I’ve got one of those Magicshine EVO 1700’s on order to be delivered over the weekend. It’s a Go-Pro mount but I can’t see that being the end of the world.

I’ve resorted to using my old MBBatteries Lumenator on the bars but on anything other than low (2nd mode is ~800 lumens) it tends to make oncoming cars actually stop in the road.  I’m really not a fan of ‘normal’ LED lights being used on the road, it’s definitely dangerous even if the danger isn’t to the rider (assuming the car driver isn’t going to steer into the bright light it can’t see past).

Not necessarily. Maybe it’s your butcher shop, bakery or candlestick production facility…

But then you could always pay yourself an actual salary and then get a bike on cycle to work, you just might pay more tax overall……………..

Commuting to normal place of work isn’t a deductible business expense for the self-employed (or anyone else).

But if you’re self employed then your business address is presumably home, which would be where you do all your admin work, therefore could be considered your “normal” place of work?  And you have to get from there to client offices, sites, whatever?

If your “normal place of work” is a clients office then you’d have IR35 issues?

But once again offers bigger savings the more you spend, so the wealthier benefit more…

Counterargument, the money that someone might save buying a carbon road bike (say £833 off a £5k bike) is probably smaller as a proportion of their income than someone on a lower wage getting £166 off a £1000 bike. And it’s a far better solution than offering them £2100 off but the lower income buyer only between £0 and £210.

Do we complain that food at Waitrose and Jack Foultons both have the same (0%) VAT rate?

And do something for the self employed.

Just have the company buy it if it’s for work purposes.

A far simpler option is surely to remove VAT from bikes? Make it a 20% saving for everyone regardless of tax band.

The problem with this idea is there’s almost no benefit to those on minimum wage.  If you want to buy a bike then lots of shops offer 0%, klarna, V12, etc and if you don’t pay tax then there’s few or little taxes saving to be had, and if it pushed someone’s income below the NI threshold they’d risk saving a few quid on a bike then having no state pension.

In the meantime C2W operates as a big subsidy to middle class twonks like me buying expensive bikes income tax free. (To be fair, I bought a cargo bike that has 95% been used for commuting and not some carbon roadie nonsense).

I think limiting it to 1k for bikes and maybe 2k for ebikes would quell the vanity chariots for the middle class comments and perhaps limit the bikes to ones more akin to those you might actually ride to work on.

To be fair I commute on some roadie nonsense (albeit not bought via C2W).

No putoline or anything crazy like that, though.

Just bite the bullet and do it.

I suspect there are now better options than putoline, and I’m not sure it’s not changed recipes over the years, my 2nd tin was a lot softer than the first.

Currently I’m working on a DIY formulation, but I’d not recommend it.  There’s a bit more to it than just adding some tungsten disulphide or PTFE powder to some candlewax.

I’d been setting my tyres in the 24 psi area on the Joe Blow.  This seems to only be around 19 psi on the D2. I set them at 24 psi on the D2 and had a horrible ride on any rooty bits.  Which is correct I don’t know but I’ve now starting setting them using the D2 but at 19 psi.

Surely that’s still 24 on the Joe Blow?

The trick is to be less fussy about the absolute number and comparisons to anyone else, and more fussy about how it actually feels.  If it feels crap, stick 20% more in, see if it’s more or less crap, then try 20% less, then you’ll have a better idea what the change should feel like and can make smaller 10 or 5% adjustments.

I’ve got the SKS one, it’s a PITA.

1) to get the continuous reading mode you have to select it every time because it defaults to the other mode when it switches on.

2) the batteries go flat in seemingly no time

3) the rotating head feels that only turns half way like it’s more hassle than it’s worth.  Because the universe hates 50/50 chances you can guarantee the two options available to you will be the screen facing the floor, or the screen facing the tyre (less of a push-bike issue as you can just hold it the other side of the bike, but it’s probably the reason for point-1 when checking cars/motorbikes/trailers).

Had an Oxford DigiGuage before that and it was all-round a much nicer product to use.

I actually ended up buying a motorbike TPMS system off ali-express, i didn’t like having it on the motorbike, but it’s actually really useful for the push bikes because you can hold the screen in one hand and the ‘guage’ in the other. No more need to contort you head to the floor to read/adjust pressures!

I’m not sure there are many moderates left in the tory party after Johnson’s purges. The assumption that centrists will leave the party split and marginalised is probably overegged.

That sort of depends what sort of candidates they find at the next election.  The exodus and collapse last time round means that in 5 years time there going to be a lot of new Tory MP’s. Unless the right wing can survive at the top of the party until 2029 and be organized enough to control MP selection, there may well be enough moderate MP’s with their no confidence letters for the day after the election to install someone more palatable to the center.

Clerical error. Plead not guilty and state that your license details were provided previously as your defence.

Depends what the crime was?

Speeding – you’d have to pled guilty, and the rest is mitigation

Not filling in the form correctly – depends if you did or not.

As above, read some private eye (look for the Paul Foot awards podcast episode where they give the award to and interview the journalist who’s investigating what an absolute shitshow the SJP is) .  Don’t try and be clever and say not guilty, then explain that actually you are etc etc, the flaw in the system is that it’s a magistrate who rubber stamps a case every 40s or so on average.  They won’t read any of it and will just say guilty but without any leniency for actually pleading guilty. Put the effort into getting out of the system entirely.

And cost more to run.

Yes, but the goal was to heat the room, so efficiency is the enemy.

Going out on a limb but when i was a student I was upto more interesting things than reading the Which guide to dehumidifiers ?

dehumidifiers don’t really heat rooms, they are internal to the room so the only heat input is the power to the compressor which is relatively low.  In larger houses they don’t really dry anything out either as moisture quickly comes from elsewhere to replace the small amount you have removed.

Not the case.

If a dehumidifier takes 8l of water out of the air, then in terms of energy that’s the inverse of boiling dry an 8L saucepan.

You’ll always get more heat out of it than you put electricity in.

Running mine flat out it uses ~660W (Meaco DBB8L), but the heat output is nearer 900W.  About the same as a decent sized oil filled radiator, but with the added bonus of nice dry air.

A condenser type would be more efficient, You could probably find a model that did 15-20l/day for the same energy usage,  But it’d be more expensive to buy. And the criteria was to heat the room without pissing off the other housemates.  If the heating isn’t on, then the loft/dormer is going to get pretty damp if she’s up there studying  / drinking tea / breathing.

You might considerer a dehumidifier too.  If the room gets humid with being at the top of the house, and all the humidity-generating activities, then it might benefit from being dehumified.  Running a dehumidifier will also heat the room.  Think it heats the room more efficiently than a heater (I have the figure four times as much in my mind, but stand to be corrected…)

At least >1:1, 4 seems optimistic, that’s heat pump territory where you are taking the heat from an external source as well as the humidity in the room.

Also makes sense as it avoids accusations of “heating” the house.  A desiccant type will be less efficient (i.e. more heat).

You’ll need to figure out the drainage as even a small Meaco DD8L will max out it’s 8l/d in a student house, so the little 2l basket built in won’t be enough. Does she have a sink /ensuite in her room? Otherwise she’ll be emptying it constantly.

TBH we did similar in our student digs, the thermostat was set pretty low then the person on the ground floor “living room” bedroom put an oil rad in their room as it weas the coldest and the heat would rise anyway. Cheaper to run that and warm his room up above freezing in the morning than have the whole house heated for the ~30min we were up before leaving for lectures.

A room at the top of the house would in many cases be one of the warmest so whats going wrong if it’s not?

Heat rises by convection, but the loft has by far the most surface area so unless all the doors in the house are open letting the heat rise then it could well be freezing cold because it loses heat but nothing rises to replace it.

Reform need to be defeated by a legislative agenda that gives working people and those in poverty real hope and belief that the government is working for them, not by a restrictive voting system that distorts democracy.

The irony of this is that if Labour does a good job of delivering what they’re supposed to ………..

Do you mean “socially conservative”? Even that’s a polite euphemism, isn’t it.

Yes

Check her USA appearances since losing the PM position to see where she is on “social” issues.

I’ll grant her the benefit of the doubt and allow for a difference between what she may have perhaps honestly believed pre-brexit and what she’ll say for her employer as a freelance rent-a-gob.

We will see if after the Tory leadership ballot and the new leader is appointed whether there is a sudden surge to Labour, I somehow doubt it.

I doubt it too, in the wilderness years of polling between elections there’s going to be a huge number of “they’re all ****” responses, which then crystalize into “Well they’re not as **** as …….” on election day.  Starmer might have abysmal approval ratings now, but I’d bet he could still win an election Tomorrow (just maybe not so decisively).

I agree somewhat, however the unknown is how many current Tory voters would stay if it lurched (further!) to the right – many have already defected to the Libs, and equally how many Reform could vote Tory, since many are disaffected Labour voters. Hard to see how they can square that circle.

And add to that a bit of lib/lab tactical voting, our constituency was won by a minuscule margin despite a 3-way campaign.  It was a new constituency, mostly from splitting up a former Tory stronghold. One side went Lib the other Labour.  Next time round I’d hope Labour and the Lib Dems might come to a quiet deal where one doesn’t seriously contest the other and comes 3rd to keep the Tories out.

They are about to be lead by another Liz Truss

Was Truss ever politically conservative rather than just economically?

All outgoing links, however, are run through our affiliate provider Skimlinks. We will score a commission on the sale of between 1-5% but only if that retailer is part of the affiliate network. Not every company or retailer is. Retailers need to join an affiliate program and commit a set % as a commission for that to work. I can check any retialer or link to see if there’s a commission opportunity at the end so if you tell me where you are thinking of buying from I can let you know if there’s a chance for us to get the commission.

Presumably broadly the same as going to buy something via Topcashback, Quidco, etc?

But don’t worry too much about that – even a click only nets us between 5p-£1 depending on the product being advertised.

Missing a trick there not having adverts from Reform, I’m sure plenty of us would quite happily transfer a few quid from Farage’s grift to ST!  Think of it like the Mails side-bar-of-shame, a little box of morally abhorrent adverts to click on to feed the hamsters and then ignore.  I’d feel guilty clicking on any nice companies link now if I don’t buy anything!

Doesn’t look bad to be fair. I thought they’d gone bust tho! Or was that just speculation?!

Bought by Winlong Garments Limited, who are owned by private equity firm Baaj Capital LLP. Nope, never heard of either company either, but they still exist and TBH a bit of slightly ruthless corporate business-ness might not do them any harm in the long term.  It’d be nice so see some of the clothing actually get developed as a range rather than just random items of varying fit and quality.

I’d be checking out decathlons latest offerings

+ a half.

The £39 Van Rysel semi-transparentrain jacket is popular among roadies, but is probably a bit fragile for off-road (and the cut is pretty much head down, arse up so won’t suit bimbling) .

ST liked this one, Rockrider ST 700 Rain Jacket review: £70 brilliance – Singletrack World Magazine, doesn’t seem to exist anymore but I assume the “900 Comfort” is the new version? Men’s Mountain Bike Rainproof Jacket Comfort 900 – Green ROCKRIDER | Decathlon

If it’s an option then Trendz (i.e. Halfords) have various Scale’s in stock which are even better VFM on Cycle 2 Work (I was looking because we can only use the Halfords scheme).

Or if steel is your thing then Singular have Swifts in stock again.  Personally I think light bikes feel faster, but probably aren’t.  I’m currently lusting after a Strael (or Brother Stroma) but in my head know I’ll probably just get a Cannondale Synapse because it’ll be 2lb lighter (frame weight plus putting the money saved towards some lighter bits).

As for bikepacking mounts: If I had mounts under the downtube or on the top tube I’d use them, but they’re nothing some velcro straps or rubber strap-on cages can’t resolve.

Magicshine EVO 1700 are down to £67 again on Amazon, “Prime” delivery seems to now be 5 days so I’ve not tried it yet, but the STVZO style cut-off and a switchable main beam combination seems like a winner.

I’m intrigued, all of the negative reviews seem to be too negative….

One review I found postulated that some demographics watched the first one as a comic book movie where the downtrodden little guy rose up to be the hero of the film.  You were supposed to perhaps have some sympathy for his situation early on but you weren’t supposed to root for him in the end (c.f. Walter White?).  And that demographic doesn’t like musicals either.

Electrical tape +1

As for electrical tape… Well it’s not porous! But it’s about as tough as a wet piece of paper in the context here… Might work at fat bike pressures, certainly don’t expect it to work at normal MTB pressures as it will not be strong enough not to tear on the spoke holes.

A few layers is fine upto about 50psi.  It doesn’t work on the road though.

It has the added advantage of being bale to tune the thickness by adding more wraps until a troublesome setup will seal.

Was waiting for someone to suggest Gorilla tape…

Guys… Please… DO NOT use gorilla tape as a tubeless tape (at least not on alloy rims, might be ok on carbon)… It is porous and most tubeless sealant contains ammonia.

At which point, a thin strip of gorilla tape over the spoke holes followed by electrical tape works fine.

My 80yr old neighbor came out and took the hammer off my OH whilst she was trying to install some lawn edging

I’ve seen her use kitchen knives so I can imagine how dangerous it probably looked.

News to me. I’ve never bodged a mains electrical repair with duct tape but that’s handy to know in case I’m ever tempted and have silver to hand so thanks!

It’s a blurry line, but generally “Duct” tape was designed for sealing ducts, so is horribly sticky, great on hard surfaces, and long lasting and a bit waterproof. Usually looks like plasticy ripstop.

“Gaffer” tape is a product from film and theater, gaffer is the job title for lighting technician*.  So it’s heat resistant, works on carpets as well, can be written on with sharpie, but also more temporary and doesn’t leave a residue. Usually looks like cloth.  I wouldn’t assume gaffer tape to be good insulation, but I’d not use duct tape anywhere where it being conductive might be an issue.

Electrical tape – shouldn’t actually be used for insulation. It’s insulating enough that a stray tail of it contacting something won’t cause a problem, but 0.1mm of PVC isn’t going to do the same job as ~2mm,  Fine for color coding wires, taping them together etc, but it’s not “insulation tape”.

*Gaffer = person with a gaff, gaff = big wooden pole, big wooden pole = the thing used to open the big skylights on the rooves of studios to let light in before high powered electrical lights were more common.

No, black is fine, black is fine, black is fine.

Damn you Amazon, damn you to hell!

That’s how it’s supposed to work.

a) clear out the version no one is buying

b) clear out your bank account before some other annual event does.

Prime day – buy stuff before the winter holidays wipe you out

Black Friday – same but last attempt

January sales – clearing out any spare cash before you realize January payday is a log time off.

Summer sales – you’ve not been on holiday yet have you, how about spending those savings on a new sofa?

I went for a walk yesterday with the possibility of a pint at the end.

The potential cost of the pint put me off calling in at the pub.

I’ll be far from not boozing this October but I might save a few quid by cutting back on the pub visits.

A local bar is advertising “£5* a pint” for October.

*selected draft ales only

One of the many reasons I quit booze.  I felt I was missing out on living by spending too much time in the pub or feeling lethargic the next day.  I’d had enough of that kind of living, I’d enjoyed it for a long time but the enjoyment had fizzled out.  30 years of drinking is plenty, 30 years of doing other stuff without alcohol seems like a fair deal to me.

+1

On holiday or at Christmas when you’re expected to  drink with every meal, by about day 7 I feel like crap and sleep  quality is suffering.

Or a few drinks at friends houses on a Saturday night, it’s great, except it ends up writing off the entire weekend because you can’t really fit in any other plans  from Saturday lunchtime onward, and a couple of beers is enough of  a marginal  loss to my meager FTP to have me launched out the back on the first climb of the Sunday clubrun even if i do wake up for it.

Gobochul / mefty +1

The heat shrink + solder connectors are indeed brilliant witchcraft, for doing things like car wiring looms, but you’d still need some chunky heatshrink to cover them up afterwards and make it look neat (when making the joins, offset the cuts by the length of the heatshrink so they take up less space), the glue lined / waterproof stuff also provides a bit of mechanical strength so they can’t pull apart.

But ……. with my PAT tester hat on, I’d probably say it’s a fail because the insulation is still damaged and you can’t say for sure that the repair is better insulated than the original. Whereas a connection box is easy to check.

 in black if you’re posh.

That’s silver ducttape, which is often not-insulating because there’s an aluminized layer in there somewhere to reflect heat in HVAC ducts.

Gaffer tape tends to be electrically insulating because it’s intended to go on theater/set lighting.

And FWIW some of the marathon events i’ve done use RFID chips and readers at multiple points on the course to check that you’ve passed through,

That’s what the red chips on the fork legs are at most races.

In the example being discussed they were either not working (unlikely) or just doesn’t work as a solution as it doesn’t tell you if they’re crashed, or just in the DS’s car, riding back to the start off-course, etc.

From the article:

What’s special about Zürich is that there are laps and timing chips. Every time riders cross the finish line or any timing point, their times are recorded. Technically, her chip should have registered crossing the finish line for those laps. Obviously, it didn’t, and no one checked, which would have been a major oversight.

In this case she dropped off the back and no one checked up on her.  Which TBH is probably normal, the people in the team car will only be caring about the race up ahead, that’s their job after all. I doubt having been dropped that unless there was a major race stopping crash ahead that allowed them to catch up the team would have contacted them until they were back on the bus anyway.

Without radios, DS have no idea where their riders are or what they’re doing. In the case of Zürich, one of her teammates would have looked for her to tell her to go to the car. That alone would have indicated that she was not in the main group. If the DS passed her, the DS would have radioed the feed zone about the situation. If she didn’t pass the feed zone, that would be a red flag. There’s a lot of radio communication within a team to track their riders, so this could have decreased the response time, especially if the organizers didn’t have a marshal to oversee the descent and if the commissaires made a human error.

GPS trackers might be the solution, but most clubs CX and Cat4 road races struggle to break even or get enough volunteers to run them as it is, without adding a whole load more expensive tech and having to find people to admin it.

I’m doing  Orctober instead, spending the month making sure short people don’t throw stolen jewelry into volcanoes.

Don’t forget ….. Aftermarket windscreens favoured by your insurance tend to be shite.

I’ve never had an after market one last more than a couple of years. Yet the original usually lasts 10.

Can’t always be that lucky with the original/unlucky with the new one surely……and the new ones always pick up minor scratches/marks easier.

Same here, OH’s fiesta got a new screen a couple of years back and it’s got a few big scratches already, including one somehow on the inside . It’s also a funny color, or maybe it just refracts light differently because I’m sure it sometimes looks blue and other days yellow, it’s definitely filtering out some wavelengths.

The heating elements on my old car and the work transit (which seemed to be particularly prone to chips and cracks) were more visible too,

So someone shaved a layer off your car windscreen and its not weaker? OK…

The strength comes from the fact it’s laminated over a plastic layer.  Polishing off a few microns won’t have a measurable impact.

Not the pedal from the crank.

To be fair, the axle is usually left behind.

Really? I think power meter head units and displays of your output have led to more dull races than radios.

Same but different, team radio was the power meter of the 00’s. They should get rid of both.

You do realise that blanket safety rules don’t need to be applied across every level of racing?

There’s quite a difference in the safety precautions taken in an F1 race and a local navigational rally.

Yes, but in that example F1 is the inherently dangerous starting point so requires more safety related regulations.

In the same way a world champs should be well spectated, with team cars, cameras, officials, etc etc. And the riders are competent.

A cat 4 road race is lucky to have a couple of cars and some NEG motorbikes, zero spectators, and if you get dropped you’re on your own to chase back to the group. And cat 4 races can be absolute carnage, It’s not uncommon for the big yellow taxi to be called. If you want to look at safety (and you spent the first page moaning about growing participation being more important than viewing figures) then that’s where the problems are, it’s Martin from accounts thinking he’s Tom Pidcock, not Tom Pidcock. And TBH I doubt there is a good solution to that.

The time limit proposed is even more daft.

*In a layby somewhere near the top of the Torumalet pass*

DS: : hey Tom, here’s your areo descending frame with slammed saddle.

Tom: alright, see you at the bottom for a strategy meeting over a 3 course energy gell and rice cake lunch  while we swap back to the climbing frame.

You’re not going to convince competitors to be uncompetitive.

There’s also the cost implications of any tech changes. Arguably they’re most needed on your local cat4 amd 3/2 Sunday morning race that your local club puts on but no one watches. Or even the Sunday club run or Tuesday night TT which is lucky to get a marshal on each junction.  A race with a £2 entry fee isn’t going to survive if they have to provide mandatory spot trackers to all competitors.

And yes, @brucewee radios have ruined the spectacle of racing. That’s not some conspiracy at the UCI to kill riders, it’s the team’s looking for an excuse to justify radios.

They seem to get inconsistent for me?

They start off nice and positive and take a bit of a kick to get out but they release with a big CLICK. Then they get loose, but the release needs more force and gets less positive.

Could be worse, Shimano steel cleats last ages whereas the brass ones on time or CranBrothers last a winter (if the pedals lasted that long)!

Other way round IME, eBay usually gets the best price as it has the biggest audience and more newbies.

I’ve always found when I’ve “won” 2nd hand bikes off ebay it’s felt like a really knockdown price to the point of feeling really guilty when collecting them, usually evidenced when I got o sell it (often a few years and thousands of miles later) somewhere else I think “I’ll just list it for what I paid for it” and end up with people queueing to buy it.

Bought a motorbike* off there recently and it was probably 25% less than similar bikes were selling for privately.

*petrol powered, not sarcasm

This will have a big impact on the resale value and therefore options for trading up and changing e-bikes in the future.

Will it though?

Ebay’s always been the place to sell stuff in a hurry, generally for less than you get on forums/gumtree/craigslist/marketplace. I doubt it’s actually that large a slice of the 2nd hand market?

I suspect bikes were optimised for what they do 99% of the time, not their handling at 100km/hr.  I’m a lot more confident on my girlfriends shopping bike going downhill than I am on my road bike but I doubt I’m going much faster.

Downhills have become more important in terms of being able to launch attacks but they are still a tiny part of what the riders do in a bike race.  The bikes are still designed for climbing and riding on the flat.

Yes, but any attempt to make the bike “better” would only increase the speed in the one place they crash, fast corners.

Same with other leftfield ideas suggested like no pedaling or speed limits. All you’re doing is making the corners even more important.

If you want slower corners, make them ride 21mm tyres with rubber hard enough to last the entire professional season.  They’d be sliding everywhere but would be doing it at a crawling pace.

Also, the UCI have no problems dictating the rules for how bikes should be designed.  Perhaps they should be looking at the geometry rules and tyre rules.  If they are going to include stages where people are going to be hitting 80-100km/hr then I don’t see anything wrong with forcing teams to use bikes that are optimised for it, even if that means the bikes aren’t optimised for the rest of the riding.

They kind of are, the basic shape of the bike is dictated by the UCI to look like it did 100 year ago, and those bikes looked like they did because it’s probably the best solution for bike handling.  And they’ve banned the unnatural positions riders were taking to try and make that shape of bike faster (i.e. they now have to hold the bars and sit on the saddle).

If you wanted to go fast downhill it’s be on some sort of recumbent / prone bike.

Most crashes are in the corners where riders are slowed down (sometimes enough, hence the crash), if you mandated slack angles and wide sticky tyres they’d still corner on the limit, they’d just be going twice as fast.  Someone said up there that crashing on the road is like jumping out of a car on the motorway, which is true if they crashed on a straight, but they don’t,  most crashes are in the corners at <30kmh.  No one (other than people riding motorbikes in t-shirts)  needs to see the results of actually hitting the tarmac at 60mph without protective clothing.

I’m 165mm cranks.

Mechanically it would make sense to pair short cranks with a lower saddle set back on the rails a bit because the bit you’re interested in is the force you can produce at the ~3 o’clock position, so it doesn’t make sense to raise the saddle with short cranks.

Unfortunately we’re in the middle of a trend for 78deg seat angles and people squeezing 200mm droppers into bikes they don’t fit with. So either I’m wrong or MTB’ers are fashion victims.

We had to replace my son’s Dub in his, not too-well-maintained bike and had him standing on the opposite pedal, while I tried with an allen key with a metre long barbell bar as an extender. All it felt like was going to happen was the allen key would snap… We happened to be going to BPW and gave it to the workshop. Got it back and they didn’t even mention it! Pro workshop for the win :D

To be fair, this is the kind of thing the ugga-dugga gun was invented for, they probably didn’t even have to hold the crank still whilst it rattled it loose.

Halfords (and other brands) will do “intensive glass cutter” type products, it’s basically T-cut for glass and works reasonably well for getting decades of pock marking and scratches out.

A drill / grinder pad attachment would definitely make the process a bit quicker as it’s obviously a lot harder than paint.

Anyone have any recommendations? I will check with insurance – I know we can have it repaired for free/not much if it gets chipped, but don’t think scratches are covered.

Insurance won’t pay for wear and tear on the windscreen, only if it’s broken by an actual event.