“due to the recent spiraling costs of raw materials”?

because thats what we want to hear.

The point generally is to try and use as little steel, or any other material, as you can get away with when you make a bike. 10 kg of mixed metal is worth pretty much nowt in the scheme of things whether raw material prices are high or low. The less metal you use the more effort and cunning you need to put in to make sure it all works. And the more of the effort you make the more the cost goes up, and the more the cost goes up the, the number of buyers who are prepared to pay a premium for those values decreases, so you have to make your product viable with fewer sales – and to make that work you have to charge more.

People hate to think it, but most of what you are paying for when you buy ‘things’ is ‘people’ and ‘time’ and ‘ideas’ not ‘stuff’. The direct cost of the raw stuff, and even the direct cost of manufacture are pretty much irrelevent.

Blimey didn’t notice how long that was – if this was another popular forum I’d be apologising for ‘girth’

I used schwalbe Big Apple tyres on my last two tours and have never had a puncture with them. The only other concession I’ve made to touring is Ergon grips

Luggage/ packing /gear wise – minimalism is the trick no matter how hard you try to shave everything back you still take stuff that never gets used.

Things I’ve found useful are:

Thermarest 3/4 length camping matts.

Tents – the smallest packing tent you can find that you can comforably lie in / get in and out of, I’m a lanky **** so I actually roamed far and wide (a 400 mile round trip in the end) to find a tent shop where the tents are out on show for you to try out. It can be handy if a tent packs up short rather than thin. I’ve got a Northface Roadrunner 22 as a result, a 2 person tent that opens on both sides and in long enough for me. The biggest weight saving you can make with a cheaper tent is to replace the steel pegs with alu ones.

Flatworld / Orikaso folding plates and mugs – weightless, flat and floppy, take up no space and create no voids when you pack, and cheap as chips

A little topeak bag that attaches to the toptube / stem – keeps useful stuff like your camera to hand so you don’t have to stop and dig around for it.

The biggest capacity water bottles you can find for the bike and luggage/strapping space for an extra 2 litre shop-bought bottle on hotter days

Some kind of small bag / hippack or whatever with all your important stuff – wallet passport, etc so that you can easily take the essential stuff with you when you stop for a coffee or a look around. I use an ortleib waterproof bumbag, so not only is all the valuable stuff with me it protected if you get caught in bad weather.

The clothes you stand up in at the end of the night when its raining and a bit cold are pretty much all the clothes you’ll ever use apart from one or two changes of quick drying socks and pants. By the same measure you need to pack with enough spare space that in hot weather all those layers can be stashed away.

Those Lifeadventure compact towels are really good but pricy.I’ve used those microfibre cleaning cloths in the past, which are a bit small and a bit rough, but do exactly the same thing otherwise.

Don’t carry stocks of food with you all day or day to day. I got into the routine of striking camp in the morning and riding to the nearest town/village for breakfast, buying the food I’ll need for the duration of the ride there and buying whatever I was going to eat that night at the last place you pass through before your desination. The only thing this relies on in getting into the rhythm of shop and cafe opening times which are quite different in rural europe to what you’ll be used to here. I’ve never bothered carrying the wearwithall to make hot drinks.

Finally – i’ve alway found pillows to be a bother when camping – little stash-away camping pillows annoy me and using things like bundles of clothes don’t really do it for me either. What I did in the end was go to ikea and give all their pillows a test scrunch – bought the most scrunchable one and pack it in a spare sleeping bag compressor. ( I compress my clothes in there too) . Sleep much better for it.

I’m a big fan of using a trailer rather than panniers. Its more of an investment, but towing (the right) trailer is a measurably better than panniers. It doesn’t mean carrying more either, the trailer /bag I use is actually slightly less volume that two rear panniers. And as you’re on holiday and riding a bike is how you’ve chosen to spend it, a more enjoyable ride is money well spent in my opinion

Finally give all the gear a shakedown run or two – go for a couple of weekend rides and see what essential and whats annoying you – difficult access to your gear, things not staying put – and figure out the solutions before you make the big trip.

I’ve been with greenflag for a couple of years – interestingly, compared to others they tailor your cover and give a price to suit, its a bit like getting a regular insurance quote, we are getting a very good price for two ‘named’ vehicles and two drivers on one policy.

I think you might be able to get T-Mobile to unlock it for you, might be wrong though – see here[/url]

All may favorite glasgow pubs are down dark alleys

Sloans in Glasgow city centre – a bolt hole for when you decide to throw the towel in and can’t be bothered with the shops. Great on a saturday afternoons when the place of full of shopping and people who’ve given up and decided to relax instead.

also in Glasgow The Horseshoe bar on a weekday lunchtime.

The Market Bar in Inverness, I don’t like the place much, but it doesn’t matter where a night out starts, it always ends there.

The Crown Inn, Churchill, Somerset. When civilisation ends, after the bit where there is death, disease, violence and the destruction of all the mechanisms of modern life, the dust will settle, those that are left will pick themselves up and dust themselves off, start life afresh and all pubs will be like the Crown Inn.

I have a tourettes-like compulsive twitch that makes me violently punch platform pedal pins whenever I have to fit, adjust or remove anything around the cranks. A special favorite is, with the chain off, somehow whacking my knuckles off the pedal then have the cranks spin and the same pedal smack me in the leg. Add cold gritty mud into the equation ….. loving it

you’d better start putting aside 14p a month to save up for your next one then 🙂

Where retests would get interesting is that most people driving today took a much less involving test in order to be licensed to drive a much wider range of vehicles than anyone who took their test in the last ten years or so

By the same measure do you apply the same standards to incoming residents as for new UK drivers? In that case they’d be taking a more stringent test than the majority of UK drivers have taken themselves.

So what standards do you retest to and what entitlements do you retain? Do we all loose entitlement to tow trailer and drive 7.5tonners until we take a specific test to earn that right back? There may well still be motorists on the road who have a license but never took a test as they used to be issued to army personnel back in the day.

whoop! blessed be the man who never deletes his emails

I sourced the hooks and rails and other fancy gubbins from here

http://artestuff.com/

But because I used miles of cable (I think where was a couple of hundred pictures to hang) I got my cables from here – http://www.zincomids.co.uk/home.asp

The mix and match approach might not work as well for you though

Talk to your local picture framer, they might have something. I think the challenge is to find away of blending a sharp, modern system with the hooks that hang over trad picture rails, as the those hooks tend to look a bit quaint. You could maybe fix a more contemporary hanging rail along the bottom edge of the existing picture rail so that you don’t have a funny clash of old and new.

I’m wracking my brains as I’ve had to source stuff in the past and i forget where from now, can work out pretty pricy, but once you find the right sources it gets cheaper.

Can I just add – when I was at school – the nearest we got to anything like this was making a coathook. 2 Pieces of metal, one square, one shaped like a lollypop stick. Bend the stick shaped bit and rivet it to the square.

But… is the square really square? Most people never got beyond the square bit. File file file -give it to the teacher to check. No file file file – check. No. file file file file file file file file file no no no no no no no no

After five years there was only me and another guy who had a finished coat hook, some people were still filing a piece of metal smaller and smaller. Legend has it there was a next ‘thing’ we could have made – a candle stick. But I would still be making it now at that rate.

When I went to university I proudly screwed my 5-year precision-made coathook to the door of my digs and when I moved out I forget to take it. If anyone in Birmingham is passing an old shop at 422 Ladypool Road could you give them a knock and ask for it back? Its screwed to the back of the door at the back of the shop, or at least it was in 1994. Its got my initials stamps on the back.

Will pay postage.

While fibreglass/ carbon fibre would be fun they are not the kind of materials you’re likely to get to play with very easily in school environment and they are pretty hazardous materials.

You can use fairly bog standard steel if you’re not worried about weight. Its a lot more readily available, cheaper and gives you the chance to experiment and make mistakes without running up big bills, and I’d expect the school would have all the equipment you need sitting there. If you want to learn about and develop a frame design, or even demonstrate something about the geometry then maybe you would make two or three frames.

Slotted dropouts will be the easiest bit, just jigsaw them out of flat plate. I would buy head tube and BB as these need to intersect with bought components so they need to be just so. Beyond that so long as the bike fits you, or at least so long as it isn’t far too big and the geometry is broadly in the right range (keeping in mind there are only a few degrees difference between the extremes of mountain bike geometry), then all should be good.

You want assurance that the welds/brazes are good, otherwise so long as the headtube and rear axel are in good alignment the rest should just follow, even if it ends up a bit wonky it will all still work.

The time consuming bit will be preparing the ends of the tubes – cutting the ends of the tubes so they meet at the correct angles and follow the profile of the tube they join too. Try tracing the line of the weld around where you seat tube meets your top tube onto a flat piece of paper – quite a wavy line – now look at all the tubes that meet the bottom bracket – they all need to do that.

Somewhere theres a piece of software that you can use to design a frame – put in all the sizes and angles – and from that it prints out paper templates that you can then wrap around the tubes that map out the cuts you need to make. If you’re school as the kit and the skills then you can achieve the same result with a pillar drill and a hole saw, so long as you can get the tubes clamped and supported safely at the correct angles.

If thats all a bit too labour intensive you can look at lugged and brazed frames, old school but a perfectly legit way of putting a frame together. In this case you are buying all the lugs where the joints in the frames are and buying tubes that are sized to match. It like putting together a (very elegant) piece of mechano, but the end result and the decisions about geometry will be the same.

Nick in my workshop* put this prototype together with a tube-notcher (you can get a similar result with a pillar drill and a holesaw and some careful clamping) and a tube bender. Admittedly he is an engineer, but he’d never built a bike before and it all worked out first time.

*actually its his workshop, I just take up all the space

If its on a conveyer belt then it must still be in the factory, so its not finished yet. It will fly, but not yet. Patience is whats required

I can’t remember now, lots of stuff. Have a look at the lost webite (just google lost) I think I remember there being catchup episodes you can download, but I might have dreamt it. Also they have a brief synopsis of each episode so you can get all the key events and chronolgy.

What Lost does very well though is bring you up to speed on all the pertinent histories at the beginning of each episode and especially at the beginning of each series, so just dive in an watch them

TJ its not just the speed, doesn’t it have to be pedaled to be legal too?

Don’t bet on me, I never win anything

Is that the winning slogan?

Dammit, I’ve only just got used to writing ‘rat’ on my cheques!

Also, at interview, bring a pack of chocolate hob knobs and offer them around.

Don’t offer them round, unwrap them them, stack them on the table and toy with them the same way a high rolling poker player plays with his chips. You’ve got the biscuits, what have they got to bring to the table? Eh?

the horror!

check out CKD Galbraith – just about to move into a place in Ayrshire with them – 6 months contract then it just goes to month to month. An upfront fee for credit checks and a fairly hefty deposit, but after that no more nonsense. If you are somewhere fairly rural look out for houses that a part of big posh estates – usually good value because they we’re bought and paid for generations ago, and the toffs that own them just want to get people in and keep them in, and you do that by offering them at under market price. I’m moving to a 3 bed coach house in the grounds of a castle and its cheaper then my pokey* 1 bed flat in glasgow

You can usually expect unfurnished properties to have good tenent friendly terms as offering a property unfurnished is a good way of attracting tenents who’ll stay put for a while.

* by pokey i mean I can’t stand up straight in the kitchen!

prepare to be trampled in the rush!

If you ask the agency to put you in touch with the landlord they are, I believe, obliged to do so.

Different agencies seem to have different philosphies/business models, I’ve been with some work on the basis that they want to get tenants in and keep them in and have a little contact or involvement with them as possible unless you need them. Others seem to have a business model that thrives on high turnover – fixed term contracts which can only follow on with another fixed term contract with each renewal incurring an arrangement fee, rents which automatically increase with each year of occupancy regardless of the market and a general sense of invasive meddling.

I moved into a lovely flat managed by countrywide. They were unbearable. Moved straight back out after 6 months and when I did pretty much every one of their flats that we’d seen when we moved in came back on the market as well. I feel sorry for any of owners of the flats they manage, they must loose one months rent in every seven. At the same time much the same experience as yours a pantomime of being vigilant and officious (bottles of cordial in the cupboards were on the inventory ffs!) but utterly lax whenever anything needed doing.

What I resent most was being denied the sense of the house you are renting being your home, with them clucking around it made living there feel like an exam.

when you rent a house you don’t just get the building, you get the right to peace and privacy.

I’ve now made it part of the house hunting process to interview the agency.

Ben from Kinetics would be the best person to speak to.

He used to be a top-charting poster on here

I think the EBC one and the other can’t-believe-its-not-a-BOB trailers are all the same, they’re knock-off BOBs that have been touted by their manufacturer for quite a while, long before EBC started selling them, the company just makes them and sticks whatever stickers they are asked to on them.

If the EBC isn’t one of those trailers then it looks a lot like them.

or if she is looking for sex-pest-chic

There are those segway things too,

Mind you ‘segway’ also brings up this image on Google

Its for rent, not for sale – see my link above.

cheaper[/url]

I’ve always been a bit wary of the drill powered pumps, 240v drills aren’t rated for using anywhere where there is water splashing about. A submersible will be a lot quieter too.

Read the ‘trailer science’ section on the carryfreedom site. The choice really is between 2 wheel trailers and 1 wheel trailers. 2 wheels are much more efficient than 1 wheel trailers. One wheel trailers handle better off road but you’ve only really got a fraction of the benefit of using a trailer, as although the weight sits on trailer its is still being balanced by the rider and a surprising amount of effort goes into that. A two wheel trailer doesn’t influence the balance of the bike and you can pretty much forget that its there. You can carry more for the same rider input with a 2 wheel trailer.

Where I’ve really found 2 wheel trailers to benefit is when they are off the bike – if you are using trains and planes to get to and fro from your ride then 2 wheel trailers can be wheeled around like a cart, keeping one hand free to handle bikes or bags or whatever. Single wheel trailers are more of a handful.

Did mine a week or two ago, online for the first time. Nice and easy but almost swallowed my tongue when it came up with the final bill. Once I came back from an urgent and quite prolonged ‘comfort break’ I realised the figure included the payments on account for next year but hadn’t knocked off the payments on account for this year that have already been made. So the figure in the screen was actually more than double what I’m actually due to pay.

You’re clear about when you are doing it and why. You’re are getting married for your own reasons and the time and place is about your dad, so really its his party too. State that and things should settle.

You’re only planning to get married once but you don’t need to have one party. My brother had a wedding with two receptions – months apart and in different cities. His wife’s parents have split up and it wasn’t possible to have a do where both of them would come, so her mum was at the wedding and her dad at the second party.

The second party was also held further south as the Bride and Groom live in Glasgow but a lot of the extended family are from the south coast, and the older the relatives the further they had to travel, so the second do was planned for easier and shorter travel times for those folks.

One thing they did to deflect any concerns over marked absences was they didn’t have any of the traditional roles, her dad couldn’t be there to give the bride away so there we’re non of those roles – no best man, no bridesmaids. If there were jobs to done they were given to people who could do them well, so my dad was ‘Speech Man’ because he’s a one-man public address system.

I think if you’re relatives are anxious about people who are not invited its probably more about their own worries about drifting apart from their wider family. Some people only meet their family at weddings and funerals so they’re a big deal. At my friends wedding recently there was a bit of an emotional moment when he realised that he was in the same room as his two brothers and ‘nobody had died’.

If thats their worry maybe as a family you need to conspire to get together more often. Every now and then my folks throw a party that for all the world looks like a wedding reception – generations of friends and family, meals, free bar, a good band the whole shebang. For no reason or occasion other than to get everyone in one room.

And when I was very young we had an adopted farm cat that would go out on massacre missions and in the morning we’d find his ‘tally’ neatly arranged in rows on the doormat, is size order – shrews and mice at one end, ducks and crows at the other.

When my old cat was getting up in years he used to proudly strut in showing off what he’d just ‘caught’. Sadly it was always something that hadn’t required a lot of ‘catching’ as it would be long, long dead. Usually pulsating with maggots and composed mostly of stinking grey zombie flesh.

In the summer if I slept with the window open he’d bring in his catch and gently place it on my pillow while I slept.

9 years together.

in all the shock and confusion – 9 years is a pretty sizable measure of your worth. If you were worthless you wouldn’t be able to measure anything in years.

A lot of charitable / social sector jobs are also advertised in the big issue. Charities can be quite like any other type of employment in the sense that they are organisations needing to be managed or administered. But, depending on the cause, there is also front line work to be done and that can be quite unlike any other kind of job.

My girlfriend used to work with children in crisis, that could mean ‘activities’ and other diversions and it could mean the only friendly face while the police are lifting the floorboards trying to find your mother.

At that end of the charitable sector it can be a tough ride. Deep despairing depths and catch-22 decisions where the only results for the the kid are a rock or a hard place. But those are balanced elating highs – really knowing someone means you can really help them, and really helping people brings reward beyond comparison.

It became a big part of her work to shock service providers into realising just how much their actions effect people for better and worse and to feel failure and to feel success. I think most peoples lives and work are limited by having no real sensation or measure of success. If they had it they’d succeed all the time.

I spent 4 days working with her and it was barely a taste, and it wasn’t at the rough end of the spectrum of her work at all, but it was the most satisfying and most human experience I’ve ever had.

You are just too late to rent this one

The phrase ‘2 is less than one’ brings up 22,300 hits on google

The last ‘Tell me something I don’t know’ thread was a rhetorical question.