get the personal injury lawyers on him, the Police will ratttle it through with Lawyers up their ass.

Most all Mavic freehubs just pull off once all the axle parts are removed. if you can see the end bearing in the freehub and there are no axle parts left in place just give it a yank.

Certainly my Kysirium and Crossmax Sx come off that way.

Obviously i had his address already, i was just wondering if anyone might know him and can lean on him to do the right thing.

All three of my bikes are worth more than both of the family cars put together. No wonder car companies are going out of business.

Mosey, i have loads of pumps, from various, bits you can have a FOx one if you like.

Simon text me 07770572037
Sharrow

mmmm Raising to SRAm prices, now there’s a thought…

If they are going to put some time and effort into the layout of the classifieds section then yeh, charge away. But as it stands 30 minutes after posting your ad is on page 3.

Jesus christ, 100 miles out of a set of pads. WTF do you ever let go of the lever?

MY BLT has over 800 miles on the rear pads…

Cinema 4D is a decent choice, your experience of it will only be as good as whoever the distributor is in the UK. Maxon have a great rep for online support.

Get used to using the Rayracer, you’ll need it.

ebay do cheapy ones, they work best if you dremmel them flat as the heads can be the wrong size, especially for Saint bolts.

yeh but not the Raleigh Chopper design which was done by Tim Lovering.

I’ve been around this market a little bit, used to do the big graphics show demo’s for Discreet, contracted all the big name manufacturing, architecture and design houses in Europe and many in the US and I’ve trained and taught, Maya, 3dsmax, Softimage, Studiotools and various parametric modellers.

The truth is, all these packages are the same, they are all very much of a muchness, one may have a slightly better render engine or wider availability of plugins than another, while another might have a better nurbs modeller or better export paths to cad/cam gear.

You can choose any of them.

However in my experience the easiest of these to use for importing data modelled elsewhere is Maya, and the easiest for rendering is 3dsmax, lightwave has the best soft modelling toolset and Rhino has the easiest to use Nurbs.

if all you intend doing is making 3d structures to render and superimpose into photographs then if someone else is paying Maya or Max would be my first options. If i was paying I’d make do with Lightwave.

Please bear in mind that very few hi-end studios use any package end to end, they will cad model in one, particle generate in another, animate somewhere else and the frig the entire thing visually by rendering with a renderman complaint render package that is controlled solely by a team of dedicated render programmers.

I have plenty of mates who still work at ILM, Cinesite, Rushes, Mill Film etc none of them know all of one package that’s not how the big studios do things.

CRC are victims of their own success, or rather Uk distributors lack of foresight and huge currency fluctuations. Growth in any company is tricky to manage, i imagine CRC are expanding very rapidly

A new headset at cost after 18 month? What else do want a free hand job?

jesus some people don’t deserve to be customers.

I don’t think marketing stretches the truth, just makes it as appealing as possible… ;-)

Where to start there’s loads of them. I use the guys on Abbeydale Road at the Clinic, just up from the Abbeydale/Archer Road crossroads, before big Tescos.

A very measured and level headed response from Armstrong to someone he obviously dislikes greatly. I’m not applauding Armstrong’s position on cyclists who have been caught or commenting on whether i think he has always been clean or not, but i think he is the consumate professional.

Imagine breaking into a team van, that must take some balls. ;-)

I use Park Tools inner tube patches to keep all my cables off my frames and forks. makes a hella difference when you sell a frame on if it has zero cable rub anywhere.

The view from inside….

It’s a companies job to part you from your cash as regularly as possible. To do this they need to make you think you are upgrading for positive reasons, ie. “i’m buying this because it is so much better”, rather than ‘ last years never worked”.

The easiest way to do this is to sell you on the differences. They might not be huge differences, so the marketers art is pitching these in the correct way to stimulate maximum interest.

Though they might be true the following marketing campaigns aren’t likely to help increase sales.

Fox forks: Largely unchanged since 2002.
Boxer World Cup Solo Air 2009: Long legged Totems for ridiculous money.
Marzocchi 2009 forks: Bigger breasts in the adverts to blind you to continuing bearing slop.

Trust me on this, marketing guys would love to write things just like they are, as above, but we’d be out of a job pretty damn sharp. Flowery marketing prose helps sell gear. None technical users lap it up and replay it verbatim, as if it’s fact. Replay it often enough and it is fact.

Dirty, filthy Pace rc100, now that is nice.

There’s an awful lot of cheap plastic on the SRAM stuff.

just ditched SRAm for shimano on the rear of my Demo7. No comparisson.

toxsin from ebay

yeh two bikes fit in mine…

One’s a Budgie the other a Commando.

160 with travel adjust sounds good, you’ll need the drop for uphill.

owt over 16mm will do, can’t be cropped with standard cutters, they don’t open that far.

Of course you can just carry two sets and have one set up with slightly wider spacing on the strops.

caustic soda. the seatpost is galled into the frame, the oxide of aluminium take sup more space than the alloy itself so they stick together.

Caustic soda will ‘reduce’ the oxide and the post will come out.

plug the bb with plasticine and fill her up from the top and leave it overnight, leave it in the bath…

How to make a product still born, price it up there…

I somehow managed to set up an auto-response email that auto-replied and cc’d everyone in my address book to tell them i was out of the office, rather than reply to any address and tell them i was out.

I then had the joy of explaining to my manager at the time why a number of our clients had received emails, cc’d back to all the addresses in my contacts from my Mate John, calling me a stupid kunt etc etc.

Suffice to say a lot of individual emails were sent out on my return, crawling and licking.

merlin are also dirt cheap on some shimano still.

Mine skips like buggery and that’s with Pace rc41’s on, and they ain’t exactly tall.

does it tighten into another bolt on the other side of the frame.

Vinnyeh, there’s little point me explaining it further, for some reason you seem hooked into the idea of bribes and blackmail which has nothing at all to do with what I was talking about.

Your comments and what you incorrectly read into what i have written are far more telling of your psyche, than the game that is played out between magazines and advertisers.

Find a low temp slow set epoxy, not Bostik or B&Q epoxy, something built for the task, from a composites parts place. Look for something like West Systems resin, and if you are really anal, cut it back with polishing paste and spray it with Ultravar lacquer.

Spec up the build normally, only bought one bike off the shelf and that was my Demo which was never intended as a keeper, just something to use over Xmas then sell on, it was cheap enough not to have to take a hit on it.

Of course Xmas is long gone and i still have it with a multitude of new parts on it. Doh.

Stripped the back end on my BLT this weekend, first time in 12 months, 2nd time since i bought it. No noticeable bearing wear at all. Total of 2400miles on it now and it’ has only ever needed the shock bush replacing the once. I only had to repack one bearing this time round….

Rob, Please try to a least read what I wrote, not what you think I wrote.

Please point out where I stated that bribery or coercion were required to sell any product or that I advised trying them.

I’ll state it one more time for those at the back who are having trouble understanding.

There are a multitude of different, positive ways in which you can ‘unduly’ influence the outcome of a review, without having to resort to any ‘negative’ tactics. A good product manager will know the review staff on his magazines intimately and ensure that he does all he can to punch their happy buttons when they are reviewing his product.

Rob, companies will have an advert next to a poor review because they book spreads of adverts and get a lower rate for say 6 or 12 issues than they do by spotting ads on an ad hoc basis. You can’t just pull a single advert from an issue when you have a 12 month contract. Well you can but you’d look like a dick, after a few poor reviews you’d be pulling your adverts anyway.

I wasn’t talking about making shit products seem better than they are, I was talking about what makes the difference between the leader and the good also rans. It’s What makes Specialized and Burton for example, different from say Trek or Nitro Snowboards, and why Fox gets so much press when their products aren’t exactly built to last.

Molgrips, I’m UK based geographically, but work for a US company with a global reach.

Vinnyeh, sorry, justify was the wrong turn of phrase, ‘valiadate; might have been more accurate. It’s not the marketing practices ‘we’ use, everyone does, at least the successful brands, regardless of their field.

Ben, I’m glad you no longer feel threatened because i clarified my position so that it didn’t sound like i was casting aspersions on Singletrack, just a shame you couldn’t be a little more magnanimous about it, without feeling the need to take the opportunity to try and be mildly offensive.

Vinnyeh, I was actually down playing it when I said ‘little known’, i see no need to justify my viewpoint by stating who i work for.

Sobriety, exactly..

Here’s my response to Matt’s email.

Matt, It wasn’t a personal slight at Singletrack and I didn’t question your or anyone else’s integrity at the magazine. But in my experience, no matter how much a magazine claims otherwise it is impossible to separate the two. You are after all the Advert Manager and a staff writer…? ;-)

I don’t doubt your integrity for one minute, and that you truly believe that you have the separation in place, but the truth is, you probably don’t, you really can’t have, it’s beyond the ability of human nature not to be influenced. It’s simply impossible, unless you take no freebies that forget to be returned, no trips away, and all gear is reviewed externally by none staff members, outside of the industry and submitted under ‘plain cover’. If you couldn’t be influenced subtly then what the hell do we as manufacturers/distributors hope to gain from trying to influence others through advertising?

I’m sure you’ve thrown accounts because of reviews and I applaud that, but it’s not what I was talking about. I was talking about the art of building relationships between the marketing depts of manufacturers and magazines; the subtle interplay between supplier and reviewer, not the crass, obvious stuff, but the subtle stuff, ie. way in which we prepare you for receipt of a new item, wind your springs, make you feel you’ve earned the right to review the product rather than just been supplied with it, and a whole host of other subtle psychological techniques that a marketing/product contact will use to ensure the most favourable review possible.

If you don’t think you’re being played, then there are two potential truths to this situation, you either hate everyone and everything and have no buttons to push, or you are being played.
Simon..

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=roMxTYVxj98