My carbon Zaskar was built to support my weight, after riding it for a while it developed a crack. The only plausble solution for this is nano thermite, planted by the government, to stop me buying imported carbon frames.

On a similar Meta note, has anyone tried 2008/2009 and 2010 for comparisons? I would ponder updating my 2008 sometime, I'd just be paranoid of subtle geometry changes, the 2008 fits like a glove.

After having both a clearcoat Mojo and a green one, I'd have the white one, the paint is easy to touch up, the clearcoat dries out and cracks. I'm sure it's come on quite a lot since the original Mojo, but I'm definitely a fan of the thick tubing and paint, dirt just falls off.

Not to mention how good it'd look with the new 2011 Fox!

2008 one here and it's fantastic, no cracking issues. Fantastic suspension glued me to the floor like nothing I've ever used, mainly using my Mojo at the moment, for no real reason other than it's prettier , lighter and I'm a tart. The front end is very floaty compared to the Meta, truth be known I probably do laps faster on the Meta. The Meta is still the bike of choice if we go somewhere vaguely scary.

So tragic that the company screwed up a bit, they were doing fantastic but seem to have been become a budget brand.

They're only 130g, £1/g, bargain!

I've got a 350g Truvativ post you can have if you want, I can undercut you and do 80p/g. Bargain!

The carbon Ritchey posts?

6'6" here, always found XL Specialized bikes fit well, my XL Meta fit well too. Various GT bikes (owned a carbon Zaskar and Avalanche) and Giant Trances I didn't get on with bizarrely, they all felt a bit short in the top tube, even though the numbers disagreed.

Riding a 21" Mojo which is borderline at the moment, the seatpost is a bit of a monster. Just about feeling comfy with it now after lots of faffing.

Yeah, I wondered that, my standard Mojo with Fox 32s, full XT, carbon Monkeylite bars, Formula Oro brakes, Hope Hoops on Flows, comes in at 28 pounds.

It's not a light build*, but I'd expect it to be about 30ish if I added a heavier frame, seatpost and forks.

*it used to be about 26 and it felt awful.

Good stuff heihei, very intruiged to how you found it compared to the normal Mojo.

I've too seriously pondered selling everything for one of these beasts. Couple of sets of forks and you'd be done for everything. Using a standard Mojo at the mo, which is drastically beyond my skill, but this seems to do everything and more!

Bet you could get some decent lightish forks/wheels on, stick it in 140mm mode and race xc/marathons on that at a push. Followed by swapping to 180mm and downhilling/freeriding, silly.

On an old note, vaguely related, 2Pure sent me some Nuclear Pesto paint today. My frame was direct from Ibis and didn't come with any, top service!

Like Dougal says, anyone who cares about low weight won't want to run hope hubs. They're 100g more than a set of XTR hubs, and the idea of alloy cassettes lasting 6 minutes and resulting of a weight of 80g more than the equivalently priced XTR set up just makes it sound silly.

Well, they're closer to 50g heavier than a set of centerlock XTR, but then centerlock XTR will need another 60g of centerlock adapters or heavier rotors, and this is comparing 160mm XTR to normal Hope floating rotors, never mind Ashima etc. DT centerlock adapters are 30g per end.

There are lighter hubs, but they're pretty weenie, XTR certainly isn't an example of one of them.

The new cassettes aren't mid ranged bits, I'm surpised everyone wants sub XTR/XX weight for SLX cost.

Yes and no. If you've got 4GB ram you'll not be able to use much more than 3GB of it due to memory mapping of the display and other stuff (so it's not quite true that 3GB is the max, but that's closer than 4GB

Well given that reasoning, wouldn't 3gb just mean you have even less after the "memory mapping"? It's the per process address mapping that's the limit:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa366778%28VS.85%29.aspx

Bit of a waste of cash getting over 3gb on Win 32 though I do agree! Given a lot of Core 2 systems are DDR memory though 3gb is a bit of a bizarre number.

On the antivirus front, everyone at work seems to swear by ESET NOD32, http://www.eset.co.uk/ – Things like AVG used to be good but don't seem to actually catch a lot of new things. I'd definitely avoid the likes of Norton and McAfee though, both sell on name alone.

This is what "Rapid Rise" refers to in Shimano mechs, they work the other way around.

No need, just fit a fork mounted front brake hanger and you'll have no more judder

Yeah, as you mentioned, the new ones come with it. I've never noticed any judder here, 15 stone rider, 61cm frame, were it going to happen I'd assume it would have.

I'd hunt down one of those little clamps.

Phew, it's lucky you arrived when you did with your £15k education, things were looking bleak there for a moment.

I hear the 80s were just a chain party, everyone just ate cocktail sausages and drank champagne.

Indeed, it's out of con-troll!

It's a shame the thread has got quite so derailed, the OP clearly wasn't refering to people who have worked hard for 20+ years in an industry, then got stuck unemployed. It seems to have been trolled down into a pretty dark place, then anti-trolled back out to talking about something completely different.

As far as the paperwork goes, perhaps you could get a graduate to help you with that next time? I'm sure they can explain it too you.

Indeed, most will have filled it out hundreds of times :P

On a completely different note, there are some absolute tosh degrees around at the moment, I've done one myself which was a complete waste of time and money. I bet a lot of tax money is wasted there on getting people pretend qualifications that don't actually work towards getting a job.

People seem to be justifying their own personal experiences as evidence that the dole system is solid. Regardless, there are a lot of people, who have made a concerted effort to avoid work for their entire lives, as it's currently a viable way to live in it's own right.

It's fine as a fallback system for when jobs are tight, there will always be millions of people using the system, which is fine. There's definitely a culture of abusing the system though. I'd quite like to take every second week off to sit around and get drunk, if everyone here could get together and arrange a fund for me that'd be great, cheers.

I own "xxx"

Hmm!

I don't think there's a binary right/wrong answer here, everyone's situation differs. There are a hell of a lot of people sponging still, it seems to be a bit of a consumer culture thing.

I don't think we've quite modernised as a country from a huge chunk of our industry shooting off to Asia, now that shipping things around has become such big business. Obviously every raw material, and secondary manufacturing industry fell apart, not that long ago either.

Hope hoops on flows are rarer than rocking horse s*&t secondhand, and at least £360 new!

Mine were about £250 from Winstanleys, best wheelset I've ever had, far more solid feeling than my 355s or XT M775 factory set. Probably due to the huge width, the fact they get used for DH is pretty reassuring. I don't think I'd ever use anything else now.

Front Wheel

Rear Wheel

100g-ish of the weight difference between the wheelsets is down to the lower spoke count on the Mavics.

Any finished pics? Just curious how like mine it ends up looking, I noticed you asked about Joplins :)

There is some pish talked on here about weights.

How can you say that, then quote a weight off the internet as gospel? I've never had a frame come in even vaguely close to the claimed weight.

Hot, sort of like a heavy Mojo HD then?

The one you rode has about an extra pound or two of weight over the Carbon Nomad on the Santa Cruz website, which is 28.65lbs claimed, mysterious.

http://www.santacruzbicycles.com/nomad_carbon/#builder.php

300 grams knocked off this year? I'd see that more a sign of just how heavy they were in the first place, my XL was 1600g or something silly. Sadly it cracked at the seattube, the build quality was very shoddy compared to the bulk of other carbon top end bikes I've ridden.

New fangled Samsung Galaxy S here with Android, really getting on with it and an increasing number of them are starting to appear at work.

If you want to get more involved in the workings of it all, or have a pathalogical hatred of brands that move the game on and charge a premium, get something else, like one of these:

That pic may have been relevant about 5 years ago, things have moved on a bit. Standard headphone jack here, plays all websites including those with flash yours doesn't play, plays more audio formats, plays more video formats, better camera for taking pics of the friends I haven't got, drag and drop or use one of numerous bits of software.

Simples?

Now you say a mac will not do everything you need which surprises me (there is plenty of CAD/CAM software available), but you really give it away in the last sentance. You can dual boot to Windows, personally I admit I have a windows virtual on both macs (work and home) in case I need one (about once every two months).

I really gave what away Sherlock? I don't use CAD/CAM software, the OP does, assuming the software is hardware accelerated it'll be quicker on a mid range £700ish PC than a high end Mac due to the £60 gfx card choke point.

I'm a programmer for 360/ps3 at work and tinker with Android etc at home, all of which would scupper me. Why spend more on a Mac when you want to dual boot to run your software? I can't say the idea of paying more, then hacking my way by with dual OS or imitation Windows software really sounds like a solid plan.

To put it another way, what can you do that I can't do for less money? What does your average Mac user require an i7 for but only the very lowest modern line of graphics card? High end video processing or something?

..and is as functional.

How so? This is fairly specific to what you're doing surely? A Mac wouldn't do what I need, either at home or work so I'd argue the opposite.

The form factor/look of the iMac is certainly a huge plus, but function wise I can't see how you'd ever have more control. I guess it comes down to your uses. The very latest iMacs show off about their top end graphical performance, when realistically they have a £60 graphics card in there, with a tiny fraction of a proper desktop PCs rendering power, your CAD/CAM is going to be a bit gimped. They're more like big laptops.

I'd get a custom build PC, i7, couple of raid SSDs, silent, higher graphics card, tons of RAM given it's cheap as chips.

Windows 7 here, completely rock solid, can't see why I'd spend more money to get the choice of less software, for more money. If you buy off the shelf PCs and have issues build your own, it's like Lego, honestly. Don't stick anything cheap in there and you'll have just as solid a system, for less money, which runs faster etc.

To be honest iMacs nowadays are just PC components, in attractive cases, running a different operating system and charging double the price.

You sure it won't?! :| My old Zen Stone just plugged in and appeared as a removable drive in Windows 7, drag/drop worked fine. You'll probably find Windows 7 is MORE compatible with random devices than XP/Vista ever was.

Sadly my Zen broke recently so I too went the way of the Clip+, very good although the max volume seems curiously low compared to the old Zen. The Clip+ also plays MP3 by folder as well as ID3 tags, which helps as my collection isn't massively tidy.

If you do get a Clip make sure it's the newer Clip+, the one with the slightly square center as oppose to the old circular one. It's got a few new bits, smoother menus, ability to play folders etc.

I've had it before with my Shimano, getting the air out always sorts it. To be honest I'd assumed compressing the air made it warm, the warm air expands.

I can't see it being the oil expanding, the whole point of the hydraulic fluid is the fact is doesn't expand/compress under pressure.

Dot oil is supposed to be "degassed" when bleeding brakes. I'd assume not doing this would lead to a similar pumping up the brakes situation. I'm not sure if the same is true for mineral oil.

Xenon IIs music was by Bomb The Bass, who released a full album around that time.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EgjNb-6EOYw

Sadly no idea on the Speedball one, I didn't even know it was a proper band.

Ice cream! Ice cream!

Edit: by the way I rode a Raleigh Lizard, hehe

I'm surprised how important smooth mobile phone menu ergonomics are to everyone anyway nowdays. :?

The vast majority of the time I'm either at work or home, both of which have a PC set up for all my browsing needs, proper keyboard/big monitor. When I'm in neither of these two places I'm probably out on my bike, at which point I don't really care about email.

Still, regardless of this, any decent smartphone from the last 5 years with Symbian/Winmo can happily handle turn by turn navigation, email, tethering, RSS feeds etc. All in compact cases, with much better cameras (which are occationally hand on a bike).

Do people have a second phone they chuck in their bags when they go biking just out of curiosity?

PS I'm the target audience, IT tech, middle aged, programmer too. I'm just not paid enough for gizmos, I'm stuck on a long contract and I'm bitter I think.

Good call ;)

Although it gets poked a bit for being expensive I don't think it's that bad for a boutique carbon frame. RRP is less than the Trance Advanced, Commencal Meta Carbon, Blur LTc, either S-Works trail bikes, Trek EX 9.9 OCLV, Titus FTM Carbon etc, along with by far the best support I've ever experienced.

Forgive my ignorance, but who is Hans?

Hans is one of the 4 partners who runs the company, proper industry guru chap who's been working with carbon bikes for ages now. If you post in the MTBR Ibis forums he'll generally reply very quickly. Amazing dealing with a company where you're literally talking directly to someone in charge, eager to help you out.

Most companies fight to get out of paying a warranty, bizarrely he made a real effort to lend a hand. Even when I told him I wasnt covered for numerous reasons (second owner, over 3 year old frame). I'd buy another Mojo pretty much on the strength of that alone.

We're miles away sadly, Midlands sort of area.

Hmmm… I need to get out and ride one I guess….. Now where on earth am I going to be able to find a demo bike!

Yeah, good luck on that one :| Where do you normally ride?

The best bit, if you did find a second hand one, even if it as out of it's warranty, Ibis would probably still cover it for faults (and/or offer crash replacement prices). They did with mine, wooh \o/

New frame incoming from America as we speak, 8 days sat "Arrived at Outward OE" and now "Arrived at destination country". So close. I sent Hans some chocolate bars and I think I've sweetened him up, he promises I'll be happy when I open the box.

run your ardents below 30 and they will be alright, better on the back than front.

Sure it'll be all good. I like riding easy things, doubt they'll be doing much tougher than Glentress Red. My 2.4 Nobby Nics on the Meta have survived 2 years there on the trot (including all the rocks in Dalbeattie).

I've just bought some Ardents for a week in Scotland we've got coming up. Look pretty big and round for 2.25, low rolling resistance, lots of positive reviews. Intruiged how other people get on with them to be honest.

Hoping they fit on the Mojo, otherwise they'll live on the Meta.