Stif seem to have quite a lot of Niner frames with pretty hefty discounts, including XL frames.

A lot of the euro bikes do that, stuff like Cube and Canyon looked to be tall, but not overly long in 22/23″. I say this because I was hunting around, as my arms aren’t quite as silly long as my legs. The Stumpy is the only thing I’ve seen that has just scaled up all over.

The trouble i’vd found is that from xl to xxl only seat tube and headtube length change.

Have you tried an XXL Stumpy? They grow in all directions.

668mm ETT!

Edit: Oof, just spotted your home built frame thread. Amazing work. Is it still going strong?

Sounds worth a shot, cheers!

Seems like a shame, whatever offers the most stability sounds fine by me though.

Tragically I’d just resubscribed after xmas via a gift sub, yet to receive an issue. I’m hoping 25% less issues equates to a partial refund on these accounts and not a 25% price hike.

6’6″ here, I think I’m hoarding them all. My current collection is:

XXL Specialized Stumpjumper FSR
XL Specialized Enduro
XL Singular Swift

XXL Stumpjumper HT frame (missing a mech hanger bolt, grr)
XL Scandal frame (quite a bit of tyre/grit rub on the seatstays)

I’m mainly legs, the XXL both feel a bit too long if I’m honest, which is why the Stumpy HT ended up in a cupboard and I swapped the the Swift. They look very nicely in proportion though. I’ll probably flog the Stumpys on here at some point, it’s a shame as they’re super rare and in great nick, but probably won’t be worth much.

23″ XXL Stumpy there, managing to not look ridiculous, like most big bikes do.

I’d rather spend on this than buy a Cruz for the same money with a far inferior build!

https://www.stif.co.uk/bikebuilder/santa-cruz-bronson-cc-custom-bike/143/%5B/url%5D

Far inferior there, could even have a full XT + BOS Deville build for less than the Stage 5. It looks like a top bike, I’m just baffled by people trying to justify the £5.5k build is good value compared to anything else on the market. Totally blinded by the sticker on the side.

Yeah, I’ll do tomorrow too. Generally do Tues/Thurs KISS rides if I can. My last performance was terrible, I seem to be going backwards, I’ll be content with mid-D bracket.

Im really not sure why people get so annoyed around what others spend their money on. I mean its not like they built an Ebike or anything……

Who’s annoyed? Are people not allowed to express an opinion, for fear of offending one of the potential customers?

The Canyon you linked, you are aware you’re spending a fortune on the carbon frame? The alloy version is £2000 less.

https://www.canyon.com/en-gb/mtb/strive/2017/strive-al-6-0-race.html

I’ve had a Five before, bought new with a set of Kashima forks for £2k, I do have an interest in their new bits. Even if you bought all those bits you’d listed previously for online prices, you’d still have about £3000 left over (assuming the frame comes with a shock), I wonder if that’s going to be the sort of price they’re asking.

I was trying to think of another company doing similar prices for flash aluminium frames, without being custom built. The only thing I can think of is something like Nicolai?

Grantway

Oh man, I’d not heard that name in a while. Amazing guy.

My only issue I’m moaning about is that the new ones seem a bit pricey. Even a Segment with SLX for example is £2800, I don’t mind that, seems fair enough.

I can’t help but wonder if everyone is funding some new tooling with these new ones? Just seems totally bonkers. Given the value of the kit on it, is the frame going to be £4000 or something?

No you can’t, you can buy two canyons but not the same spec the same spec is

https://www.canyon.com/en-gb/mtb/strive/2017/strive-cf-9-0-race.html

Wait, what? Aren’t we comparing to:

https://www.orangebikes.co.uk/bikes/stage-5-le

The Canyon you linked you has £1000 groupset, that Orange has a £300 one. The wheels on the Canyon are double the price. Not to mention it’s carbon.

No, I was comparing to the £2500-2900 sort of models. Aluminium, GX instead of XT. Admittedly those Lyric RC are only £700 to the £850 Fox, that’s about it though? Tragically I’d bet money the Canyons frame would be a good chunk lighter.

The main difference is you’re spending £3000 for some guy to weld it together and a distributor to shift it around. I still think they’d be more competitive if they sold direct.

If I had to put money on a bike lasting ride after ride through a couple of UK winters with minimal servicing, it would be an Orange every time, not a Canyon.

Buy a spare then. You can buy 2 Canyons with similar level kit for the same money.

Bizarrely I’ve settled with tubes on the back, tubeless on the front. 100kg rider and skinny tyres felt too soft on the back. Rarely get punctures anyway.

I really do think Orange should just sell direct these days, if that’s the best they can do price wise. Maybe even just solely sell frames, I just don’t understand how an alloy frame + Fox 36, with a £1000 of groupset + wheels + finishing kit can ever be £5500.

I wondered what Canyon Strive you could have for that money, sadly they don’t make bikes for that kind of money. Even the carbon Strive with X01 Eagle would leave you with enough change for a holiday.

lol stw just nerded prematurely

I dunno, the chat forum is half full of Linux posts at the moment! This stuff’s lightweight! 🙂

Indeed, it’s a tenuous lead though. The one price point they could be argued to win at is the RX 480 vs GTX 1060. Even then, the prices on Amazon are about the same for both, benchmark wise the RX 480 only really wins on DX12 titles, it draws more power and the bulk of games will be written primarily with Nvidia drivers in mind.

The new early benchmarks for the Ryzen do look good and I hope they succeed to bring prices down. Every AMD system I’ve had has been arse though. The last being a Phenom X3, which is really a factory reject quad core CPU, with a broken core.

AMD definitely has the advantage in this particular game due to its efficiency with the Vulkan API. The RX470/480 makes mincemeat of the latest Doom.

This is true, isn’t Vulkan is a rebranded Mantle, which is an AMD technology. Also id software have been fighting for years to keep making games in OpenGL which everyone else has hopped to DirectX, I can’t see many other studios building games in Vulkan.

Sorry, miles off topic 🙂

Yeah, I’m on Three as well. No complaints, very good value and I’ve had no coverage issues personally. Saved a ton since I’ve stopped using contracts.

The likes of G2A have £20 Windows 10 keys in most the time, generally sellers with thousands of feedback. I’ve bought a few from there, my current PC and parents PC are both using a £20 key, zero issues, authenticates fine. I bought Windows 7 keys from similar back in the day. Feel free to spend 5x that amount if it makes you feel better.

I’ve very skeptical regarding AMD, they make great integrated systems like you see in the PS4/Xbone. They promised lots with the RX 4xx cards too, yet they can barely match the mid range Nvidia cards and they’re far less efficient, they just seems a generation behind. They’ve been pushing more hz/amps/cores on their processors for years, it’s never helped.

Thanks all, so… crank brothers idodine really worth avoiding?

Crank brothers – cheap ish and light and look good.

Did you just ask a question, then answer yourself?

I’ve had a set of Crank Bros Iodine on my Stumpy for a while now, they’ve lasted and genuinely seem quite stiff compared to most low spoke count wheels I’ve run. The spokes constantly make a twanging sound though as they re-tension and they’re not very wide for what they pretend to be, I only use it for red/XC sort of riding and I can’t say I’d trust them on anything more than that. Really can’t see any reason to get them, aside from what they look like.

I considered putting them on my Enduro, but the stock OEM wheels were just as light, with miles wider rims.

I went to one similar to the initial post a few years back, although it was karting, airsoft/bb stuff and a casino. Cost a similar amount, good fun weekend, none of which stuff I’d normally do.

For mine I dragged all my mates camping in the Lakes for a weekend, in a terrible 12 man teepee tent we got from Argos for next to nothing. The weather was brutal, lots of memories, whether they like it or not. Even managed to drag them all out there for the subsequent 3 or so years before they broke and refused to come anymore 🙂

I’ve gone on a few crazy drives to make my bikes lighter, every time I’ve ended up with a bike I like less (aside from the rigid carbon forked Scandal, I loved that!). Wheels specifically, light wheels and 6’6″, 100kg rider is never good.

Fenix 3 here again, love it. Use it to track steps and things every day, notifications and the odd bike ride. The new ones look crazy expensive which is a shame.

In the past I’ve owned a Samsung Gear Live and Pebble Time, both felt very flawed in their own ways. I really couldn’t go back to something like the Gear of Apple watch with a sub 1 day battery life.

Something like a Garmin 735XT sounds like it would check everything off your list?

Sure 🙂 Via HDMI I found I was getting a slight delay on playing a note and it coming out the TV. Only 0.5 seconds or so, but it was definitely noticeable and quite frustrating. Since HDMI is digital your signal will be passing through a DAC in your TV or soundbar, this is where the latency was added. You may find you can avoid it with a passthrough/game mode, for our setup it was always there.

Fortunately the 360 has a component out, which is an analogue output. I can’t notice any latency whatsoever via this, I used a component to headphone adaptor and route the audio direct to headphones, bypassing the TV entirely. Playing via headphones isolates you from the acoustic sound of the guitar somewhat as well.

There’s also has a 2 player mode which is quite good fun 🙂 Needs 2 cables obviously. On the difficulty note, it starts out very easy and ramps up, the idea is to keep replaying the same song for a while so you learn it properly, the very top difficulty level will start hiding the notes it displays, as you should know them by then.

I normally play on PC these days, as there’s a huge archive of player made content floating around (Customsforge). Hunting for interesting music with cool bass lines has definitely set me off listening to random stuff I wouldn’t normally.

I more arched back, so we can achieve the perfect posture by sitting on a sofa all day.

If you wanted that specific dialer you’d need to flash a custom ROM, from the likes of XDA:

https://forum.xda-developers.com/xperia-z5

I bet there’s lots with that dialer. The Xperia Z phones were always a pain in the arse for flashing, due to the weird way they had licenses for the camera hidden in a separate partition. I’m not sure if that still applies for the Z5, I had an older model.

On the app note, I used the “Should I Answer?” app, which has a decent database of common spam numbers. You can add your own custom ones too. I don’t use it anymore mind, I don’t seem to get any spam bizarrely.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.mistergroup.muzutozvednout&hl=en_GB

Yeah, i had about an hour and a half on there. No issues. Login seemed to be broken around 8ish, but it let me in shortly after. I think theyre doing pretty well, not much software can handle you fully disconnecting and reconnecting mid session, its pretty tidy.

Hmm, I don’t play guitar and wasn’t really planning on learning, but I *do* have a bass guitar in the loft that was given to me a long, long time ago that I failed to do anything with. That Rocksmith thing sounds intriguing !

Rocksmith works really well with bass. I’d get the 2014 version over the old one. I still keep my 360 purely for that, the Xbox One has no analogue output so it’s tricky avoiding latency! I used to play with headphones plugged directly into the component lead cable.

Sorry for going straight for the alternatives, but that sort of money would get you an i5 on the Dell outlet, I’ve had 3 from there, all brand new. Even now, quick check:

Inspiron 15 – 5567
Processor: Intel® Core™ i7-7500U (2 Core,4MB Cache, up to 3.5 GHz)
Windows 10 Home (64bit)
8GB (1x8GB) 2400MHz SDRAM DDR4 Non-ECC
256GB 2.5 inch SATA Class 20 Solid State Drive
8X DVD+/- RW Drive
4GB AMD Radeon R7 M44x

£479

Or if you wanted an i3

Inspiron 15 – 5567
Processor: Intel® Core™ i3-7100U (2 Core,3M Cache, up to 2.40 GHz,15W)
Windows 10 Home (64bit)
8GB (1x8GB) 2400MHz SDRAM DDR4 Non-ECC
1 TB SATA Hard Drive (5400 RPM)
8X DVD+/- RW Drive

£366

On the post above, 5 minutes from work, living in an area with dodgy drivers, time factors (I’ve signed up to gyms nearly every year, rarely go), we’ve got a 6 month old at the moment, it’s all exactly the same setup I’ve got. Every winter my fitness goes off the rails, every Spring I get destroyed due to being unfit, just about build up some fitness by Autumn, then the clocks change and I complete stop again until the next year.

This year I joined in with the Zwift lot on the 6th of December and I’ve done just over 400 miles on it since then, over 23 hours so far.

Absolutely delighted, fits in great with my home routine. Just being a bit more active on the bike has got me commuting, when most years I’d be driving in at this time of year. I’ve signed up for a race tonight, which I’ll likely destroy myself on, genuinely find it all really good fun. Not sure why 2 hours of spinning on the roads in the pitch dark is in any way better than mashing myself for 2 hours on a race.

Is this not Amazon and Ebay saving cookies out, Facebook’s adverts are just targeting using those?

Clear cookies and shop in a private window if you really don’t like it. You’ll most likely just get adverts aimed at your gender/age/usage, which I usually find even worse.

True, but only as the MacBook Pro is gradually turning into a MacBook Air 13. I’m used to Pro meaning “has a discrete graphics card”, the current cheap ones just look like fat Airs 🙂

Comparing the latest Pro 13 to Air 13, the Air has a longer battery life, 20% lighter and costs £300 less for the base model. It depends what you want it for.

As I say, I went for the Dell XPS 13 personally 😛

Just to cover all options, I’d get the Macbook Air. Lovely bits of kit, light, decent battery life, easy to carry around. The stuff you’re doing, even video and photo editing is only going to primarily going to be limited by CPU and storage speed, both of which are just as swift on the Air.

I’ve got a Macbook Pro I use from work, monster spec, it does get roasting hot and sound like a vacuum cleaner when it’s going though. I use an XPS 13 at home, which is more like the Air 12″ sort of form factor. It’s done photo/video editing and currently gets used most days for Zwifting.

Which Specialized? If it’s a pre-2017 Stumpjumper it’s borderline too low already, you’ll struggle. Enduro you might get away with it, much higher.

I’m using about ~720s, I tried longer and ended up cutting them down after a few rides as it just felt a bit unwieldy.

Although my bike uses 29″ wheels with 2.3″ tyres I seem to have enough upper body strength to turn the handlebars. Not meaning to show off or anything, but I find it quite easy.

I use one of these, which my XPS 13 fits in perfectly (the 11.6″ one):

https://www.amazon.co.uk//dp/B00DUGZFA6/%5B/url%5D

They do bigger versions. Fairly tough fabric, padded, a few storage areas, crazy bargain. Might be a bit small for your usage.

Have you got an Ant+ washing machine or something?

I feel like I’ve been so lucky here, aside from the night where it all exploded everything has worked for me.

GTX 670 would be miles quicker than a 750 Ti for the same cash, it would also use double the power and I do agree that with a low end 475w it’s probably a safer bet! 🙂

I’ve extrapolated my data to conclude that I’ll be world champion by next November! Exciting times.

There are 2 or 3 STW Zwifters that seem to be around the same level of (un)fitness as me so it’s interesting seeing how their times compare to mine, so I follow those.

8)

Loving seeing the gradual improvement at the moment, I pretty much had last year off cycling entirely, so it’s starting from scratch almost. My first race a month back was 1.95w/kg, last nights was 2.43w/kg, there’s a fairly linear leap between the 6 or so I’ve done. Hoping to upgrade in a week or two.

I might do the WBR Sub 2.0 tonight at 20:15, losing some of my 100kg would probably be the easiest boost right now!