Can’t edit the above as I’ve left it too long, but the blue is the same as Hobster and postierich are suggesting :)

Main road would be the easiest. If you’re after a pootle in the countryside you can go from Scarborough past Rainclife woods, to Hackness, then through a few villages into the back entrance to Dalby, lovely ride, very quiet country roads, goes through Langdale End which is another foresty area.

Red route = obvious but boring.
Blue route = interesting country roads.
Cross = traily goodness.

You can actually link the two for a 40ish mile loop, really nice on a good day. It used to be my initiation ceremony I did with every new bike as a young ‘un (waaay before the trail center existed and things) :)

I’ve made the blue route look shorter, but I think it’s at least the same length as the other to be honest. Certainly feels it :) There’s places to eat in Thornton Le Dale or at the trail head in Dalby.

For XC I wouldn’t be surprised if they did.

650b stomps on 29ers.

Nino Schurter wins everything, he’s sponsored by Scott, Scott are pushing 650b. Quick, new fad out, buy again!

Used to use screwdriver and mallet tbh :P All went in fine, all my old forks still have them in.

Similar sort of thing to quick release, saves me 2 minutes, every 6 months, quite happy chucking an extra 50 grams at it?

The weight difference is something really silly, I’m talking a gram or so, not even sure which is lighter. The quoted weight of 30 grams includes the top bolt, you can use any top bolt you like with them. The actual weight of the two tiny aluminium plates is next to nothing. You can use half a SFN if you’re really crying over 5 grams.

No issue here, quite like that I can chuck it in any set of forks. Quite the opposite I’ve got loads of SFNs kicking around as I don’t need to hammer anything into forks.

Don’t see many of these for Hed Doctors :P

So, since he’s gone now. Isn’t the 401 just a Magicshine MJ-872 for double the cost, with a pretty blue body and a battery with black tape on? Not sure I get it. All the specs are identical, and you don’t get the posh body like Exposure do.

Stick my battery around the back of the seatpost and wind the cable around the top tube personally :) In line with spray from the back wheel, but what the hell, it’s got tape on it.

Friday here too, doesn’t seem to be a fault on the mags end tbh.

Pepsi looks like it’s more on the AM side of the spectrum in my opinion, Pitch/Remedy sort of thing. Coke looks more like a long travel light XC/AM sort of bike, like a Zesty/ASR5.

Pepsi looks like it’s more fun, Coke looks like it’d go faster. Totally useless opinion there, I do apologize.

Definitely the frame and not the wheel?

Max Rocket size 19.3″? Hand built in Lilliput? Bigger is better apparently. Were there a 21″ I’d have had a real hard time deciding between that and my 22″ Five.

Rather tragically I think swapping my nice Ourys to some ESI Chunkys was the smallest weight gain I’ve ever achieved for the biggest negative side effect. Even riding on a tiny rock hard saddle, at least I can stand up to get away from it. Cut them off with scissors and stuck the Ourys back on.

Victory!

Ditching sensible tyres and riding with thin little 500g tyres comes a close second. Didn’t cut them off with scissors, bet I could have done though.

Totally regret selling it, could care less about my old Enduro, Mojo, Zaskar, FSR XC etc. This one I should have kept tho! :cry: Lovely bikes!

It’ll probably feel rubbish and squishy for the first hour or so, give it some time!

My only gripe is Avid seem to make all the little bolts out of cheese and they’re a pain in the arse to get a perfect bleed on them. Shimano or Hope do both of the above better, so I’d buy one of those instead.

Nothing wrong with a well set up set of Avids though.

Smorgasbord is the only thing I can think of that would do exactly what you’re after for that price.

Nevegal maybe, the 2.2″ is massive though.

Sorry for a hijack, but the on one smorgasbord is on offer for £12.50ish… 2 quick questions, are they tubeless ready and is it worth a swap from the spesh eskars I’m running at the moment?

Not technically, but mine went straight up on Flows and didn’t leak any air overnight, they’ve stayed up for 2 weeks since then without any more air.

They’re heavier than Eskars, to be honest they’re not much lighter than the £15 Chunky Monkeys, which have considerably more knobbage for cornering.

I don’t mind Eskars too much though to be honest, especially as it’s spring soon (probably) :)

Loving my new Chunky Monkey on the front :) Used to run Nics tubeless but they always felt far too soft, the Monkey is quite a bit heftier. Using a Smorgasbord on the back, but to be honest it’s probably overkill, the Ardent I had on before was probably a better compromise.

70mm stems are dead on their bums, 75mm is just too long, we need 72.5!

Isn’t it just the ceramic BBs they do that used to be dodgy? No issue with their hubs or headsets here.

http://www.konaworld.com/bike.cfm?content=dr_dew

Kona Dews are usually all over the place for very cheap this time of year. Come in huge sizes and lots of mounts for carrying stuff.

The big Specialized stuff is huge.

6’6″ here and riding a 61cm Tricross, perhaps a step too far towards the roady side, but would merrily do everything you asked above.

Ridgeback do some good explorey bikes at decent prices:

http://www.ridgeback.co.uk/bike/flight-01#details

Looks like a group of seriously crap riders.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8OChYbXlLU

Same trails, sans falling off.

Just seems to be a bit of a breakdown of communication there sometimes, had a few gripes.

Last one, ordered a V1 Scandal frame a couple of weeks back, the last raw one in stock. I needed V1 as I was after rack mounts for commuting with it. A V2 arrived, by this point V1s were completely out of stock and not being made anymore so I kept hold of it and had a moan.

Very quickly they offered to send me some bits for free! I asked for some Racing Ralph 29er tyres and they were fine with this. A couple of days later a package arrived with another wrong item, this time some random tubular tyres.

I’ve sent these back now. Getting silly. Quite exciting seeing what will come next though.

To put it another way, a good chunk of the bikes in the top 10 are 4 bars. Yes, they’re multi pivot, but they act absolutely nothing like Maestro/VPP. Their claim to fame is remaining active regardless of what’s going on, not anti bob.

Much like single pivots, they rely on having loads of platform damping on the shock, much like the Specialized Brain shocks.

4 bar full sus mountain bikes have been around now for a good 20 years? Back from the days when half the backs coming out had unified rear triangles.

Is the mega mostly an uphill race? No? Then re-read the OP…

Well no, but it’s about as good a measurement of having a play in the woods as I can see. As per the OPs:

I’ve loaded a load of rides into Strava and defined a number of segments (mostly, but not all, climbs).

It’s generally won by fairly swift trail bikes, not DH rigs, Trance/Five would fit in perfectly well. What do you suggest I compare with, pro level XC? 2011 had 2x Fives in the top 10.

Well, the giant system as told by the mahs is supposed to be a more efficient system

Woah, slow down, you’re blinding me with science.

Same, run loads of Nics and Ralphs on Flows tubeless here, haven’t tried Ex. Last thing I set up was a Chunky Monkey about a week ago on a standard Flow, went up easily, didn’t seem to even leak out any air overnight.

So you’ve 3 bikes, but only ride when its ‘nice’…

Exactly!

Spotify is fine for previewing music, but artists get a pittance from them so don’t kid yourself that it’s a substitute for buying music

I spend more money on Spotify than I’ve regularly spent on music in my life. We’ve got 2 full accounts in the house so chuck £20 a month at it. The idea that I’d go out and buy those 50 albums I’m listening to in the month is absolute rubbish. Spend most of my time trying new artists that would get £0 off me were it not for spotify.

Don’t kid yourself that it’s piracy because it’s cheap and easy, the more people who use Spotify, the more money there is in the pot. Artists get about 0.1p per play of their track, I’ll merrily listen to music ALL day, 5 days a week, so that’s about £3-4 directly to the artists. More than they’d get directly if I bought a CD, given all the costs associated.

The last album I bought was in the late 90s.

How do you decide which bike to take?

It depends how good I’m feeling, around this time of year I’m truly terrible so the full sus wins, it goes:

Five -> Scandal 29er -> Tricross

As I gradually improve, then winter hits, I stop riding for 2 months and it all repeats. The Circle of Bike if you like.

you can only ride 1 at a time

This sounds like a challenge to me. Show her who’s boss and ride all 3 down the street at once.

Chris Kings, yes its expensive first off but you will NEVER have to by another headset

Much like the £12 FSA Pig then, I’ve got one on a 2003 Stumpjumper I failed at killing.

It’s a stupid headset for an XC hardtail, but I can’t justify another one until I can kill the damn thing. The bearings are like meatballs.

I’ve seen quite a bit of negative stuff, but really liked my Superstar headset too, on the flip side I’ve never got on with On-One Smoothie headsets.

Run out of house space at 3 for me and 3 for the missus, probably for the best. Five, Scandal 29er and Tricross here to vaguely cover the spectrum.

Surely you have a few there you’ve not ridden in years but can’t be arsed to sell?

just leave a loop of slack or something

Adjust the floodgate?

The only 22″ Orange Five in the universe (probably), it’s got a neck like a horse. It’s also got a reverb now, which hides it’s gangliness quite a bit :)

21″ Scandal sounds ideal, respectably short head tube so the front end isn’t miles up. 6’6″ here and recently bought a raw one in 21″, used to have one of the old style ones before this but it was getting a bit ragged :)

Can only speak from experience but can’t recommend on-ones monkey and smorgasbord highly enough for the price

+1 chuffed to bits with mine, rubbish for the 40% road/60% muddy trail combo as above, but then probably no more silly than a Rubber Queen :P

Hehe at the Mega thing :) Quite a few single pivots in there, you see a lot on the bigger beefier models. If you’d looked at 2011 results there were even a couple of Orange in there.

http://www.megavalanche.com/ckfinder/userfiles/files/resultats%20mega/MEGA%202011%20ALL%20RESULTS.pdf

2x Orange and the Commencal top ten at very least. Most of the rest being 4 bars, which are plusher than single pivot if anything. Completely the opposite direction to the VPP/Maestro setup.

Not that it makes a difference anyway :-) Which was pretty much my original point.

It’s how efficient the maestro design is. It blows the five design away and as efficient as the five feels, it’s not a patch on the maestro system. Not to mention how torsionally stiffer it is through the entire length of the frame.

Given the bulk of riders top 10 in races like Megavalanche are on single pivots they must be hella fast then. Imagine how fast they’d go with Maestro! :roll:

Good inch and a half extra length in the Trance top tube, I’d definitely say it would be a factor. Sizable difference though!