If it’s a 27.5 you decide on then the Cube Stereo 140 HPC TM 2018 is worth a look, fox 36 Factory forks, DPX2 factory shock, fox transfer factory dropper, carbon front and alloy rear, 30mm Newmen wheels (which are 1700g so nice and light) and full GX eagle, £3500.

Might be a little short on travel at 140/150mm if you want a full on enduro rig and it’s more trail bike slack, not 65 degrees.

There aren’t many bikes around with full fox factory kit and a carbon frame and GX eagle for £3500.

Otherwise the Nukeproof 2018 carbon mega factory comes in at £3780 with the BC discount.

Doesn’t a 29er generally have the effect of having another 20-30mm of travel?

29ers tend to be shorter travel than an equivalent 27.5 bike, so in effect the s-150 is a 170mm bike Vs the t-130 at 130mm. That and the slacker HA on the s-150 along with the 29er wheels and it’s not surprising it feels a bit dead on tame trails.

A short travel 29er or a 140-150mm max 27.5 with a slightly less slack HA would be better for general trail riding I think.

Rockhopper – Member
Stretch it a bit to £1350 and get a Whyte 901. Buy it from JE James and you also get £250 worth of credit to spend in the shop so it actually works out less than your budget!

Where are you seeing that deal? Can only see the one which gives you £135 worth of points.

Also I think, OP you need to clarify what type of riding you’ll be doing, a 10 and 13 year old can ride as hard as any adult, depends on the kid. If it’s just basic single track and fire roads then a £1300 hardtail might be overkill and a £600 Bizango will be more than adequate. If however you think you’ll be taking on some decent trails then deffo spend around £1000. Don’t forget the British cycling 10% discount if you buy through CRC.

ta11pau1 – I was thinking that but it’s a slightly better spec than the top of range Scout 275 (in my opinion), in particular the forks, but then you could argue that Yari’s are overkill on a hardtail compared with Pikes/2018 Revelations.

Oh if you’ve got bars/saddle/gears etc lying around then it’s a much cheaper way of getting a bike, I added it up and versus a Vitus Sentier VRS+ at £1170 it would cost me £1200 to build a scout frame to similar spec, with a £200 used fork, matching SLX groupset or GX groupset, dropper etc. So unless I could get an absolute bargain of a fork out would be a worse spec for the same price!! The scout isn’t quite as good value as the Vitus – the race model isn’t anywhere near as well specced and the pro model is another £360 for a Revelation over a Reba and no other spec changes…

That’s a medium? 8O looks tiny!!!

Also confirms my thoughts that building a hardtail for around £1k is no cheaper than buying one off the shelf unless you have some parts already.

There’s the MBR demo day at FOD April 7th-8th and April 28th at Dalby. Then there’s QE cyclefest by Hargroves cycles at QECP on May 12th-13th.

Goldigger – Member
The weights of the Ali are porky, how have they managed to increase the weight from the AL 7.0 EX 2017 12.7kg to the AL 7.0 2018 14.2kg
Can’t be the choice of 2.6 tyres can it?

The AL 6.0 and CF 8.0 are almost identical in spec apart from a KS lev on the AL over a reverb and m1900 Vs m1700 wheels, so about the AL has a 300 grams heavier spec – yet the quoted weights are 14.7kg vs 13.3kg, that’s 1.1kg extra weight just in the frame…

The Pro frameset looks to be about 2.8kg w/o shock and seatpost so that would make the non pro CF frames about 3kg with their alloy chain/seatstays so the alloy frame is about 4.1kg. Add a shock and that’s 4.4kg.

Lardy bastard!!! The sonder Evol is 3.2kg with a shock for comparison of a simple alloy frame.

Seems a decent spec on the £2700 one, CF frame, eagle, pikes.

And the red AL6.0 is a nice spec for the price, however… 14.7kg for a medium 8O

What a fatty!!! :lol:

daver27 – Member
Personal fave of their 2018 bikes is the new Stereo, really nice looking bike that is

Stereo

And a comparative bargain for all the kit its got on it, AND they have sorted out their sizing it would seem.

Was about to post this, never taken a second look at a cube until this one, it’s currently top of my list if I buy a FS trail bike next summer.

8)

Fox factory everything, carbon frame with decent geometry, GX eagle, and a light (1700g) Newmen wheelset.

I do have a bit of a soft spot for gold though, this is my motorbike :D

Not to everyone’s taste but I love it!

Deffo use the 10% BC discount, that’ll let you get the next model up for £900, leaves £100 for a dropper post.

Of course if you can get the budget up another £170 the VRS model comes with a Brand-X dropper, 140mm reba, full SLX and slightly better nukeproof horizon finishing kit for £1170 after the discount.

http://www.chainreactioncycles.com/vitus-bikes-sentier-vrs-hardtail-bike-slx-1×11-2018/rp-prod159772

I honestly don’t think there’s a better value HT out there around the £1000 mark.

Can you use the BC discount on CRC with a C2W voucher?

aP – Member
The GLA and TfL have realised that London’s existing transport infrastructure network is so finely balanced that the only way to increase capacity without spending serious money on new infrastructure is to promote bicycle use.
this then has other benefits – reduced pollution, increased health, increased footfall in retail, less noise, allowing those existing infrastructure assets to continue in use without significant disruption.
I know quite a lot of people who are surprised that I own a car (and a van) because in London I cycle nearly everywhere otherwise using trains, buses or the tube.
I still drive about 16,000 miles a year – I just don’t do it in London, because TBH you’d have to be an idiot to do it every day.

And motorcycles have all the benefits of bicycles, and more, yet we’re mostly ignored when it comes to reducing traffic and congestion.

Bikers use no extra space on the road in solid traffic, don’t need separate cycle lanes or ANY alterations to the road infrastructure, don’t hold up cars trying overtake them, they have lower emissions overall due to never sitting queuing in traffic, reduce overall traffic and emissions (if 10% of cars switched to a motorbike traffic would reduce by a huge amount), and of course there’s the benefit to the biker of getting to work faster, less stressed, and it costs less too.

More motorbikes is the answer, but I don’t see any plans incorporating them any time soon.

Commencal Meta AM HT? 2018 frame is 27.5+/29, has boost and comes with a 150mm fork as standard. 561mm max fork height according to the website.

An extra 10mm probably won’t make much difference, sounds like you need to stick some tokens in the forks/shock to make it more progressive, this should let you run them a bit softer and they’ll ramp up as they go through the travel.

Don’t open links sent to you by email. It’s not that hard, no need for antivirus on a phone.

You can check on the actual email address it’s been sent from by clicking ‘view details’. Dodgy emails are pretty easy to spot.

They’ve got 2017 Whyte 905’s along with T-130’s

Does it have to be from certain retailers? As an extra couple of hundred quid at this price level gets you a lot more bike, especially if you can get last years model bikes with 20-40% off as well as the BC discount.

If not, the extra on the Pro FS is definitely worth it, the forks alone are worth the £200 over the bossnut.

blokie – Member
Hi,

I currently ride a 2017 Boardman Team 29er hardtail and I’m loving it, however I’ve started doing more offroad (usually the red Kitchener Trail at Sherwood Pines) and I’m finding the hardtail just too uncomfortable for the job, not to mention struggling to put any traction down.

Just had a quick watch of a video of that trail and it doesn’t look especially challenging, easily ridable on a hardtail.

That is however, provided you have the required fitness to be able to stand up for the full 8 miles or so of the trail.

If you’re anything like me (coming back to MTB after about 15 years, and not done any cycling in about 5-6 years) your fitness will be the main reason you want a FS bike, as your legs will be getting tired and you won’t have the energy/strength to stand up all the time and then you’re hitting roots/rocks etc whilst sat down which is sending all those hits and bumps straight through your body, which in turn is making you tire quicker. This is exactly what happened to me the last couple of times out, after 6-7 miles I was struggling.

No amount of carbon bars or other upgrades will help this, there’s 2 options:

Buy a FS bike which will be loads more comfortable when you’re tired and your legs need a rest.

Or, get fitter! :mrgreen: but you can only get fitter by riding more, and you’d need to put up with the uncomfortable rides before the better fitness appears.

Out of interest, how much do 2.6″ tyres help on a hardtail?

Three have a black friday deal on for their SIM only deals if anyone needs a new SIM plan – 100GB data a month (+ the usual unlimited calls/texts) for £20, 12 month contract.

Another option if you weren’t sold on the purple – just over £2k.

http://www.ubyk.co.uk/cannondale-bad-habit-2-carbon-2017/64574

Or the Pixel 2? Granted it’s another £125, but how do future OS/security updates stack up? Any idea if the OP5T gets updates for the next 3 years?

It’s not £125 more though is it? The base model 64GB Pixel 2 is £180 more than the 64GB 5T, and that gets you an older style display. 128GB version is £230 more, and if you want a 128GB version with a 5T style display you’ll need the Pixel 2 XL, which is £900. Nine Hundred **** pounds!!!!!! 8O :|

Software updates should be good, they’re still updating the OP2 which came out in July 2015.

As you’ve come from a Nexus 4 I presume you like vanilla android, in which case the only answer is the 5T.

My 3T has just got the Oreo update. The security issue isn’t really a big issue (have a read up, it allows root access without unlocking the bootloader, but it needs physical USB access to the device) and it’ll be patched very soon.

Nothing wrong with a cheeky ride…

For those times when you really should be doing something else but, “ahh, sod it, go on then” :mrgreen:

At £3.5k that would be a bit pricy but at £2k? Bargain!

Even if you added GX eagle to match the S150S you’d still be quids in AND have a carbon frame.

‘Off for a quick blat’ – very similar to a blast.

Yeah point taken, if you’re happy not changing anything apart from adding a dropper its very good value, more so if you can pick one up on sale (plus BC discount).

Vanilla android was one of the reasons I went with the 3T too, the extras they’ve added like the gestures are all good additions.

I paid £439 for my 128gb 3T just after they launched so I’m happy there been no stupid price hikes for the 5T (cough.. pixel… £900 for a 128gb version :roll: )

3T 128gb owner here, could not be happier.

Dash charge is amazing, performance is perfect, battery lasts a full day unless I’m seriously spanking it. Oh and the alert slider is great, couldn’t do without it now.

Regular updates, the fingerprint scanner is mega quick, camera is decent… There’s literally nothing bad about it, apart from it being a bit slippery without a case.

If I was looking to upgrade I’d get the 5T in a heartbeat. Can’t justify the £250 cost to go from the 3T to the 5T though when mine is working flawlessly.

Ahh excellent, sod trying to find a boost 29er fork with a non-tapered steerer!!! :lol:

Some wider bars, a set of used guide R brakes for £100, dropper post and a used Reba for £250 and you’re probably still under £1000 once you’ve sold the brakes/fork.

Actually looks damn nice that, what are the forks like?

Just what I was going to ask, how do they compare to the likes of a RS recon?

NX for £650 is amazing, but then there’s a non tapered steerer tube on the fork (I think?) Which severely limits the upgrade route for the fork.

I am sure they advertised a few months ago an early entry fee for parking, to encourage more mtbers to head on in. Worth giving a call and asking, Quench cycles there should know, I think the parking was before 8:30 and you had a couple of hours.

Yeah I’m fairly sure they’re doing that, 8am-10:30am and it’s £3 – seem to remember signs when I visited a few weeks ago:

*A reduced vehicle admission fee of £3 will also be offered to any cars entering and leaving the car park between the hours of 8am and 10.30 am every Saturday morning. Any car leaving after 10.30am will be subject to the standard £12 fee.

As for whether it’s worth the trip, it’s OK, I had my first ride on a MTB for 15 years here a few weeks back and I didn’t die… It’s VERY pedally, and to be having decent fun you’ll need to be going pretty quick. There’s a few trail ‘features’ like rock gardens, pumpable bumps ad some small drop offs, but apart from the one about 200m after the start they’re all torwards the end. In fact the best section for me was the cake run, which is the very last section before a short fireroad ride back to the car park. it’s 10 miles for the complete loop.

I’d say swinley has better/more fun sections and more height variation, but bedgebury is OK if you just want some fast swoopy bermy singletrack without much gnar.

It’s certainly more than possible.

Most managed networks won’t actually store data on the PC – it might show on the desktop, or in a folder somewhere on the C: Drive, but it’s just as likely to be on a server – end users can’t be trusted with important data and desktop HDDs fail all the time, any place of a decent size will have all the data on a Server with disc redundancy and a back-up, it just looks like it’s on the PC.

There are some great back-up products that ‘snapshot’ servers, from 15 min intervals to daily – if they’re sensitive to data security they may well be able to have whoever manages their IT to say “bring me content of folder X from this time, on this date”.

That’s a sort of ‘worst case’ for you.

Perhaps more likely they’ll have nightly back-ups of the server, it’s not very easy to pull out individual files from a certain date, because most systems only save changes, so if you delete a file, once it’s backed up that data is lost.

Okay, so assume OP works in a smaller or less managed place and the data was actually on the PC if you’ve deleted more than a little while ago, it won’t be easy to recover, but nothing is impossible, if they want or need to get it back, they can pay £1000 or so for someone to try to recover it, but they’ll need to know what they’ll looking for ideally and it’s a gamble – it might not be there any more. In short when you delete some thing, all you’re doing it telling the PC it’s free to use that bit of disc for something else, it doesn’t over write it straight away.

As to your level of risk.

IF you’re in a spot of bother and your employer is actively looking for something naughty specifically, they’ll probably find it.

If you’re in a spot of bother and your employer is looking for something naughty in general there’s less chance they’ll find it.

If you’re worried about them finding something naughty on your PC but they’re otherwise not ‘having the drains up’ on you, I wouldn’t worry too much.

Truthfully, most of the systems in place these days aren’t there to catch employees out, they’re there to keep data secure in terms of it not falling into the wrong hands or otherwise being lost. The tools that really work well are expensive and need a decent level of skill to administrate, most places don’t use them unless they’re required to.

Wot this man said.

If it’s a decently managed company OR the IT system is provided by another company, they will have nightly/weekly/monthly/yearly backups, so if someone wanted a copy of a file that had been long since deleted, it’s fairly simple. Even if it requires off-site media, that just takes a day or 2 normally.

As for scanning files in an AV/security kind of way, yes they will. If a user plugs in a USB pen drive with a several folders and just one of the files in a folder is something a bit, naughty… well guess who gets an email alert within seconds? :mrgreen: It’s there for security of the system, file servers and desktop/laptop pc’s will automatically scan any new or modified files for trojans/viruses etc.

Source: I work for a managed service provider and have seen the latter happen. Guess who got a phone call not 2 minutes after plugging said USB drive in?

If you’re worried that you’ve had something naughty (as in something with a name that would immediately get picked up by an anti-virus/dodgy file scan) on your PC, if it was a work desktop or a laptop connected to the work network then it would have probabaly already been scanned/seen/alerted. If your IT have suspicions then yes (normally with the appropriate authorisation) they can see your entire deleted emails/files etc as there will (should) be a back up of everything. Deleting incriminating items means nothing, honestly. Just makes you look more guilty.

Regarding the size, I’m also between sizes at 190cm , however my ape index (arm span vs height) is +7cm so the bigger (longer) bike should be correct for me. If you have a negative ape index go for the L, positive then the XL.

Ahh, cheers – last time I looked at the size chart it still had the 2017 figures.

So they’ve gone a degree slacker and 25mm longer on the XL Escarpe 29er VRX, I’m 6ft 3 with an ape index of +7cm (190cm tall in bare feet, 197 arm span) so the XL should do me just fine :mrgreen:

Can’t for the life of me see the geometry link on any of the sommet or Escarpe product pages on CRC, anyone care to post the link?

The Vitus website hasn’t been updated yet, some of the 2018 bikes have only just gone on the CRC website in the last few days. Once the website has been updated with the ’18 models it’ll have all the stats.

If you end up looking for a full bike I don’t think you’ll get a better spec for the money than the Vitus Escarpe 29, the 2018 VRX model has lyric RCT3s, a deluxe RT3, DT Swiss E1700 wheels, RS reverb stealth B1, guide RE brakes, GX eagle, carbon cranks, maxxis minions, 140/150mm travel for £2430 after the British cycling discount.

The Fuel EX 8 29er is on my list to demo too, the trek has a great frame with loads of little touches as well as the reactive shock, but part of me wants a Vitus Escarpe 29er VRX, the 2018 spec looks bloody impressive, the only thing that lets it down is a not quite so quality frame, there’s nothing else I’d change.

I’m getting back into MTB after a 15 year hiatus and I think FS will be the way I’ll go as I’m mid 30’s, not 19 anymore and it could be the lack of saddle time but hardtails become painful and tiring after a couple of hours, when you’re trying to pedal along a rooty, bumpy section and have to sit down because your legs are done in, but when you do the bumps are digging the saddle into your arse over every root… :(

Need to get some demos done, but I think I need the added comfort of a full suss :roll:

I’d add the 2018 Vitus sentier to the list, recon gold RL, full SRAM NX 1×11, and a choice of either 27.5+ or 29er versions, 130mm on the 29er and 140mm on the plus model, £1000 so £900 after the CRC discount.

Also they’ve gone to boost spacing for 2018, and proper boost with a thru axle, not the crappy “boost QR 141*9mm’ on the Roscoe.

Chain reaction cycles is the only place you can buy them, but the 2017 models are all sold out, the 2018 bikes should be available November/December time.