Yeah, I had 125s so am aware of the revs needed. But mine managed to stay off footpaths, keep both wheels on the ground (in traffic), the baffles stayed in the exhaust and my helmet always seemed to be on my head.

I agree, but even if you put my mum on a 125 it’ll spend it’s life with the throttle pinned open.   Even I as a relatively sensible kid rode everywhere at full throttle because unless you have a strong tailwind and a decent hill then it’ll still only just do the NSL.

being ragged

It’s a 125, they only have one throttle positions……

Although I agree with the above, the sensible choice is to just buy a honda, it won’t get nicked, it won’t lose value, it won’t break down, and the rust is manageable.

But then when I was 17 and had a CG125 I lusted after friends Aprillia and Derbi. So a 30somethings opinion is clearly wrong ?

2nd hand.

Anything from a Hero4 onwards has the image quality pretty much sorted.

Anything from a Hero8 onwards has the stability well sorted.

They’ve messed around with screens, mounts, case compatibility etc so just pick the one that does what you want.

99% of the problem is the mount though. Most GoPro accessories involve bolting the camera to the end of a plastic arm. Which is like trying to take a good photo at arms length, it’s not good.  Get a decent mount like a Hague SM2, and strip it down so a 1/4″ GoPro adapter bolts directly where the ball mount was. Then it’ll be rock solid (at least as solid as whatever you suction it onto).

I should add that I paid £625 at the absolute peak of lockdown Berlingo silly season where every millennial and their divorce wanted to build a micro camper. You couldn’t buy a shed for £2500 so you can imagine what £625 with 3 days MOT remaining was like ?.

It needed some minor tlc to pass the MOT, then it took a whole afternoon and buckets of carpet shampoo to get rid of 20 years of smoke,  nicotine and dog hair.

The underside was ok, it’s galvanized.  The axle isn’t. Normally they rust from the inside out and collapse suddenly. This one you could pull off chunks of the outside so god knows what state it was in.

It did have 4 new tyres though, so someone had spent some money maintaining it.

Then there’s the “normal for a Berlingo” things.

The engine shook at 50mph. Full on bouncing the car. Apparently a common trait to which no one has an answer why they do it.

The brakes are the most scarily bad brakes I’ve ever used. They’re barely better than my 50year old MG. Single piston calipers, disks the size of a saucer, and drum rear. That poor brake servo must be working overtime just to be that bad! Got knows.how bad it must be if you put the full 800kg payload in.

The rear axle was rusty to the point you could pull off chunks of rust and question whether it was just flakes or had you just removed something previously structural. They normally rust from the inside out so being that bad on the outside was worrying.

I’d still buy another.

Prices have dropped a bit. About autotrader, there’s only dealers on there. Facebook and eBay are the places to look for <£1000 cars.

The average male round here dies at 55.I,m living on borrowed time.

Where’s that?

Because I just put in a postcode for Redcar and it gave me 81?

https://healthequals.org.uk/make-health-equal/

I’ve never (so far) had a warranty issue via Ali express, the handful of things that have been DOA I’ve just raised a request and most times it’s just refunded instantly. In fact I think this usb adapter is the first time it’s generated a returns label.

Out of curiosity I just compared them to the ones on the ODI site and the ones I’ve bought:

A) don’t have Odi / vans logos

B) don’t have the textured end section, it’s just smooth.

C) don’t exist as a combination from ODI, they do a different version entirely on the ones pre installed to the throttle tube, or a loose version that (if you squint) looks like the ones I bought.

So I’m easing my conscience by telling myself they’re no more fakes than any other grip manufacturer making their own variation on ruffians or flanged longnecks. They just happen to look like a vans waffle sole which is a fairly distinctive pattern ?

no judgement for buying what you buy, but odi only make their grips in the USA. I’m not even suggesting that your grips are fake, but they probably are.

I’m fairly sure they probably are fake.

And I now want a MK2 Escort shell!

Yeah, that’s what I meant. Lots of people seem to think they are hidden, as they are arranging all their meet-ups on Telegram. But anybody can join those groups, nobody checks who you are. Journalists at The Times are members of some of them and are highlighting the plans for this evening, for example.

Guess the only more difficult bit is linking the online account with a real person.

In that sense it’s as secure as you make it.

The aforementioned car groups changed the group membership to be by invitation and you had to send a photo of you and your car at an event acting like a dick.

Part of me thought I could setup a group under the same name and with the same rules, get loads of footage then bulk upload it to operation snap ?.  I assume if I’ve thought of it then various police forces have probably had the same idea!

There was a Chinese brand called Wake that made cheap stubby dirtjump style CNC stems, for a while they seemed to be the must have upgrade for any self respecting Carrera or Voodoo riding school kid at Swinley.

THEY

ALL

CRACKED

But then again we all bought Thompson stems for £60 back in the 2000s and they cracked so regularly that you could buy replacement face plates.

Here’s the challenge: it’s got to be under £4k…

I got 30,000miles out of a 2.0hdi Berlingo before the clutch pedal cracked which was going to be an utter ballache to fix on account of it being French.  It couldn’t be removed from inside the car and removing it from the engine bay meant the engine would need to come out. So I scrapped it.

Cost me £625, and I got £415 for scrapping it!

Depending on whether he can find a really nice one forn£4k I’d be more tempted to buy something a little rougher and just treat it as bangernomics.  Really the difference between a 120k 10 year old van for £4000 and a 120k 18 year old van for £600 isn’t much more than cosmetics and a bit of refinement. In terms of reliability it’s down to luck either way.

I’m currently looking for an MPV NV200.

Which will still be logged to your IP address and hardware.

I thought his point was that GCHQ doesn’t need to break any encryption, they can just create an account, log onto the groups, and sit there taking notes.

Even I do the same, a local car club uses the park and ride to drift and generally sit there smashing their Fiesta ST’s rev limiter for hours every weekend. At its worst it was reported that 300 cars turned up from all over London, Southampton, Oxford, Swindon, Birmingham.

Now I can call the police before they even arrive which seems to have had the desired effect. No one drives from Birmingham to Reading to spend the evening being tailed from car park to car park by the police.

*Bodykit only 1.2

Perhaps oddly I’d trust brakes from a relatively known Chinese brand or supplier (like the ones that are obviously the Clarks without the branding).

But I’d not trust a stem.

Partially because stems are cheap and/or available 2nd hand or in crap colours anyway. And I figure that I can overload a brake just by squeezing it really hard in the car park. If it survives that then it’s unlikely to fail when tickled on the trail or of it does I have two of them.

Same with cranks or handlebars. But I’d probably trust a frame and fork from a known supplier (dengfu, carboncycle, tosseek, etc). It just doesn’t seem worth spending Deore money on a set of cranks when Deore exists. And handlebars are either fussy enough to buy the ones I want, or cheap and simple enough that I’d just use whatever is in the spares box rather than some other random ones.

Eg ,A big list of active phone phones in the area , cross reference with known offenders , people on benefits

I’m not sure what checking the middle class wheezes of furlough and eating out help out or PIP, or Motobility, or free childcare, or the child tax allowance, or the state pension have to do with extremism.

Or was it just not not “those” sorts of benefits.

Sold my old Dalesman on the CTC forum. I’d replaced everything with new (105/Mavic wheels, strong light cranks, new chain and cassette, new brakes, new tyres, new mudguards). And still only got £275 for it.

I think the better question is who if anyone buys the beaters off eBay.

I buy a fair amount of stuff from there, usually things that fall in the “too simple to mess up” category.

Recent stuff:

Cheap bar tape because I trash it quickly however expensive it is.

Motorbike grips, not sure if knock off or from the back door of the factory but they’re identical to the the Vans x Odi waffles. This is about as close to “fake” as I’m prepared to go.

TPMS kits for both the motorbike and car because the OH is really bad for never checking tyres and the bike had a slow puncture so for £10 why not.

Job lot of SAE connectors so I can finally have a consistent set of plugs for the all the chargers. Optimate do them for £10/adapter, but the connectors are £5 for 10.

GPS Speedo. For £15 it was cheaper than getting a card printed for the km/h speedo (and risking dismantling it) and I’ll just use it untill mental maths becomes 2nd nature (which tbh it already is).

SAE to USB adapter. This is actually the only thing in a while that’s been a letdown. It’s supposed to be QC3.0 but won’t deliver it. Shame because it actually looks well made.

Basically all the stuff that’s manufactured in china anyway

I’d not touch things like “EC90” handlebars though.

Our 20 year old fiesta has only ever had one breakdown, the cable on the alternator jiggled loose so the battery went flat.

Other than that it’s mostly just been consumables and servicing.

Even accounting for a slightly accelerated number of consumables (i.e. more than none in the first 100,000miles) the last 10 years the average garage bill has been less than a month’s finance on a new fiesta, and there’s probably less than one a year on average.

Even the MG which is 50 isn’t “unreliable”. It tends to need a lot more TLC but it always starts and most breakdowns are 50p fixes because something rattled loose (there’s very little to actually go wrong!).

Said it before, it’s like wetherspoons has shut down and the regulars are looking for something to do, looking at the state of them in that video

Why is it every single one of these far right ***** caught on video looks exactly like the stereotype of a far right **** I have in my head.

Because social media is feeding your outrage as much as it is theirs. It’s the new automated propaganda machine, but far more effective than an A1 poster because the algorithm is getting realtime feedback to help you find what your want to be most outraged about. And the only war it cares about is the one to post as many interstitial adverts between clicks as possible.

Meanwhile on farrighttrackworld the feed is full of counter protestors who all have pink hair, dreadlocks and smoking a joint.

Our house is a disaster.

I have really poor memory (and I swear it’s getting worse, I couldn’t articulate the word “data” the other day I was stuck with “what’s the word for specifications, but you already have the information, what are the numbers called?”.  My keys spend more time lost than found and the “find my phone” feature on my watch is the most used by far.  I couldn’t go back to a separate wallet!

Nothing in the garage is where I think it is.

And she who must be obeyed likes to reorganize things to make my life easier.  Not realizing that creating a new drawer for cycling paraphernalia doesn’t help when I already had one elsewhere, but still couldn’t find the right thing.

This seems to be the new business model for those channels, attract outraged patriots to your website (and serve them lots of ads I assume).

Disk brakes and 29ers kept the STW hamsters fed for almost a decade!

{EDIT for the typo} grease is NOT halfway between an oil and a wax with a defined melting point, it’s more like jelly which is water bound together with gellatin.

I think you’re right, but then what happens when it’s used on motorbikes? They’re ridden in the rain quite a lot right, and I’d imagine re-Putolining a motorbike chain every ride would be a bit of a faff, so what am I missing?

It was designed for MX / Trail bikes so I imagine a similar level of maintenance to MTB’s is acceptable (they’d be cleaning their air filter and changing the engine oil every ride anyway.  They’re also physically bigger chains, I imagine it’d take a while for water to get all the way in and flush it all out.  Modern road going motorbikes don’t use Putoline, they use O-ring/x-ring chains so each roller is in effect it’s own little factory sealed bearing.  You only have to apply a light lubrication to the outside so it doesn’t wear against the sprockets.

Comments like that make me think it’s not saving me enough time and effort to be worthwhile, which is a shame, as I want to be a believer.

We’re talking the sort of conditions where you question your sanity being outside and get through multiple sets of brake pads on a ride.  Most winters I’d probably only do it once a month (and do 2-3 bikes at once assuming my riding was slit between the SS, road and commuter).

And if it doesn’t work out on a trip, just drip on whatever wet lube you normally use. It’ll wash off in 5 minutes but it at least reminds you how good Putoline is

Saying that, I’ve been having my deep fat fryer set at higher temps than others seem to, more like 120-130deg, so maybe I’l drop that down and see if it makes a difference.

I think that it’s more a case of the power / construction of DFF’s that’s the problem rather than the temp settings.

An 800W element bonded directly to a thin aluminum pan will be heating the base upto hundreds of degrees regardless of what the thermocouple attached somewhere up the side says. Fine for a liquid oil where convection sorts out the temperature distribution, but not for melting wax.

Whereas a slow cooker is a heavy ceramic bowl with a 100W element under it takes ages to warm up the wax and it has time to melt more evenly.

My hypothesis is that putoline is a low melting point grease of sorts, which would mean it’s basically oil with a soap mixed in to thicken it and bind it together (grease is halfway between an oil and a wax with a defined melting point, it’s more like jelly which is water bound together with gellatin).  The soap (a calcium or lithium based compound) is what’s broken down by the temperature.  Once it’s degraded it’s gone and you’re left with a softer grease.

My DFF died a few months ago so I’ve been researching / experimenting a bit.

I’d like to see drivers with attitudes like those shown be forced to hand in their driving license, as they have no right to own one with such levels of complacency and irresponsibility. The video is a good advert for compulsory re-testing and re-education every decade to retain the privilege of being in charge of a dangerous vehicle on the road.

I dunno if that would work, I think most people could pass a re-test if they closed their mouth and stuck to the speed limits for 45min.

I’d rather it was “normalized” to suspend licenses for relatively minor offenses. So rather than 12points = middling length ban, make it a weeks ban for each point leading upto that as well.  Get caught speeding – 3 week ban, on your phone 6 week ban, get caught again and it’s cumulative so 3 points + 3 points = a 3 week ban and a 6 week ban.  The existing points system makes the idea of loosing your license so remote and alien that people just act with impunity anyway.  It should be “If I go 37 in this 30 on my commute today I’ll be on the bus/bike/train next month” not “If I go 37 in this 30 on my commute today there’s a slim to no chance of a meaningful punishment because I’ve only been caught once in the last decade so the points expire quicker than I can accumulate them”.  Either that or just remove the expiration date on the points so they hang around until you get a ban at some point.

On new roads cycling provison is a second class provison with the main priority to separate cars from bikes and keep cars flowing. Cycle provision is poor and slow to navigate.

Ironically new roads seem to go OTT in my experience.  There’s usually a really wide shared path set away from the traffic even if it’s a bypass to nowhere from a cycling perspective just linking one busy road you probably wouldn’t want to be on, to another one the other side of the village.  Bypasses don’t make sense on a bike, generally we want to be in the village because the journey lengths will generally be short (i.e. one village to the next, not multiple villages away requiring a bypass in-between)

They’re not always done well, the Arborfield bypass has a mile long diversion to cross it on the old Swallowfield Road. And the A329 form Coppid Beach to St Crispins makes the mistake of having the driveways at the road level so the cycle path (which is still ~5m back from the road so there’s no reason for the driveways to be sunk down)  making it so undulating it’s motion sickness inducing!

What I think we do so wrong is “brownfield” cycle paths.  It get’s squeezed in, where it can be on wide straight roads, often where it’s not needed, then disappears where it is at junctions and pinch points. Reading Road <-> Wokingham Road is a good case in point, one end is a shared use path that engineers in conflict at every point.  The other is a cycle lane that starts/stops, goes on and off the shared pavement, and disappears just as you need it to get through the junctions at Winnersh Sainsburys or Reading BP.

I’ve had carbon cranks on my road bike for about 15 years with zero issues.

Are they functionally better than shimano 105, probably not meaningfully, but they look cool.

They are (or were, obviously everything moves on) lighter than aluminum cranks.

They are at least as stiff as HT2 cranks which is the benchmark. Like most bike components I think there’s a a threshold beyond which it doesn’t matter. I’ve got some alloy RF Deus cranks which are objectively “not stiff”.  I don’t think it matters so much to power output, it just feels a bit softer and the trail buzzes less with them.

I suspect in terms of bang for your buck upgraders it’s probably worse value than chain wax and silly jockey wheels. And way behind a fresh Vs worn drivetrain and way way behind tyre choice. Even the weight saving (and stiffness to a similar extent) is probably better with a £300 pair of shoes than a £300 chain set.

however Putoline is somewhat different from lubes like Molten Speed Wax and the Silca stuff, was originally developed for motorcycles and plays by its own rules, so that’s possibly of limited use to you.

I’ve just switched form Putoline to a DIY mix of 60C Paraffin wax, WS2 and PTFE.  First impressions.

Parafin melts to the viscosity more like brake fluid / baby oil it’s very thin once melted even at 70-80C , putoline never got that runny even running the DFF upto it’s max.

In it’s solid state putoline remains a bit ‘greasy’. Based on this observation I think Putoline is a different product entirely.  I think it’s probably a blend of  heavy oils, wax , and Calcium-sulfonate to bind it together. Like a grease made from EP90, graphite and Calcium-sulfonate?  Calcium-sulfonate is better than lithium at high temperatures, but does break down eventually so that’s probably why it doesn’t like getting too hot. Nothing to do with smoke points which is what I previously assumed.

For those that are running Putoline, how long or how many miles do you find it lasting you? Started using it last Autumn but in wet Peak District conditions it didn’t last as long as I’d have imagined it to, between applications.

It depends, it can last hundreds of miles but I’d probably say the Peak is one of those cases where it won’t, that place eats drivetrains!  I work on the assumption that Putoline lasts at least 4-5x longer than anything that could be applied wet, so if it’s lasting for example 2 rides, then that means it’s at least lasting more than half the first ride, and it’s those lube-less miles at the end of rides that kill components.

Deep fat fryer or slow cooker?

I’ve switched to a slow cooker, as above I think my putoline went ‘off’ in a DFF.

Paraffin wax is cheap (it’s the additives that cost ££), about £5/kilo from craft suppliers. So if you want to experiment with a “wax” rather than Putoline to see if it works better for you then it’s a cheap experiment, it’s just won’t have the fancy friction modifiers.  I know a lot of people blend a bit of oil in to soften the pure wax which helps it stick to the outside of the chain better rather than chip / flake off.  My plan (having made 4 batches of ~250g of a a ‘recipe’ I found that used pure paraffin wax is to blend it with the old Putoline to make something that’s just the right consistency.

Also worth noting, I’m sure the Putoline recipe changed, I’m sure the new stuff is softer and not as long lasting as the stuff I bought 15 years ago.

OFO

Are we talking these …

That’s the one, although mines gained a rear rack, rear light, and some extra bracing on the front basket.

They went bankrupt and most of them got scrapped. For a while they were being sold for £90-£110 each which is a bargain when the Nexus hubs alone cost that.

They’re like Boris bikes, heavy and slow.  But if there’s no intent to ride it further than the majority of car journeys (under 5 miles)  then speeds irrelevant anyway as the difference is only seconds / minutes.

As yet, no comparable solution for bikes exists in this country.

You’re setting the bar unrealistically high then.

It’s not like cars are exactly secure anymore, anything from a Transit to a VW to a Range Rover is gone in 60 seconds with a laptop. 10-20 years ago there may have been a utopian sweetspot where cars were secure. But having an unhackable (at the time) immobilizer on a Skoda Octavia isn’t any different to having a decent lock on a generic commuter hybrid.

It doesn’t even make sense financially as a justification.

4 miles each way, say about 36mpg* at best (short trip, engine never warms up, lots of stop-start), that’s about a liter in fuel each day. £1.50.

Parking £3.50

That’s £5/day. 47 weeks a year that’s £1175

My commuter (one of those yellow OFO’s with baskets and shimano hub gears and dynamos for ~£100 a pop) could be stolen every month and I’d still be in profit vs driving into town.  And I suspect after the first couple of months the market for fenced OFO’s would be somewhat saturated anyway!

*picked for easy maths, 8 miles @36mpg happens to be 1 liter of fuel. It doesn’t really matter anyway when 3/4 of your costs are parking.

I’ve had a car written off in the last 5 years, it made minimal difference to the next premium going via compare the market.  OH had a claim a while back and that made only a similarly marginal difference, about £50/year in the first year? I think it adds about £10 to my other car policy and my motorbike.

If he was 18 driving a banger then maybe I’d consider just letting it slide. But if he’s >23 or so then I doubt it’ll actually make a difference and he won’t be left with a devalued car.

Sounds good, I’d also add Bulgarian Split Squats to that to do list.  Because you can never loathe a routine enough ?

And deadlift / deadlift variations to add some variety to the glute work. Focus on the variations because proper deadlifting is tough on your body.  RDL, stiff legged and rack pulls isolate the movements with smaller loads or in the case of rack pulls higher loads but through a shorter less dangerous range of motion.

Unless I buy a brompton and carry it around with me at my destination, there is no way I will be cycling to a town centre or train station and leaving my bike in public. That is my one and only objection to cycling for transportation. The only thing stopping me doing it.

I dont need more segregated routes although the existing ones are welcomed. I dont need cars physically restricted to 20mph. I need to know my bike will be there in working order when i return to it.

So buy a commuter / pub bike?

I’ve got 2, ones so rubbish I leave it without a lock outside Reading Station.

Not doing a 15 minute journey by bike for those reasons is like saying you won’t drive because the Paggani will get scratched in the multistory.   The solution is to buy a small city car   a utilitarian bike.

Yea, I don’t think it made the news much at the time, 24h news hadn’t really taken off yet.

It’s latest surge in popularity is down to the whole MAGA / Don’t Tread On Me / 2nd Amendment crowd.

But I’ll say again what I’ve said before. As a small business owner (less than 300k turnover). Cash works better for us, we have zero fees on cash and actually get paid to deposit it

Isn’t that because you’re the very niche case of being a post office and shop so you don’t have most of the issues relating to cash that most businesses have i.e. actually having to deal with paying it into a bank which takes manhours or security costs, plus banking charges?

Roughly 1.5% of every card transaction is going to a bank or card service provider – so that’s 1.5% of your paycheck every year going to a bank, for almost nothing in return.

Arguably for that 1.5% I get:

Not getting mugged or burgled because no one carries round or has to store a day/week/months worth of cash anymore.

Not having to spend time traveling to / from cash points

Ability to spend spontaneously, I bought a motorbike last week!

I can’t physically lose it

It doesn’t weigh my pockets down / fill my cup holders with shrapnel.

From a consumer perspective, 1.5%, or the 0.6%+1p Zippykona gets charged would seem like a bargain for all the convenience it affords. And from a retailers perspective, do you not think you make that 1<% back on extra sales?

Depends on the sets and your goal.

Strength / Powerlifting (e.g, 5×5 or even fewer reps) the whole idea is to take 5+ minutes between sets so that each and every set is the same (high) effort. As opposed to hypertrophy sets where you’d aim for 15-10 reps per set, aiming to stop ~2 reps before failure each time, and only rest 90s between.  The lower weight means quicker recovery and no strict numbers to hit means it doesn’t matter if you go 15-12-10 reps.

The bigger issue might be warming up and staying flexible between sets. I’d not do 5 heavy squats then go sit in an office chair for half an hour before doing another 5, I’d at least use a standing desk to keep things moving otherwise you’ll want to do warmup sets / mobility exercises each time.

Hypertrophy work I’d say if you can take 10 minutes away from your desk then just do a quick warmup and the 3 sets of 12-15 in one go for each exercise.

Strength work I’d maybe do supersets instead, e.g if you’re doing do a set of 5 squats, then immediately do the overhead press for week A, Or bench for week B.  Then save the deadlifts or bent over rows for lunchtime.  But don’t be sedentary in-between supersets, keep moving/stretching.

I can’t think of a single example of anything which is improved by having to do it on an app. At least for the user.

This in general +1

Why no one had a manifesto commitment to ban parking apps is a mystery.

I’ve zero issue with cashless parking,  but just make it a contactless card reader.

I bought some coffee online from a member of a different forums new business (it’s actually really nice which was a surprise) and at the end of the purchase it made me download an app! GET IN THE F*****G SEA! I’m not registering with yet another app to buy a kilo of coffee once in a blue moon.

“I’m puzzled why any of them are standing now. Recent history has shown the relatively short term nature of Tory leadership”

Stand

Get a sizeable but not winning level of support

Withdraw and  gift that support to the winner

Become (shadow) Home Secretary

Launch leadership bid in 24-48 months after the stronger, but too keen to take the poison chalice candidates have been eliminated.

Lose the election anyway because your toxic and no one associated with the post-Cameron Tories stands a chance.

Ironically I think Labour doing a good job is the only way the Conservatives can get back into power. It needs 4-5years of competent government and things getting better to turn people off protest voting, which will re-unite the right wing vote and drag Tories back to the center.

Cars are a necessity for rural dwellers if you want any kind of access to modern life.

Which proves the point somewhat.

The reason the village pub and shops closed is because people jump in their car and drive to the supermarket / other entertainment.

Narrower rims will be lighter and less strong because there is less material in them. Conversely wider rims will be heavier and stronger.

Narrower rims will fit narrower tyres better, wider rims will fit wider tyres better.

Basically that.

With the caveat that 30mm isn’t really all that wide. If it was a decision between 25 and 35 then the drawbacks of “too wide” might have been a factor, but I’d say 30mm is pretty goldilocks for a ~2.4″ tyre.

I have an 883 too. Great bikes, mine is an almost completely stock 2005 apart from some extra spotlights. I’d been toying with buying a HD for ages so just picked a cheap sportster but was surprised at how nice it was to ride so it’s a keeper now.

Put a forty quid eBay screen on mine and toured the sw of Ireland on it last year.

Next change on mine will probably be hagon shocks.

Yea, I’m umming and ahhing over suspension upgrades.  The ~£400 YSS adjustable emulsion shocks look like a good compromise along with their fork valve kit.

Never been a biker, but there’s been one bike I’ve always rather fancied, and that’s the Honda NX650 Dominator. I’ve always liked the styling, as a 650 twin it’s narrow and fairly light, the ideal bike for hacking around narrow lanes and byways, and I believe the Ridgeway is still open to motorcycles. There’s one for sale in Malvern, for £3850, so not a cheap bike even now.

Dominators are odd. They bottomed out <£1000 a few years ago then suddenly became “classic”.  So beware that some will have been thrashed as a cheap bike at some point in their life.  For that sort of money a CRF300L has more of a modern following which means suspension upgrades are plentiful (and possibly already fitted).

Also (2nd hand info, never ridden one) not that great (soft spindly suspension being the top comment).  The bike you want is the XR650L.  But again they’ve achieved some sort of cult status in part because big air cooled singles went out of fashion for ages, and now that people want them it’s not really practical to make one meet modern emissions rules.  Even Hondas CRF450L (does it still exist?)  was a crap bike in factory trim, almost like Honda were daring people to strip it down and make it a CRF450R with lights (rather than a CRF450R with lights and a very expensive restrictor kit) because it was already impossible to make a real CRF450R with light pass the emissions rules. .