reports were written years ago recommending a review and if necessary overhaul of the legislation as it is according to the ‘experts’ not fit for purpose.

If by reports you mean coroners’ reports, such as that for Lakanal House, bear in mind that a coroner is not an expert. They may have heard from some experts during the inquest, but it is unlikely that someone who is most likely a solicitor by profession is somehow going to see where everyone else has been going wrong and what needs to be done.

The reality is that there are lots of ‘experts’ and they do not all agree. Moreover, with something like fire safety which is so multi-disciplinary, no one expert or group of experts has all the answers.

High rise fires have been a major concern for the whole global fire safety industry for many years, and it takes time for knowledge and experience between different experts and different countries to be shared and discussed, and hopefully to reach a consensus and for optimal solutions to be identified.

Unfortunately, most advancement in fire safety is reactive, and it often takes a major fire, or even several major fires, including loss of life, before there is a general consensus of understanding about what all the underlying causes were and what the best solutions are.

Any review in the UK will probably not be carried out by government officials, but will instead be undertaken by an organistation like the BRE, and it it will probably take a lot of preparation by them to identify the right people to participate, for those people all to be available at the same time, and to establish the right extent of scope. If it were clear that there was still a lot of uncertainty in the fire safety industry about the precise nature of the problems and a lot of disagreement about the solutions, it would not surprise me if the organisation charged with undertaking the review suggested to the minister that it be delayed until there was more consensus. The ministers themselves are not experts, and they are largely dependent upon the advice given to them (with the exception of Michael Gove, who has had enough of experts).

Moreover, I suspect that the sheer scale of loss of like at Grenfell Tower will result in changes which simply would not have been considered if the review had been undertaken earlier. Sadly that is the reactive nature of safety legislation: the nature and extent of risk is often not apparent until some people die, and constantly evolving technology, construction methods and other changes in how we live mean that fire safety is also constantly evolving and changing.

We’ve come a long way since the 1979 Woolworth fire in Manchester, when employees died because the instructions in a fire were to firstly to empty the tills in case the money were stolen, and they were then trapped on the upper floors with iron bars on windows preventing fire fighters reaching them, but this is a never ending process.

A final point about sprinklers. As I have said, the majority of sprinkler systems in the UK are property protection systems and were not installed to protect lives. A very significant number of those systems will fail due to incorrect design, specification, changes to the occupation of the building, or inadequate maintenance. Because fires are relatively rare, many owners and occupiers of buildings with sprinklers and many sprinkler companies do not get caught out by these defective systems. If we take a knee jerk reponse to Grenfell Tower and require that a very large number of sprinkler systems are installed in flats, and rely heavily on sprinklers over all other forms of fire protection and fire safety, we may well find in 10 or 20 years that we have a large legacy problem of lots of buildings where we cannot adequately rely on the sprinkler system.

Former housing minister Brandon Lewis told MP’s 2 years ago “We believe it is the responsibility of the fire industry rather than the government, to market fire sprinkler systems effectively and to encourage their wider installation”

That right there is the Tory ideology.

The market and the profit motive fixes everything.

The government shouldn’t hinder the market by putting red tape in the way.

This is a flawed understanding (not that I would dispute firestarter’s comment that Brandon Lewis is a bit of a ****.)

The sprinkler industry would love the government to legislate requiring sprinklers to be installed in more buildings. It’s precisely the sort of competitive advantage every business would like. By way of analogy, it’s a bit like cycle helmet manufacturers wanting governments to pass laws making helmets compulsory for all cyclists, and I think most of us are aware of the flaws in that approach. Ironically, passing legislation that favours a particular business sector is exactly the sort of thing that the Conservatives tend to be accused of.

The reason not to require that more buildings have sprinklers by law, and to say it is up to the sprinkler industry to make that case themselves, is that like most safety legislation, our fire safety legislation is goal based. This means that instead of having laws that prescribe exactly what fire protection measures are in place in any given building, the legislation requires suitable means for warning of fire, detecting fire, suitable means of escape, adequate fire resistance in the construction etc. etc. Official guidance is given on what is suitable or adequate in various codes of practice, including Approved Document B of the Building Regs for England and Wales. This goal based approach allows for changes in technology and the state of knowledge to be taken into account: the problem with prescriptive approaches is that it is impractical to keep updating the legislation as and when new technology appears and evolves. Sprinkler system technology itself is constantly developing and evolving, and not all systems are equal or as good as one another.

Sprinklers are not the be and end all of fire safety. It is perfectly possible to design buildings that are safe without sprinklers, and it is also possible to have buildings with sprinkler systems in them which are inherently unsafe. Most of the sprinkler systems in the UK are property protection systems, i.e. installed to prevent loss of the building and its contents, rather than life safety systems. When sprinklers are installed to protect life, there is often a trade off, and Approved Document B and recognised fire safety engineering principles allow for this, e.g. reducing the fire resistance of walls and floors or permitting bigger compartments because sprinklers have been installed.

If prescriptive legislation is passed making sprinklers a requirement in buildings where the same or better levels of fire safety can be achieved by other means, especially less expensive or even more reliable alternatives, then that is not making things better.

Flogging my cycle helmet analogy to death, spending lots of money and resources on making everyone wear a helmet, may deliver a worse result than other measures such as road safety campaigns, better design of roads and cycle lanes etc.

I thought Viking were the least expensive supplier of 3M tape, including the 3M8671HS version recommended for use on bikes.

What I don’t get is the cladding would burn very quickly as it doesn’t have huge mass like wood…As the insulation is a plastic I would also expect it to burn at quite a low temperature on the outside of the building.

Plastic releases far more heat energy when it burns than wood (think about it – it’s a product of the petroleum industry: your car isn’t powered by wood but by a petroleum derivative). If you turn it into an expanded plastic foam containing lots of air bubbles you have the perfect combination of a fuel source and oxygen, with the maximum surface area of plastic exposed to air inside the foam. If the fire is outside the building it will continue to have a ready source of oxygen, and if it’s in a flue created by an air gap between cladding and the building, it will draw air in and the heat from the fire lower down the building will be drawn up the flue very quickly, heat up the insulation material etc. higher up the building, and so rapidly increase the rate at which fire spreads up the side of the building.

If it is a concrete building with cladding on the outside, how come the inside burnt so badly, concrete doesn’t burn.

Take a look around you: our homes are full of combustible material, especially plastic. Your upholstered furniture may be made with fire retardant synthetic fabrics and plastic foam, but fire retardant does not mean non-combustible: it takes longer to ignite and saves lives being lost as a result of careless dispoal of cigarette ends etc., but when it is involved in a major fire like yesterday, it burns as fiercely as non-fire retardant plastic.

Essentially they are saying that the material likely used can’t propagate a fire unless it has frequent penetrations. Which it most likely will do for vents etc. They’re saying it’s been a big area of concern for them but has not been addressed adequately in the regs.

They are referring to External Thermal Insulated Cladding Systems (ETICS) or External Insulated Finishing Systems (EIFS), which is an insulation material affixed to the wall, like polystyrene or mineral wool, covered by a thin render, which is probably the system used on the Royston flats that perchypanther describes above. These systems are much more common in some other countries than the UK, e.g. Germany and the USA. Where the insulation is highly combustible like polystyrene, then as the FPA say, vents through the cladding or damage/deterioration of the render as a result of wear, tear and aging, exposing the polystyrene, increase the risk. In reality you cannot design out such penetrations or the risk of the polystyrene being exposed as a result of deterioration of/damage to the render, so you have to install horizontal fire barriers of mineral wool or similar at every floor level to interrupt the polystyrene, or (as most people in the fire safety industry would much prefer) use mineral wool as the insulation rather than polystyrene. At the end of the day, all products have their advantages and disadvantages, and there are some applications where the properties of polystyrene (or other expanded plastics) make it the best choice. It’s not as simple as just saying polystyrene bad, mineral wool good.

The system at Grenfell Tower does not appear to have been an EIFS system or to have used polystyrene. Apparently it was an ACM cladding system, and the reports are saying that the cladding was not a single metal skin, but was a composite panel with a polyethylene insulation sandwiched between an inner and outer metal skin. A photograph in a newsletter I linked to above also shows a foil faced polyisocyanurate/polyurethane insulation board being affixed to the concrete walls, which was then presumably covered with the cladding panels, possibly with an air gap in between.

We don’t know the precise mechanisms that were at work in the fire on the outside of the building, i.e. was it the inner combustible polyethylene core of the panels that was the major factor, or did the the air gap (flue) cause the foil faced panels to burn much more quickly and intensely than they normally ever would, or was it some other particular combination of materials and circumstances surounding their installation.

I am slightly surprised that a polyethylene composite panel may have been used at Grenfell Tower: most composite panels in the UK have polyisocyanurate foam cores, and most of those will have passed a large scale fire test (‘LPCB Approved’), which is far more demanding than the BS476 surface spread of flame test that is all that is required by Building Regs. The LPCB test came about as a result of a large number of fires in the 1980s and 1990s involving composite panels. Insurance companies will expect any new building to use LPCB Approved panels as a matter of routine, and I think all the composite panels made by Kingspan for example are LPCB Approved. According to Newsnight, the panels were made by a French company, but I would not read anything into that for the moment: a lot of the panels used in the UK are manufactured by non-UK companies and undergo LPCB testing, and conversely Kingspan panels are widely used in Europe.

Not arguing that point, the point is whether the materials used are appropriate, which in turns asks both whether they are approved but also if that approval is appropriate. And the experts (whoops, we love them!) on the radio I heard last night were saying that the review process to evaluate that had passed through 3 minister’s hands now and was still being avoided.

That is IMHO criminal.

To call it ‘criminal’ without waiting for an inquiry and giving the ministers and the department an opportunity to explain why things have been delayed, is again lazy emotive and simplistic – it’s the same sort of knee jerk outrage that makes it possible for the likes of the Daily Mail to continue to stay in business by pedalling sensationalist manipulative rubbish.

It’s possible that there is some Machiavellian motive for the delay, but I doubt it. Sometimes things are complicated and difficult, and there are no easy answers, and sometimes it is necessary to wait and see rather than taking a decision to do something because ‘something must be done’.

It’s easier to make a bad decision, than to undo the consequences of one, and with something like fire safety progress is often necessarily slow and painstaking to ensure that optimal decisions are taken.

Would the UPVC windows also be a potential issue, since a fire was up the outside? The advice to stay in a flat was based on fire not spreading up stairwell due to internal protections of fire doors etc- not a fire outside with no protection…

Yes they are an issue inasmuch as the frames are plastic and will melt/burn and fail, and allow fire spread from outside into the building. However, it’s always important to consider the behaviour in a fire of any one component in the context of all the other components (as a package). So even if the frames were instead fire resisting, the glass isn’t (as far as I am aware Australia may be the only country that does require fire resisting glazing for high rise buildings), and you would also need to consider the window fixings and any other potential points of entry for fire in the external wall, e.g. ventilation grilles, trickle vents etc. The whole thing is only as good as it’s weakest link and you have to assess how it performs as a package, not as an individual component. Even if it was practical to improve the fire resistance of the windows, it would probably not be the best use of resources.

The ‘Finger Fenders’ fitted by Geoff Apps to his Cleeland Landseer look like what you are after. I suspect they may be a one off made to his order.

The trick is to not make them on the cheap and turn them into vertical ghettos and then polish the turd by covering them in ‘unfit for purpose’ cladding to make the problem look nice

This is simplistic emotive rubbish, and no better than than the political point of which Corbyn is being accused.

Concrete buildings are not cheap, and modern high rise buildings are now almost invariably steel framed instead, which potentially is much more difficult to bring up to the levels of fire resistance of a concrete building.

The reason for the cladding, which was part of a project which included new double glazed windows and a new heating system, was to improve the thermal performanace of the buildings. In other words to insulate the flats and make them better places to live, as well as improving energy efficiency, which is essential to reducing our consumption of fossil fuels and addressing the risks of climate change.

We will continue to need to keep doing similar projects, so it’s vital that we understand the underlying causes of this fire.

Superficially it could be argued that the inherent fire safety of a 1970s non-combustible concrete high rise tower block – which makes it possible to have a single stairwell exit route – is not compatible with retrofitting modern insulation systems which use expanded plastic foam. I don’t think that is the case: there are expanded plastic foam products which have very good fire resisting performance. I understand that BBC’s Newsnight reported last night that the version of the cladding affixed to Grenfell Tower was one with a low or no fire rating. Before we talk about the current Regulations being inadequate, we need to establish first whether they were breached at Grenfell Tower, and how we can better ensure that Regulations are complied with.

Moreover, there is more to this fire than just the cladding. Even with the outside of the building on fire, people should still have been able to evacuate inside safely, and we need to understand everything that went wrong, what it’s impact was, and how best to prevent it happening again.

I would like to see more of the fire fighters shown in the photographs above spending their time on safety inpections and enforcement activity. A photograph of a a fire safety officer undertaking an inspection, writing up a report, inspecting building works, reviewing plans etc. is a lot less dramatic than the photographs above, but that activity is potentially far more valuable and will save more lives. We will always need the sort of fire fighting and rescue capability that the Brigades showed yesterday, but we need to be better at prevention rather than cure.

Jambo – in the circumstances, that link is fair comment.

No, Jambalya is right. Many people are dead and it is wrong to use this situation to make a cheap shot like that, regardless of how you might feel about Boris Johnson or any other politician.

Jambalaya was lambasted on the Trump thread for this comment:

So a Trump hating Bernie Saunders fan shoots Republicans. You can imagine the headlines and STW outrage the other way around

There seems to me to be little difference between these comments, and I think both are wrong, but it does seem that these threads exhibit the sort of double standards to which Jambalaya was objecting.

With regard to the issue being discussed in the video clip, it was not particularly relevant to the loss of life in Grenfell Tower. There are no reports as far as I am aware that the brigade took too long to arrive because of reduced cover.

There is a very compelling argument that it makes sense to reduce fire cover. Those resources need instead to be directed to better strategies to reduce the number of fires and their severity, which is what Boris Johnson is talking about.

Sprinklers are the most effective form of active fire protection, but they are not a panacea. Their reliability levels are generally very high, but they can fail. Blocks of flats with sprinkler systems will usually have isolation valves in each flat, and it’s not unknown to find after a fire which the sprinklers failed to control that some tenants had isolated the system in their flat because they were concerned about water damage from a leak or because decorating works had been carried out and they forgot to switch the system back on afterwards.

Moreover it looks like the external cladding on Grenfell Tower was a key factor, and internal sprinkler systems will not control a fire where it is the exterior of the building that is ablaze. Residential sprinklers rely on the fire being extinguished at an early stage by just a small number of sprinkler heads. If a large fire on the outside of the building breaks through windows into multiple floors, the sprinkler system will not be able to deliver enough water to all the heads that are triggered on each of those floors, and the fire will continue to grow and spread.

I’m not suggesting that sprinklers should not be retrofitted to buildings like these, but it will still be necessary to ensure that other aspects of fire safety are properly installed/in place and managed/maintained.

A major difficulty for those responsible for conducting fire risk assessments is that it requires skills and knowledge which extend over multiple disciplines, e.g. construction, systems like sprinklers and fire alarms, potential causes of fire and how fires may behave in different circumstances, human behaviour etc., and it is difficult for one person to be an expert in all those fields. If that were not enough, there are limits to the extent to which someone undertaking a fire risk assessment can assess and investigate. So they have to assume that previous building works will have been compliant with the relevant fire safety standards, unless they are some obvious visual indicators that contractors have failed to do the job properly.

There are no easy answers, and no substitutes for good standards of management to ensure that any building works are done safely and that the fire performance of the building is not impaired by such works, and that day to day fire safety is actively maintained, including regular checks and maintenance of all fire safety systems and equipment.

Thank you. I see the adapter and head cost more than the Rennkompressor itself, but even so it’s still a lot less than a Silca Super Pista pump.

Mrblobby, may I ask from whom you bought the 17-4 head, and how easy is to fit it? Presumably the head is not actually supplied with a miniture jubilee clip or similar fastening?

Part of the problem is trying to get the tool to stay in place when I turn it.

Is it square taper? If so I may be able to assist: I have a VAR tool like this, and the spring holds the tool in place:

If it’s Octalink or ISIS, I think the latest version will fit:

depends on the spec, yes the contractors may have substituted, but you would have to be a real cowboy* to substitute something totally different.

More likely is incorrect installation, especially for a built up in situ system that has various separate elements. I do not know if the specification for the cladding required any kind of horizontal fire barrier every floor or every other floor, but fire barriers are the sort of thing which often requires precise attention to correct installation if it is to work. The only way of making sure it’s done properly is to monitor the installation very closely, since once it’s complete it’s extremely difficult to check afterwards whether or not it was done properly.

Looking at this photo from the Brigade’s twitter account, the two charred ‘fingers’ which were the lowest point of the fire on the left hand side indicate that the air gap between the outer metal face of the cladding and the insulation behind did act as a flue, especially where those vertical sections of cladding were continuous and not interrupted by windows.

These materials will all have a class ‘0’ fire rating, which is about as good as it gets, however this doesn’t mean they won’t burn, it just means they combust in a slow/controlled way.

The problem is that the class 0 rating is based on a small controlled test scenario, where a small flame is applied to the surface of a material for a relatively short period to see if the flame will spread on the surface of the material.

PIR and other materials with fire retardants added may pass this test because they will resist ignition for some time, and under such controlled conditions they may only char rather than spreading fire. However, when heated to several hundred degrees in a fire, especially one where the design of the building creates a flue drawing hot air and gases, they will very soon burn as intensely and fiercely as plastics without fire retardants.

EDIT The Class 0/BS476 test is by no means as good as it gets. For a while several years ago Kingspan and Celotex did submit some of their foil faced PIR boards for a more demanding test, LPS 1181, which is designed to better reflect real large scale fire conditions (although the ventilated flue in this application probably exceeded those test conditions and I am not aware that the current range of panels would fail the LPS1181 test, as far as I am aware the makers no longer bother to submit that type of panel for testing because there is no longer any commercial imperative for them to do so).

There was a gent on LBC this morning who stated the polystyrene used in the cladding was created with an oil based liquid which is a known accelerant, similar to the ones used in the huge Dubai fire a few months ago.

There is a photograph of what are described as cladding panels being installed on the last page of this newsletter issued by KCTMO . The photograph is not very good, but they look like foil faced insulation boards, e.g. Kingspan Siteline, Celotex or similar, which is likely to be expanded polyisocyanurate (PIR) foam. It’s not polystyrene, although it’s conceivably possible that polystyrene could have been used elsewhere on the refurbishment, e.g. in a Sto Render type external finishing system with a render over insulation.

The oil based liquid being an accelerant sounds like garbage. Flammable gases like pentane are used as the blowing agent in the manufacture of plastic foams like polystyrene and polyisocyanurate, but it’s the combustible nature of the plastic itself in a cellular foam with loads of air in the foam to provide the oxygen that a fire needs, that is the fire hazard of expanded plastic foams. Polystyrene is the worst because of the way it behaves in a fire.

I’ve been googling a bit more.

It looks like the external cladding was insulated, in which case the insulation material was most likely expanded plastic foam.

Moreover, if the fire alarm was defective, then not only did residents not get a warning, it may also have meant that the smoke extraction system and fire dampers which were supposed to be activated by the fire alarm did not work. These are supposed to stop the central stairwell and lobbies becoming smoke logged. This is a link to the cache of a webpage of the Witt Group which describes the system installed at Grenfell House.

slowster

fire may well have started within a flat (compartment) however the speed and burn pattern would suggest the cladding was a major factor in the rapid spread.

I’m just going on the photographs, but looking at some of those again I could well be wrong, and the page wwaswas linked to mentions rain screen cladding (the type I described which can create a flue):

Externally, rain screen cladding, curtain wall façade and replacement windows were fitted, improving thermal insulation and modernising the exterior of the building.

It is possible to specify fire resisting cladding, but fire resisting does not necessarily mean non-combustible: if it’s made of plastic, a fire resisting material will burn when it’s heated in a major blaze like this one, so yes possibly a major contributory factor to accelerating fire spread between floors, once the fire was well developed and broke out through the windows on the floor of origin.

The investigation will almost certainly confirm that there were multiple failures in the building’s fire safety: in general no single point of failure, such as chocking a fire resisting door open, should result in such a catastrophic incident.

The fire safety concept of flats like this is to build them as substantial fire resisting structures in which each flat is a fire resisting compartment and fire resisting doors in corridors will delay any fire spread. That should mean that a fire will never grow to the stage that the Brigade cannot enter the building and extinguish it.

Cladding can be an issue, either because it’s combutible or because it can be installed with an air gap between the external wall and the inner face of the building and consequently act as a flue causing any fire that breaks out of windows on one floor to spread very rapidly up the side of the building and into through the windows into flats on the other floors.

However looking at the photographs it does not look like a cladding fire to me. I suspect that the issue is simply that once the fire is well developed and has engulfed a large area of a floor, and breaks out through the windows of that floor, the external heat and flames are readily able to break into the floors above one by one. The external elements of structure are generally not required to be fire resisting, so the ordinary glass and window frames (UPVC?) will not provide much delay to an external fire spreading into a flat.

It’s not clear if the fire spread internally between floors to begin with, and I expect a major part of the investigation will be whether the internal compartmentation was comprehensively flawed, e.g. due to penetrations made in the walls and floors by contractors not being properly firestopped or the installation of doors etc. which were not fire rated. Even assuming the fire integrity was perfect when it was built in 1974, a building of that age will have had a lot of work done to it over the years, giving plenty of opportunities for mistakes to be made which could compromise its fire safety.

Montgomery, it depends upon the cups: some ISIS BBs used cups with internal splines which will accept a standard tool like the Park BBT-22 (some older tools might not fit if they were sized only to go over a square taper axle, rather than the wider Octalink and ISIS axles), others used cups with external notches requiring a tool like the Park BBT-18.

My favourite tool combination on a fast road bike (albeit with a not so fast rider) is this:

Scott mini tool: 1mm, 2mm, 3mm, 4mm, 5mm, 6mm and 8mm hex keys, T25, flat and phillips screwdrivers, with magnetic holders at both ends (one inline and the other at 90 degrees)

Finish Line Chain Pup

Total weight – 59g

PB Swiss use this concept in their Bike Tool[/url].

You can buy the whole tool from Amazon for £24, or you can order the adaptor from the manufacturer here (scroll down the page) for £7.70 incl. P&P.

All I need is a Grade 2

Rather than the Balding version, I think the one you want/need is the Super Taper. As I understand it, this one has a better motor than the cheaper Wahl clippers.

Supperleggero’s post has reminded me of something else: my friend’s bike with the plastic BB cups would not accept the tool he had, because the height of the splines was different. It’s just another reason to go with the UN55, since all the tool manufacturers will make sure that their tools do fit the UN55, since it is the most common BB.

Before buying the Weldtite BB tool, make sure you have a suitably sized wrench to fit it, i.e. 32mm. (The Park one will accept a 3/8″ driver, a 1″ wrench or a 32mm wrench.)

113mm wide for the thorn.

50mm chain line with a NW on the thorn

SJS are quoting a 54mm chainline with a 110mm BB. How are you getting a narrower chainline with a wider BB?

Not sure if it makes a difference but she’ll be running a 1x N/W. I can’t be doing with all the faff and extra weight of a front mech. Was even wondering whether to go single speed.

I did wonder if you might be going 1x. Others with experience of running 1x with chainlines not aligned with the middle of the cassette can probably advise better, but I would suggest that you probably still want a narrower chainline than 54mm even if you don’t need to worry about a front mech. You could always try it and see, but I suspect it might cause problems with shifts (and with back pedalling) in the lowest gears.

113? On the site it says 110mm!?

If this[/url] is the right webpage, it says “110mm bracket required to get a 54mm chainline on middle ring, 107mm can be used if only using a single ring in the outer position.”

So you need to check what chainline the front mech you are planning to use is designed for. It’s possible that you might need to use a narrower BB if the chainline of the mech is substantially less, but there’s probably a degree of tolerance for the mech to be used with a slightly wider (or narrower) chainline than it’s supposed to have (front mechs are pretty crude mechanisms). Sheldon Brown is a bit out of date on the chainlines of the latest kit, e.g. Shimano MTB doubles are 48.8mm (or 51.8mm for Boost), but it’s probably worth reading – here.

The other thing to watch out for if you go for a narrower BB, is that it positions the crank arms closer to the chainstays, and they might even foul the chainstays. That said, if you can go narrower, then that will give a lower Q factor (distance between pedals), and a 7 year old might prefer that (although they might well not notice it, whereas I imagine they certainly would if taken to the extreme of a very wide Q factor as used on fat bikes).

Lastly, the Shimano BBs are mostly symmetrical, so if a 110mm BB gives a 54mm chainline, then a 107mm will give a 52.5mm chainline (i.e. half the 3mm difference). They do make some asymmetrical BBs, which I think have a special suffix, e.g. UN55 vs UN55K or UN55E, where I think those with a suffix are asymmetrical. I would be 99.999% confident that any Shimano BB sold by CRC etc. would be symmetrical, since the asymmetric ones are intended for oddities like fitting a chaincase which is clamped to the BB shell by the BB cup (like a spacer).

Theresa May needs a crash course on the Good Friday agreement.

The announcement that Enda Kenny has spoken to May about his concerns is probably only the tip of the iceberg. So far we have not heard anything from the likes of John Major, Tony Blair, Bill Clinton etc., but they and other senior politicians and establishment figures invested a lot of effort in getting the Good Friday Agreement, and they are almost certainly talking to each other about what action to take, and they still have a lot of influence especially collectively. I imagine that the Foreign Office and possibly May personally has already received a message from the US State Department couched in friendly terms but neverthless warning of US concern that any deal with the DUP does not upset the Good Friday Agreement.

Spa cycles JP400 Plastic should be plenty good enough FOR a tenner.

For a kid’s bike where it’s likely that it will never need to be removed, it should be OK. Edit – but only if, as Montgomery points out, it is a 68mm shell.

However, I don’t like the plastic cups. A friend had a Giant with a Shimano BB with plastic cups, and they had been damaged when the bike was built in the factory. He only found this when realised the BB was loose and he went to tighten it up with a tool like the Park one, which could not get enough purchase because too many splines in the cup were missing or damaged.

He was only able to tighten it by using my tool, a Var tool with a spring loaded bolt which threads into the BB axle and holds the tool in place against the cup.

For the extra £5 odd (less when you factor in CRC’s free postage), I would get the UN55 with metal cups.

so any Shimano one will do

Shimano square taper BBs are ‘JIS’ (Japanese Industry Standard*) taper, which is what the Thorn cranks taper is according to their website, but you can get other brand JIS taper BBs. The other square taper standard is ISO (which was what Campagnolo used on their square taper cranks and BBs).

* This is a real standard, which has stayed the same for decades. It’s not like modern standards which change more frequently than some people change their underwear.

If you’ve only used Hollow Tech 2, then you will need the tool(s) for square taper as well:

To fit and remove the bottom bracket

To remove the cranks (you can get cheaper versions than Park, and you only need this if/when you need to remove the cranks)

You may also need to buy crank bolts if they are not supplied with the cranks, since I don’t think they are supplied with the UN55 bottom bracket.

You don’t need to remove it, just slide it back towards the body of the tool.

Depends which version you have. The current version does require the 8mm tip to be removed.

I agree with you completely about looking after the tool (same as for any tools for that matter). If one of my multi-tools had completely rusted up, I would be asking myself what I was doing wrong first before blaming the tool.

As for the plastic tyre levers on the Hexus, I took one look at them when I got the tool and simply decided to continue to take a separate set of tyre levers in my kit. The other multi tools mentioned don’t even have tyre levers, so the fact that the ones on the Hexus are probably rubbish is neither here nor there.

LOL if Boris falls for that one his more of a fool than we ever thought

In ordinary circumstances it’s possible that encouraging Boris to make a leadership bid could be a trap, but these are not ordinary circumstances.

Every cabinet minister and every Conservative MP now knows that May is a disaster in an election campaign, and they also know that they probably only have a year or two at the very most – possibly even only a few months – before the next election.

The Conservatives know that they must stop the rot and reverse what is looking dangerously like a sharply downward trend. Simply electing a supposedly safe pair of hands as leader like David Davis or Hammond etc. is not going to be good enough. They need to turn things around very quickly, and Boris is the obvious, and probably only candidate with the star quality who might be able to do that.

I suspect it’s not a case of Boris deciding when to make his bid, but rather that he is letting the BSDs in the party come to him as supplicants asking/begging him to take on the leadership and get them out of the mess they are in. Boris is probably in a position to demand a very high price to take over as leader, e.g. complete freedom of choice of cabinet members, and sweeping control over Brexit negotiations (not a hard Brexit or a soft Brexit, but a Boris Brexit).

If Boris takes over, then I would expect an early election: there is no way he would try to persevere with the DUP deal, which will only damage the Conservatives (and him if he is leader) the longer it lasts.

The one time I had to use the chain tool on my Crank Bros 17 (on someone else’s bike), I found that having to rotate the bulky main body of the tool in order to turn the pin was awkward and a poor design, which made it difficult to use. I expect I would find the same for the tools made by Lezyne and others who use this same basic design.

The chain tool on the Topeak Hexus is better inasmuch as the design is more like a workshop tool, in that the main body of the tool provides a large handle to grip which is static, and the chain tool stays at 90 degrees to the handle.

The chain tool is key to the choice of any multi-tool (the rest of the tool is simply a lever/handle for some allen keys). If I did not have a Hexus, then I would rather have a stand alone chain tool like the Park CT5 and a separate tool with allen keys etc.

With regard to the ingenious designs which put a chain tool in the steerer or the hollow crank axle, I am sceptical of how these seemingly fiddly designs will perform under testing real world conditions: if when you need them they fail to do the job, then they are worse than junk. Better to have no tool than one which gives you a false sense of reassurance only to let you down when you are in trouble.

This tweet from the editor of BBC2’s Newsnight indicates what is now influencing every decision that May and the Conservatives take:

One of striking aspects of election aftermath is how many snr Tories agree they cant go to the country any time soon as Corbyn likely winner

Will the EU and its representatives be willing and able to invest the time and effort in protracted and detailed Brexit negotiations, when it knows that the UK Government with which it is negotiating is so weak that it is liable to collapse at relatively short notice, forcing another election and a new government which might want to unpick much of the negotiations, or even start from scratch?

Even in the extremely unlikely event that the Conservatives are able to limp along in government until negotiations are completed, there must be huge doubts about whether they would be able to command a majority in Parliament to vote the deal through.

I can’t imagine that Junker, Merkel, Barnier et al. will be prepared to see a huge amount of their time and resources spent over the next couple of years on negotiations under those conditions.

What is surprising is the increasingly apparent extent of how bad May’s poltical judgement has been and continues to be. Normally politicians don’t have careers as long as hers, and especially get to become PM, without very good antennae. It now looks as if she was only able to become PM because of a very specific set of circumstances where it almost fell into her lap, and she largely needed to do nothing as one by one Cameron, Gove, Johnson and Leadsom etc. took themselves out of the picture by their own mistakes. She did not have to actively campaign for the party leadership in a typical full on leadership contest while in opposition and then fight a general election to become PM.

It looks to me like her very quick announcement of a deal with the DUP was born out of similar bad judgement and panic to fill a vacuum. When Gordon Brown lost the 2010 election, he waited it out in Downing Street in silence until the Conservatives and Lib Dems had agreed a deal. Obviously the situation now is different because the Conservatives are still the largest party and so are expected to form a government, but the mark of a good politician/statesman in May’s shoes in that situation would be to consult widely and take as much time as they possibly can to consider their options and the likely consequences.

Instead, May seems to have been panicked into agreeing a deal very quickly with the DUP and announcing it very quickly. Possibly she did this out of a sense of responsibility as PM/leader to act and stop the uncertainty causing damage to financial markets and the Pound etc., and possibly she felt she needed to make an announcement to stop the speculation about Labour forming a government with the other parties (the suggestions from Labour that they could form a government look like good political skills: they know they could not form a stable government, but it may have rattled May and been an added prompt to act unnecessarily quickly to stop the speculation).

The deal with the DUP itself, and the manner/hurry of its making, looks like it may be almost as big an error as calling the election. It seems she has announced the deal without actually having agreed the key terms of the deal with the DUP (in complete contrast to the negotiations between the Conservatives and the Lib Dems after the 2010 election, when the deal was only announced after the terms had been hammered out in fine detail). The DUP will want its pound of flesh, and I suspect that many Conservative MPs and the UK electorate will find the sweeteners to the DUP to be at best repugnant (extra money for Northern Ireland – say £400M, which would nicely cover the budget shortfall due to the RHI scandal) and at worst unacceptable (damage to the Good Friday agreement and harming the UK Government’s role as honest broker in NI, or any influence whatsoever over government policies affecting the rest of the UK).

I suspect that May’s premiership is now moving into just managing crises from day to day. Her current overriding priority is to pass the Queen’s Speech. I can’t help thinking that her deal with the DUP to achieve that, will add to the problems that she will rapidly face thereafter, but possibly she is planning to fall on her sword very soon, and so only cares about getting the Queen’s Speech through.

If they cannot pass the Queen’s Speech, then the Conservatives and the country will be in a really big mess, and I imagine there would have to be another GE within possibly as little as a couple of months. That is the last thing the Conservatives want, since Corbyn and Labour would probably do even better, and possibly even win, and the Conservatives need time to organise a change of leadership and a honeymoon period for the new leader in the opinion polls when they would be most likely to call an election. For that reason I suspect the Conservatives may well try and avoid a leadership contest, in order to be able to appoint a new leader unopposed as quickly as possible. A lengthy drawn out leadership contest would be risky, since the longer it takes, the more likelihood that things will be unravelling in Parliament and Brexit negotiations etc. while the contest is underway, and that will make the Conservatives look very bad (fiddling having a leadership contest while Rome is burning).

Another reason why this election has significantly reduced the likelihood of Brexit actually happening, is the collapse of the UKIP vote.

A majority of the Conservative MPs did not support Brexit, and the referendum only happened because of the votes that UKIP was getting at the expense of the Conservatives and threatening the seats of some of their MPs.

If, as appears possible, the main focus of politics in Parliament and the UK is moving back to a traditional Conservative/Labour (Left/Right) battle with all eyes on an early election, and UKIP are a much weaker force and no longer able to threaten to split the right wing vote in Conservative constituencies, then the majority of Conservative MPs will not be interested in actively pushing for progress in Brexit negotiations: all they will care about is winning their own seats and getting a majority in the next election.

I doubt that they would elect David Davis as leader, precisely because he is a conviction politician who would stick by his beliefs and principles regardless of the political cost to himself, his party or fellow MPs. The Conservative MPs don’t want a conviction politician who would be willing to risk their seats and overall victory to pursue a Brexit, when they themselves either do not believe in it or are at best lukewarm: they want a political star, a proven vote winner who will help them get re-elected.

That means Boris. And Boris as leader is probably the worst hope for those who support Brexit. If Boris perceives continuing with Brexit is harmful to him and his political ambitions, he will do a 180 degree turn and jettison it, and he is probably the one politician who has the political skills and charisma to get away with saying to the electorate that he tried, but it just wasn’t possible, and now we need to forget Brexit and focus on the future.

Back OT, probably she should resign.
It would be the honourable thing to do in the circumstances – which is why I don’t expect that she will.

She’s a lame duck now and she would probably like to resign immediately like Cameron. She knows that she will not lead the Conservatives into the next election, and the only question is who is going to replace her. I suspect it’s loyalty to her party and some of her colleagues that is compelling her to stick it out and go through the motions of what is likely to be an unpleasant remaining time as leader, giving the party a breathing space to take stock and then organise a leadership contest.

She is going to get a kicking from her MPs, PMQs will probably be a wretched experience as Labour enjoy a revival and boosted morale, and the press will tear her apart, as it always does when it scents weakness in any politician and the chance to take a big scalp. Any meetings which she attends with EU and other European leaders to discuss Brexit will be humiliating for her, because no one will be interested in what she wants or thinks: they will probably listen to her politely and then just ignore her.

Her remaining months as leader and PM will probably be a miserable experience, and she will probably want it over as soon as possible.