Sometimes the old ones need airing again, just to remind us all how sophisticated we are now! 😉

I have bought more of their kit since, it is nice to know that someone out there is prepared to repair stuff rather than recommend you junk it and buy the latest model. I have bought more Arcam stuff since buying the amp and IMO the decision has been justified by their customer service… let alone the quality of the hardware.

njee you are right of course but tbh the tt on mine seems swoopier too. Mine is an XL so that may have something to do with it. Otherwise, I need to go and lie down.. it has been a long week. 🙂

Mine's a 2006 and it had the swoopier TT. Strangely I had the same colour paint as yours and it all fell off! After the first ride I had silver calves ad in no time the seat stay was bare. I had it resprayed in black and tbh it looks much nicer than the grey ever did.

I use 959s on my road bike. Never have any problems.

mudshark.. the problem with talking to a big firm like HL is you can't guarantee continuity of adviser… they do leave or get asked to leave if they don't hit their sales targets. Look for an established, local firm IMO, try and get to work with the owner/partner etc so there is a vested interest beyond the mere selling of a product.

no offence taken thepurist

I am not alone, but a high percentage of IFAs work for fees not commission. I find it works best for my clients, but not all. As I said, do some research, find a fee based advisor and go from there.

If you belong to the IFP it doesn't mean that you hold some sort of moral high ground, simply that you have passed some specific exams.

You will know soon enough if the person you are talking to is commission driven… the basic advice will be to buy investment bonds or some insurance product.

[quoteI'm a bit curious with the IFA comment. Was he actually missold something or did the investments just to perform as expected. If the former then fair enough, if the latter well poor performance can't always be attributed to the IFA. It's advice not a guarantee and probably better informed than anything anyone here will be able to give, myself included.[/quote]

The most sensible comment I have read yet. sadly, for my sins I am an IFA and I specialise in investments. When people come to me saying they have had their "fingers burned" by other IFAs it is often because they have either misunderstood the risk involved (and that includes how long the money needs to be tied up) or they have been far too greedy, gone for what they perceive to be the best deal, sometimes against advice, only to discover that their investment is more of a Townsends bike rather than a Santa Cruz. OK there are crooks and incompetents out there but IFAs are liable if they give you rubbish advice and the regulatory regime is very consumer biased. Poor advice is generally jumped on from a great height.

Tell him to have a look around, talk to a few IFAs and see if there is anyone he likes, feels confident in. Find a specialist. Negotiate a fee related deal, maybe with a performance clause in it. TBH £150k isn't that much if you want to screw an advisor down to that sort of deal but he can always walk away. The one thing I would advise is steer well clear of the banks.

IFA or financial planner – semantics.

rootes1 – Do you run the gear cable fully within an outer? Any chance of a photo of your cabling? (Yes I am a dweeb when it comes to this sort of thing!) 😳

I have it in my right knee but it only flares up if I run. It has never satisfactorily cleared up despite physio etc and I soon came to work out there was a trade off. If I ran, I couldn't walk afterwards – for maybe up to 6 hours. If I didn't run, there was no pain. "Forunately" it is a decision I don't have to make any more as I have damaged my back badly enough that running any distance causes excruciating pain in the lumbar area.

Now I just ride my bike….simples!

Not C2W scheme but I got myself the carbon team road bike. Awesome vfm, a great handling bike and accelerates like it has a 750cc engine in there. Niggles… bars are too narrow (for me) and you could lose a bit of weight off the wheels but these really are minor niggles.

I'm one of those people for whom, if they don't do everything to make something totally foolproof, find it will al go horribly and irrecoverably wrong at the worst possible moment. Bomb proof therefore…is good 🙂

So, a bog standard bash ring (to fit an XT chainset) , the n-gear thingy, 32 tooth chainring etc etc. Dim question here.. why a short age rear mech?

Thanks… moving slightly away from the OP, what ratio for the chainring? Just stick with a regular 32 tooth?

u can haz truble bro! u r pwned!

I think this means something along the lines of "you're gonna get owned with my bombers"!

bigsi….. just a whim really. If I can do it and it is simples to do… why not? It is SS atm and I like it that way but there are days when I wish I could have more gears. The ability to change personality (of the bke) seems attractive for some strange reason. 🙂

Kore also do 460mm c to c bars at about £50 so that's two products I can look at. I'll give my LBS a chance to get some for me and then look on t'interweb if they can't help!

Those 46cm Bontragers might be even better!

It really is going to have to be 440s – armpit to armpit measurement is 480mm. I just went to my local LBS and looked at a pair of FSA (compact) bars. I wasn't sure that it felt right, so we compared how they felt, where my hands rested on a bike in the shop (420mm) and then fitted the 440mm bars to the bike. There was no difference thus proving njee20's comment about different manufacturers and sizing. They will be getting some Giant bars in for me to look at (I have some Giant 440mm on my fixie and they feel much "better"). I'll try them and see what happens.

Thanks…. that's a start! 🙂

Big then basically! 440mm probably.

Oh yes, Badger lost it big time didn't he? Wot a laff! 🙂

As far as "owning with bombers" was concerned, isn't that what he claimed to do but later 'fessed up to not actually doing it? Maybe I'm wrong but I'm sure there was a twist in it somewhere.

On the countdown to 50 here. I have found that yes, stretching is important… more so now than ever before. I have found that a few hard sessions, say a week of hard work/long sessions/intervals on the turbo leave me tired for longer than say 10 years ago but I haven't slowed down that much… or maybe I'm riding more efficiently, hitting corners etc at the right speed and carrying it through rather than ragging into bends at full tilt, braking hard then sprinting out (al of the latter while i am out on the trails and not on the turbo obviously) ;o)

Exterminator – Primal Scream, playing it now!

ooh… I feel small here… a piddling (nearly) 6ft 4ins.

ATM I ride an:

XL Swift
XL Superlight (26 inch wheels)
XL Giany Bowery
XL Boardman Team Carbon

He he he!

My Berlingo has manual windows!

Feel free to come round for that retro experience if you like. I could open a theme park!

Just as I was going to get whimsical about jumpers for goalposts etc (having read Rusty Spanner's posts) I got to thinking about wendyball.

In the 1970s when I used to watch match of the day with my Dad, or we went to the local division one game, it was quite common for the players to come off at half time, having kicked a sodden, orange ball around for 45 minutes, a uniform shade of erm… mud. It was quite rare for them to have a change of strip at half time, so they all took to the field again sporting brown shirts, shorts etc. The pitch was a sea of mud and they were all knackered by the final whistle having spent the second half ankle deep in gloop. Today, when a premiership game is over, they are practically mud free, the ground still looks like a green carpet etc etc. There is an easy parallel to draw here between peeps not wanting muddy kids and the "outdoors heros" they all look up to – wendyballers, who run about in perfect conditions and maybe get a little wet and cold but never truly dirty.

(I'm not commenting about the standard of playing surface and the quality of the game – just making an muddy/clean observation.)

Maybe it is an age thing…. I ride RRs all year round as well. Does that mean oldgit and I can claim a new uber niche?

[quoteI just hope we don't end up with a BM version of the STW gestapo.[/quote]

They don't like this site then? Is it all that bad?

Strangely, I don't see it as over moderated. Maybe I miss all the fun while I'm working!

Where from?

Time to deploy the "Bombers" so we can own them!

thanks 🙂

ripping CDs.

Thetford is fally off mud.

Bike wash… yes at Bike Art.

Conditions – haven't been for a week but it was fine if you keep off the main drag.

They did my Superlight as a warranty job. Compared to the SC paint it is as tough as old boots. (The original paint rubbed off on my legs, leaving my calves with silver smears down them.)

I asked and paid for some extras such as lacquering the decals so they didn't peel off. They didn't do any of it but by the time I got the frame back I couldn't be bothered to pack it all up, post it back etc etc.

I went for the tough option as recommended when they heard it was for a mountain bike. After maybe 3 years it has plenty of dull spots, it doesn't clean up very well and is basically dull but…. the paint has stayed on, it isn't chipped and apart from one or two small "high wear" areas it has done its job.

Functionally then it is fine, aesthetically it is a little less successful. Me…. I'd o for functionality every time.

Strangely enough MikeWW I'm using a roller turbo. Don't know if these are still around but they are the bastard child of a turbo trainer and a set of rollers. Small rollers at the back and a turbo-esque frame with a fork clamp at the front. Best of both worlds IMO and there's no chance of me falling off!

Beware though… after upgrading my laptop I found out that Tacx does not like 64 bit machines and rumour has it Win 7 is a no no too. I'm playing around with a old laptop to see if I can get it on there.

crikey, you are right but the state of my health is such that if it is too cold/damp I just can't ride outside. I have been outside when the weather has permitted but if I only climbed on a bike when the weather was right, I'd hardly have been out this winter!

I'm going to plug into an amp so the Apple looks like it will work then. 🙂

crazy legs – If you think about it, the thing with pistols is that they are very easy to shoot in an unsafe manner. A small twitch can end up with the bullet ending up miles(along way) away from where you intended it to and therefore potentially put people on the range in danger Pistols are therefore best left to proficient shooters. The guys who were allowed to use them were probably among the better shooters in your group.

Oh yes, and if you haven't shot pistols before, it is very easy to make an ar$e out of yourself and it is nothing like the Hollywood bollox where you wave a pistol around and outshoot snipers at 750 yards. 🙂

CCF was introduced at my school and I was a conshie!