The other issue is with the callipers. There is very little clearance between the rotor and the pads. You may find that any slight kink in the rotor seems to result in uncorrectable brake rub. I can understand low clearance for a nice instant bite point, yet this here does seem to just cause unavoidable issues. A bite point adjustment would’ve been a nice addition to the set.

Unless I’m missing something, bite point adjust hasn’t impacted on pad clearance since the days of the Hope C2. It just adjusts the position of the lever / master cylinder. Pad clearance is mostly down to how the caliper seals deflect and recover their shape.

Restarting didn’t resolve it, in the end I manged to do it via garmin express on the PC with a cable, but then it only does western Europe.  Which is fine except the watch itself was still trying to download the full europe each time it was plugged in and it wouldn’t let me delete / unqueue the full version. So I did a factory reset and did it again via the PC which seems to be fine.

The rumour that T212 makes money with a wider bid/offer spread just isn’t true, as that isn’t allowed in ISA’s in the uk. They make their money from their CFD arm, which really is gambling.

They also have currency conversion fees, make sure when you’re looking for a share / ETF that it’s traded in £ (unless it’s a non London listing that you’re specifically interested in).

  I’ve been looking at it today for the first time and obviously it’s baffling. I can see green lines pointing up, red lines pointing down, lots of jargon which I don’t understand, lots of chat threads and articles which I’ve been reading.

The good thing is you can just leave your money in cash  and get a really good rate of interest on it while you read.

Ignore 99.99% of advice or discussions on T212, WallStreetBets, etc.  There’s a lot of people who think they’re god because they’ve made 20% the last year or two, no lots of people made 20% the last couple of years, they also lost that 40% in 2020 unless they’re new (in which case pay even less attention to their advice).  A lot of those same shares have probably lost money in the last  4-6months as the markets have cooled off.  For every loud mouthed winner who’s made 10% in the last month with the Vanguard Emerging markets ETF (yipee!), there’s someone who’s watched the FTSE 100 be completely flat, they just don’t post about it. The sensible people probably have a mix of both, it’s dull but it’s less painful to watch every time Japan claws it’s way back into the green only to crash again.  For every person who made money on NVIDIA  or ARM last year, there’s someone scratching their head wondering where Intel went wrong.  And if they mention RoaringKitty then laugh and walk away.

We’ve got a HP Deskjet 4100 and the instant ink subscription.

It works from the PC, from phones, from laptops, it never throws a strop about running out of ink, it just works.

I was late and in a hurry this morning and managed to print a returns label for something from my phone as i  was looking for my keys, and it worked! That would have taken several hours with the old Epson ?

I’m usually pretty anti-subscription business models but this one gets a big thumbs up after all the hours/days/weeks of my life I must have wasted over the years trying to get the printer to work with whatever it’s (apparently not) connected to and accept the 50p cheaper off-brand cartridge.

By the time I’d sat in traffic, been diverted, found a parking place and walked in, I could have ridden to work, showered and changed. Ride was always just under an hour. The car could be anything from 30 mins to 2hrs depending on traffic, accidents, roadworks etc. Same with trains – walking to station, train delays, walking from station to work, it was invariably just as quick to ride.

The main incentive that people understand is time. Everyone knows time but very few people know how far a mile is. They might know their car commute is 3 miles but it takes them 30 mins in stop-start rush hour traffic so they assume that 3 miles is a really long way. But when you say that even at a leisure pace, 3 miles is a 20 minute ride, it starts to make sense. That’s invariably more of an incentive than the invisible “you’ve saved 1.2kg of CO2” aspect.

+1

At an extreme my longest commute by bike has been 25miles from Reading to the outskirts of London.

Google will tell you that’s 31 miles /40min by car. It’s not, even at 4am you’ll get caught by roadworks on the M4, and at any other time it’s a dice roll between an hour and occasionally 2.

So to guarantee I’ll be in the office for enough 9am meetings that it doesn’t raise an eyebrow if I’m late I had to set off at 7:30.  Or I could set off at 7:20* by bike and get in on time every day.  Bike commuting just isn’t that slow.

Plus that was £50/week extra in my pocket from fuel.

Plus I didn’t need a gym or Zwift membership saving further time and money.

*actual time depending on whether I showered before or after, but to actually getting out of bed times it made no difference

We were thinking of having a prize for most CO2 saved or something.

That’s a pretty good idea IMO because it’s fair-ish across all staff if they can pick walk / bike / public transport / car share and make a saving (i.e. cycling 10 miles and car sharing 20 ends up about even).

Our office went to a booking system for car park spaces. There’s no practical limit on the spaces, so everyone could have one, but you have to log onto the system up to 4 weeks in advance and book it. It’s been just enough of a stick to convince quite a few people to ride in.  Because unless you were organized you were booking spaces in the overflow car park 10-15 minutes walk away.

Those who want to not use their cars already will and the rest wont be that bothered. Why would I want to spend longer commuting than I had to, I would also include shower / changing time in that ie door to desk?  It my personal time that is being used, if work want me to spend longer getting to work that I need to that’s fine if they want to pay or incentivise me to do it. I have commuted by bike and its much nicer sat in the car

Do you turn up to work by car naked and unwashed?  Otherwise it’s no difference in time, I reckon it actually saves me time showering at work as

a) I’ve had to get organized and take the big bag of ironed clothes in on Monday so there’s zero faff choosing clothes.

b) I’m not dithering with breakfast TV, the radio, and whatever else is competing for my attention around the house.  Cycling clothes on and out the door.

c) It tends to mean I eat breakfast at my desk on company time, not on the sofa watching Naga and Chris interview a dancing dog.

d) It’s riding bikes, it’s fun. Certainly more fun than sitting in a car for 40min, then getting home and sitting on a turbo trainer or going to the gym to try and offset that time spent driving.

Or do as folk at my place did, A drives to B and then B drives A into work.

Not that hard with a tiny amount of thought.

Or A just drives every day and B pays the fuel plus a bit.

Broadly speaking – if the people you know  don’t do anything, or don’t have anything interesting to say or show about what the do, then social networks can only offer you dross. It would have been some other form of lazy dross before AI was a way of making more dross even more lazily. The feed has to contain something, how soon you hit mostly dross depends on how few people you’re connect to and how  little / rarely  they post anything.

Back in the old days when facebook was a social network you simply opened it up once in a while, caught up on the ten or so posts since the least time, “poked” the girl you’d been flirting with in the union bar the night before back, then logged off again (on a PC, because this was a time when not even al feature phones featured sufficient pixels to run snake!) .

The filler, reels, or compulsion to follow thousands of accounts that post daily is all the same to Zuckerberg, because they make money keeping you in the app longer.  The last thing he want’s is you to just use it to see what friends and family are up to.

They do work, and are arguably more efficient at heating than a lot of options because they emit substantially more heat than they use electricity.

But it takes a fairly big dehumidifier to do even a small job.  They’re best for small, sealed, unheated spaces, like boats left over the winter.

When it comes to keeping a house dry, you’ve got easy access to dry air (the outside world, cold air holds very little moisture) and heating.  So a better option is probably to just circulate some air from outside, then warm it up.

To put some numbers to that, lets say the house has a volume of 300m3

at 21C and 100% RH (say you’ve just cooked some pasta), that’s about 5.5kg of water.

At 5C it’s 1.8kg.

So just opening a couple of windows for a minute to fill the house with fresh air will remove 3.7kg of water.

It takes ~135kJ to heat that air back up again, or 0.04kWh.

TL:DR I have a dehumidifier in my gym-shed over the winter months to deal with the moisture when I’m not in there.  When I am in there I just open the windows.  Having said that, a reasonably efficient dehumidifier is probably as cost effective at heating as gas/oil and better than electric, so may well pay back over a few winters anyway.

There are three types. Cheap Peltier ones that aren’t great, compressor ones that work well, and desiccant, The latter is supposed to be best, but reviews say they guzzle electricity so check the power consumption.

Desiccant – works well in the cold (i.e. a shed / boat / garage) , expensive to run.

Compressor – works best at room temp, cheapest to run

I’ve got the DBBL8 in the shed on a timer, it comes on a couple of hours a day time just before I intend to use it to take the edge off the chill so it’s doing two jobs in one.

As above, the low-ish risk option is to just buy some vanguard or similar ETF’s.

Give or take a bit my pie looks something like:

30% S&P500

10% FTSE 100

10% FTSE 250

10% FTSE Developed Europe excl UK

10% FTSE Developed Asia excl Jap

5% FTSE Japan

15% FTSE Emerging Markets

10% Franklin FTSE India (this is the only non-vanguard one as they didn’t do one)

I don’t have it setup to auto-invest anymore, the monthly standing order just stays as cash and I make a quasi-informed decision where to put it.

I’ve made some money on short term trading with individual shares, but it’s risky. You’re basically playing poker where you’re trying to guess how good every  other player’s hand (their information on the company)  is relative to your own.  It’s only underpriced if you’re certain it’s going to go up but everyone else assumes it’s going down.  And if everyone else thinks it’s going down, you’ve got to be certain your information is better than theirs.

They give you 1% cashback, which a fun way to buy individual shares in the non-isa with real money and see just how bad a trader you actually are.

If you want money for retirement, then generally a SIPP is a better bet than an ISA, because you get tax relief on your contributions, which can then compound over time.

Depends, I figure that my pension age income will be taxed at 20% in the future.

So whether I invest 80% of my gross income now in an ISA and get to keep 100% of that in the future, or invest 100% now but only keep 80% in the future is equal.  N.I. makes a difference but then I also have the flexibility to spend that money now if I need it, not have it tied up for another 20 years.

There is no compounding* of the tax breaks. 100% x 80% x 1.05^(years) = 100% x 1.05^(years) x 80%

*well there is on the 25% lump sum, but that’s relying on it still existing in the future.

Which is better probably depends on your age and how big a lump sum you intend to withdraw.  If you’re young I’d suggest it’s less worthwhile, you’ll need that ISA for a house, car, kids, whatever, long before you retire. If you’re approaching retirement but only have a pot barely big enough to pay an income then pile it all into the pension and treat it as a deferred tax-free paycheck on retirement day.

I’ve wheeled my bike round a supermarket before when I’ve had to mid ride, debatable whether it should be allowed or not. On the one hand what’s the problem? On the other it’d be a problem if more than a handful of people tried to do it at the same time.

Otherwise just take a lock.  I figure expecting to take the bike in has the same sort of feeling as expecting to be able to park on the double yellows outside with hazards on because you’re just popping in.

We’ve already had to have a leaking diverter valve replaced under warranty, I’d imagine the cost of that exceeds the cost of a service.

They’re about £20, bit of a faff to fit depending on how many isolator valves there are so it’s either a half hour job or a couple of hours and a bottle of inhibitor if the system needs draining.

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/256539427910

Yep, that’s going to have an HG freehub, which will go up to Shimano/SRAM Road 11 speed no problem.

As long as it’s recent-ish.  10s freehubs are narrower than 11s so there’s backwards compatibility but not forwards. So it’s probably fine as long as the wheels are newer than the groupset.

Are there other routes I am missing?

2nd hand ~2005 Shimano groupsets? The era with exposed cables has much better shifting than later hidden cables and is probably peanuts now.

Or the leftfield options, L-Twoo and Empire? They both do 2×12 ~105 level groupsets for not much more than a set of Tiagra shifters (depending on which bits you buy, I’d still get 105 cassette, chain and some decent chainrings elsewhere).  I’ve a couple of friends funning different chinese groupsets and they all seem to be working just fine. Personally I’ve suntour and microshift cassettes with KMC chains and they’re just not as clean shifting as shimano so I’d not skimp on those bits.

Yea, it’s rapidly going downhill.

Every time they make it more useful, it seems to increase the amount of crap that come with it.  It’s either deliberate

Yeah, it’s shite.

And they are going to use what you do post to train the AI to post more shite or something like that.

Different issues.

One is just using your post to train language models / image generators. The other is pages generating “content” via other AI models which now makes up the bulk of the suggested posts in peoples feed.

Standard shimano, sram, magura- all fine.

Basically that, I think shimano give slightly more power (I’m using them with SRAM brakes out of choice), but I’ve not tried Magura for a long time.

I’d avoid anything that’s more air than rotor. I’ve tried a lot of them and just found they lacked power.  A 203mm Aligator/Airrotor/A2Z/TRP might weigh as little as a standard 180mm rotor, but it’s about as powerful as a 180mmrotor too, so it’s pointless. I’ve still got them on my CX/Gravel bike but that’s rarely braking hard.

Rotor thickness isn’t a massive deal, it has an impact on cooling and how resistant it might be to warping or knocks but unless you accidentally go so thin that the pads fall out.  It doesn’t affect bite point etc unless it’s so thick that the pistons can’t retract far enough.

Not essential, when we bought we asked to see the last ones as it was being rented out so we knew they must exist even if they had recently expired. I just wanted reassurance that they hadn’t been condemned and that was why they were selling.

In the end the boiler packed in 18months later because the condensate pipe didn’t have an air gap and froze solid. And the electrics we had the consumer unit replaced and he found a few serious issues that needed fixing that weren’t flagged on the old report (a completely unprotected spur to the loft). And another has since spotted that said spur is made from the wrong type of cable running up an exterior wall which will need replacing or putting in conduit but isn’t an immediate issue.

You can always say they are welcome to have the inspections done at their expense. Our sellers refused to spend any money so we had to get all our own indemnities etc.

Northwind +1

Mines a cheap ~£25 one off Amazon I think from some unknown Chinese brand and it’s OK for most stuff. I had a £600 JBC station at work and the tips each cost more each than my home station. It was better, and easier to do a good job with it because it was higher power and the tips were physically larger pieces of metal so the temperature was more consistent when actually soldering. But the one at home still does the job.

especially when so many manufacturers seem to not understand hose routing for those who have the rear brake on the lefr

Even the On-One Scandal manages to mess this up on a frame designed in the UK ?

I was still in my singlespeeding infancy at that point and wasn’t aware that there were more than a few wierdos doing it!  I think I may have been aware that SSUK/SSEC/SSWC were a thing, but assumed they were a race rather than a rolling pub crawl

To appease some of the grumpy Scots on here, Callendar Park in Falkirk just opened a new pump track / jump park that was partly funded by Cycling Scotland as a legacy from last year’s UCI World Championships.

It’s an outrage, why was funding for a WC held in the UK not spent outside Scotland, etc, etc, etc.

Haha, I’d bike packed there on something silly like 32-14 which turned out to be great for the racing as I could fly down the hardpacked sand with the tailwind and get round the marker but 2.1″ were far too skinny for the top half of the course.

It was an epic spot for a beer stop! Plus the trip to the pub the night before. IoW and the Lake District were definitely the best SSUK I’ve been to for the social riding.

[edit – I meant harder than the numbers suggested, I’m not suggesting they were harder than last weekend!]

Practise lap?!? Things have changed.

More like a sociable bimble lap with a drink.

I’ve done some climbing-v-distance analysis difficulty analysis of previous events – ranked hardest to easiest:

1. 2024   Quantocks

2. 2022  Llandegla

3. 2021  Yorkshire

4. 2017  Lake District

5. 2023  Llandegla

6. 2018 Isle of Wight

7. 2016 Coventry

How is the IOW not last? There can barely have been 5m between the bottom corner and the top of the loose sand, even with it being a short lap?

’22 Llandega felt worse than it was because it was in multiple big hills (and no nice descents)

’21 Yorkshire felt worse than it was because a lot of the climb was on that off camber in the long grass!

’19 Comrie I feel like it might have had more climbing because there was no flat?  But maybe it was just less steep and therefore felt like more climbing done on the bike?

But yea, this year was brutal, even with a few flat fields to link the beer stop back to the campsite it didn’t feel like there was any respite between brutally steep climbing, the steep singletrack, the flat out bit through the meadow and then back up again.

2025 currently sits mid range….but will it stay there?

Do you have any info on the course, because QECP has some impressive contour lines ……….

Join the local facebook group and do some searching for past antisociual behavior.

Imagine coming home from work / commuting by bike / a mountain bike ride, does the layout work for you or can it be made to work.

What are the compromises and will they piss you off after a few months?

My next house will not:

Be within earshot of the Park-and-Ride, and by earshot I mean the 125db straight piped MX5 / Golf / Fiesta earshot when they congregate there after closing time.

Have carpeted floors anywhere between the back door and a shower.

Have a single width garage door. It’s 2+ cars long, which is great but is impossible to sensibly store both a car and a motorbike without playing Tetris every time I want to get the other one out.

MTBBatteries Lumenator +1

I did have a battery pack fail and Mark did ask me to send it back but it must have been summer and I never bothered. I think it was probably user error leaving flat since the last night ride.  The lamp itself is still going strong as a helmet light with a nitefighter battery pack.

Really tempted to take the plunge and get a full exposure setup this winter as work do C2W via Halfords and there’s not really much else high-end (as opposed to consumables which they’re great for) they sell that I’d want!

The blurb says across ‘the country’, so just England, not UK.

To be fair, on any Scottish independence discussion the pro-side is always very quick to point out that Scotland already is a different “country” and merely part of a “united kingdom” form which they want independence.

And on the flip side, we may as well re-brand the “British” Downhill Series, the Scottish (And Welsh) Downhill series.

And there is a Scottish Cycling.

DrP AKA Titney Gears

? I was enjoying your duet with Elvis sometime around the Diggers on lap 3*.

*you were probably on  a higher number

Another ex-Transit driver here, the windscreens are great (as are all heated screens).

They’re not just for defrosting the ice, although they do that very well in the sorts of mornings when you don’t want to be stood outside scraping them.  They also stay clear inside when you’re sat there soaking wet after a cold wet ride with the heaters on. It’s surprising how ‘misty’ the windscreen can get even driving normally on a cold day without you really noticing, then you put it on and it’s like the worlds back in 4k.

You can see it, particularly in very bright weather when your iris is a pinhole, but in normal weather (or wear sunglasses) it disappears as it’s so far out of your depth of field.

I would caveat that Autoglass replacements are nowhere near as good as the originals.  I’m sure they’re more visible and prone to dead wires.

Western politicians should have paid more heed to the 2014 invasion of Crimea and Donbas regions but are now learning the lesson that the combined west can’t support the needs of one country fully, never mind a continent.

Against what though?

Russia could hypothetically bring some allies to the party, but Ukraine has proved that we do have enough weapons to fight them even at a numerical disadvantage.  It’s hard to imagine the Ukraine invasion going on more than a few days if it had been against a NATO country.

Derby City Council      BMX racing / dirt jump       CV10 7JJ          New facility

That track is in Nuneaton……….

I came to the conclusion that any news story or report on why alcohol is good for you is on a par with those “More Dr’s smoke Camels Cigarettes” posters from the last century.  Or cigarettes have the health benefit of making you thin, or coke suppresses your appetite, etc.  It might be true, but it’s a long way from being a net positive.

“The j shaped curve shows that light and moderate drinkers of any form of alcohol live longer than those who abstain or drink heavily.”

I’m sure the explanation behind that is that the “abstain” group includes people who have previous addiction issues.

So the person who has never touched a drop of alcohol or done any drugs in their life falls into the same category as a recovering opioid addict with life shortening blood borne illnesses.

Like it or not, society relies on drinking for a lot of its socialising.
Having just spent the weekend mostly pissed at SSUK it’s kind of hypocritical of me to say this but;  I disagree

It’s a learned behavior in so much as you have a correlation between starting the evening with a pint in hand and having a good time.

And it’s not actually sociable. Like most drugs that depress the nervous system it just slows down your cognitive ability.  Push that far enough and a lot of things seem more fun.  Anyone who’s been designated driver knows that their mates aren’t more interesting after a pint or 3, they’re idiots. It’s just that if you’ve also had 3 pints then you can’t see that anymore.  Same with drugs and art or philosophy.  You don’t gain some great insight into Marx or Elon Musk after half a spliff, you just lose the cognitive ability to think against them.

If you have chronic stress and one glass of red wine every couple of days helps you relax, unwind and get to sleep, the net benefit to you personally may not be overall negative, taking into account the long-term effects of stress, sleep deprivation etc on diet, the immune system, mental wellbeing. But it’s not possible to recommend one glass of red wine to every adult because their situations – tolerance, complicating factors etc – are all unique.

I disagree again, the alcohol isn’t removing the stress from your body, it’s just masking it out temporarily.  Masking the effect of one chemical in your body with another.

You’ll get worse sleep.

And you’ll wake up the next day and get just as stressed again.

For the sake of ~£50 to get it done by someone else with lasers and stuff, just take it into Kwikfit.

Sorry but how is it 30 degrees off centre? Did you hit a wall?

Also this?

What have you bent to get it 30deg out? I’ve rebuilt the entire front suspension and been less far out by eyeball and guesswork!

As above.  Have a google for scrap car buyers online, there’s a few big ones like Redcorn, scrapanycar, scrapcarcomparison etc.  I’ve used the first two (based on whoever offered the highest) and both were completely smooth and painless, one was an insurance write off an the other was just a minor faulty part but too much labor to fix.

Then stick it on ebay with that as the starting price. The most you’ll lose is whatever the ebay listing fee is.

Or you could try and break it yourself if you’re looking to make as much money as possible from it and parts are in good order.  A decent set of alloy wheels are frequently worth more than a whole scrap car!  Ditto body panels and interior trim.   It’s mildly more effort to scrap a non-moving car with bits missing though.  I sold the alloys, radio, batteries and a few other bits after listing them on a facebook owners group, then had them scrapped with some old steel wheels and bald tyres.

Thanks all. Found a local chap who will chemically dip for £20-30 so will get it done there

That’s the best option.

Although the easier option is to just attack it with wet and dry and sand through any chips and scratches then give it an undercoat which will show up anything you’ve missed. Keep repeating the undercoat/sanding until it looks good.  Sanding all the paint off is only worth it if it’s flaking off or you’re worried the new paint won’t be compatible with it.

I doubt they could cope with the bureaucracy.

Most engineers seem to struggle the other way round.  Getting a job in nuclear power for example is really hard as working in nuclear power previously is generally a requirement.  But in the world outside that those form a nuclear background often struggle because they can’t adapt to designing things to an estimate in a hurry then going back to refine it.

OTOH going into a bureaucratic environment is relatively easy as the reality is you just end up working slowly whilst every other department ticks their boxes to deliver you some rely upon data rather than just getting on with it.

12.5k for a 9 year old van sounds quite ‘cheap’ from what I can see of asking prices!

Depends on the context, I remember before everything went mental with brexit, covid, Ukraine and whatever else that was the going rate for a pre-registered Vivaro/Traffic

D3O is pretty temperature sensitive,  My sailing pads have cracked where they’re contoured /  cut out to flex around the knee from repeatedly being slammed into the deck sailing over winter.

And on that note, they definitely work, They must have been slammed into the deck (with all it’s ropes and pointy hardware) with no concerns every tack!

Can’t see how that can possibly ever provide  a return on investment when combined with the other F1 costs in terms of increased Aston sales…!

Each place on the constructors championship is worth ~£10million so they’d need to go from 5th to 2nd which doesn’t seem unreasonable given he clearly knows how to build a winning car.  And I imagine sponsorship is heavily weighted towards teams on the podium, can you name a non-title sponsor of Haas or Sauber?

rOcKeTdOgFull Member
The 220 page long watch thread would suggest that they do.
What a privileged world we live in.

Don’t you run a youtube channel dedicated to a specific type of bike for riding on specific types of road surface?

I have no idea.  You are perhaps correct.  Aldi stuff seems to vary from really good at a good price to complete useless tat.  I have no idea where the wetsuit lies on this scale :-)

Anything in a supermarket is best described as a wetsuit shaped object.

Thermostat still said 20.5C this morning, it’s set for 17.5.  I blooming love our new cavity wall insulation* ?

It’s just about reached the time when I’ll have to remember to close the conservatory door at night to keep the heat in the kitchen but it’s still adding enough heat in the day that I can’t see the heating coming on for at least another month.

*blown in fiberglass stuff