’t think any have really spread like this one. Cyclists cover a broad spectrum, from the casual day-tripper, the daily commuter, the road warrior (and off-road warrior!) and beyond so many people ride bikes and understand the vulnerabilities when riding through traffic. It’s bad enough with cars zipping past with just a few inches (if you’re lucky) to spare, that the chap actually got out of his car after pushing a cyclist into the curb instantly gave everyone a face, an identity with which to vent their angst and frustrations of poor driving – even though they themselves were not the recipients at the time – and so the backlash began. No driver can honestly defend him for his driving and getting out of the car aggressively, no one would defend the cyclist for his poor choice of words but the fact remains. It seems this chap was in the wrong place at the wrong time, I’m not defending his actions at all but the way the [online] crowds/mob? took it and ran with it was at once impressive as it was alarming.

as far as social experiments go it’s quite an eye-opener! basically don’t be a dick, and don’t get filmed being a dick. otherwise someone might find a photo of your…well, you know.

how do you prevent someone smashing through a – once thought sturdy – wall?! build a steel cage within it?

Thats rather sad to see…looks like they knew what they were after and how to get it. Must have taken quite a bit of hardware to cut through all that

Toothpaste.

Honestly it works. Mine was doing the same, smear a bit on the tube – done. Carbon pastes tend to have small bits of grit in them designed to provide biting grip but these can cause wear and pitting on carbon components under constant load.

Toothpaste does the job for nothing (assuming you brush regularly and have a supply handy)

if you don’t like it a bit of water washes it off – no need for degreaser

interesting thread. After being in a recent car crash (no real serious injuries, just smacked about a bit with various aches to get through) it got me wondering about body armour etc.
I’ve never ridden with knee pads – even out in the alps never had them, just made sure I didn’t ever fall off! I tend to fall in the ride-all-day-but-fast/xc category rather than the fad of ‘enduro’ which seems more downhill than actually follow it’s prescribed name of ‘endurance’ oddly. Still, assuming they’re a good idea – and recognising LBS’s tend not to stock huge ranges (just one or two makes) which are the decent lightweight ones – rather than the iron-man-bulletproof-exoskeleton ones worth checking out? Er-ing towards them maybe being a good idea as I hit some of the downhill trails pretty hard, bit of scrape protection for that one time I dismount probably would’t go amiss!

Put it this way, you can’t smoothly reduce something shot at 25fps to become slow mo at 25fps playback because the frames simply don’t exist. stick with 50fps and you’ve got the option.

i’d go with 1080p at 50fps (or 60 if it’s NTSC) and then you have the option of slightly smoother video and ability to reduce its speed by half and have some slow mo.
the 2.7K is an option for allowing you to zoom in and steady the shot very well, just be sure you have software that can handle the larger frame size – it’s becoming more the norm so you should be ok with most major software types. The downside with this is the hero3’s larger K frame rates are very slow. I wouldn’t choose these myself because of this, preferring the 1080/50fps option over anything else.
For battery saving I’d say turn off the wifi for starters and then run a test on that, and make sure you fully charge the battery all the way… 😉

Sounds fun. A link or a map would be awesome, cheers! 🙂

No idea on the rs stuff but to fox are dead esay to strip, clean and go again. As usual take your time, prepare kit beforehand and you can’t go too wrong. I took apart my 2002 fox f80’s today, not serviced them in a about 3-4 years expecting oil to come out black (did a fair bit of riding through London with skinny wheels on in the interim, even a 100km charity ride through town) oil came out clean as a whistle. So I just refreshed the oil, cleaned everything up, popped them back on the bike and they run sweet as ever!

Well if you find any do share, there must be enough round here that hit those trails…

how about a 100mm HT? just stretched it’s travel from 80mm today…it’s an old fox fork before they had the spacer inserts, had to do hammer out a pin and everything. Feeling smug about it 🙂
(oil everywhere but by the end of it I’d managed to get the right amount back in and they’re working awesome!)
I’ve got a 120 full sus as well which might be more appropriate but I definitely lean towards the more XC than DH side of all-day riding/enduro…though I gather in today’s vernacular enduro means full-face and 27.5 with 10-inches front and back.
my usual route to Triscombe is climb straight up from Bicknoller and then head along the top. great trail with epic views. Think I will have to save myself for when I reach triscombe next time and spend an afternoon exploring there. Energy bars and cake in the pack me thinks…

Just found this – bit late but hey ho. I ride a fair bit on the quantocks – it’s awesome cause it always seems dry, or dries out rather quickly, and no one ever seems to go there…I’ve hardly seen anyone there in the past 10 odd yrs I’ve been hitting the trails there. I tend to stick to the west quantoxhead end. Not ventured over to exmoor but sounds like I’ll have to! is there a loop/route somewhere to look at for an idea?

Sounds like I might have to go explore triscombe then…I’m assuming there are also non-crazy but still fun trails through the woods there i.e. not huge abyss-like gaps

intersting. the different strap – harness v regular straps – is a clever idea. perhaps more stable for certain body shapes/sizes maybe.
As for back protection, the general impression I get is if you’ve got a water bladder in there that seems to give a decent bit of padding if you bump it, large hits will never come off well unless you’ve got kevlar or something in there! – but the addition of what’s there can’t be a bad thing.
Interesting pack.