I’ve got a compressor, so getting tyres blown up shouldn’t be a problem.

The bit that gets me is the rim strip – some say get Stan’s strips, some say you can use a BMX tube, some say use electrical tape.

Do I use the electrical tape in conjuction with a rim strip made out of a BMX tube, or do I literally just pull a valve off a tube and cover everything else in leccy tape?

Can I use a BMX tube and not trim it off outside the tyre?

It’s electric, so it’ll cost 2 times what the same heat from gas will.

Goodfellas
Usual Suspects
Dirty Harry
And of course, my all time favourite, Uncle Buck.

Buy new Bosch or Valeo wipers. Air and UV does them in over time, regardless of use.

Rain x is fine on the motorway, but is squeak, judder and smear central when you’re driving around town.

Nike Dri-fit. Sports Direct / He Runs She Runs do em cheap. Not quite tights, not quite trousers.

It’s a wind up.

I love the folks on where whose default position is to have a go.

I just wanted to know if not going on a stag do is a total faux pas or not much of a problem…

Ebay, 99p, no reserve.

I’ve sold a couple of our old vehicles on on there – one an approx 10 year old Citroen Despatch, white, drove OK, ply lined, 150k on the clock, massive dent in the side door, head rests chewed by someone’s dog. Fetched £1300, which was more than I would ever have had the face to advertise it for. I was thinking of advertising at around a grand and would have taken £8-900…

99p no reserve really seems to pull people in, and if you’re not getting anywhere near the money you want, there are ways of pulling the auction. Or you could always refuse to sell and take the bad feedback. You’re not compelled to sell like in a real auction.

I’ve already spoken to him on the subject. I don’t think he twigs how much cash it is…

Bondhus again. I’ve got a Bondhus multitool which cost very little, and is identical to one of the Park multitools…

Next you’ll be posting the exciting news that the pope’s a catholic. 😀

Tesco sell quinoa.

Chuck Norris.

What the other fellow said. A dress watch has a slim case, leather strap and some attempt at style.

I’d go for a Quartz battery powered one, perhaps a Skagen if it’s for occasional use.

I can vouch that Seikos are very solidly made and they do reasonable automatic watches for 50 quid upwards, but you won’t get a cheap auto movement and a thin case…

Nevegal. Well, they seem superfast compared with 2.4 Rubber Queens.

I’ve driven a few decent cars as we have a fair variety of pool cars at work, and I’ve been able to borrow cars occasionally. As a result, I’ve driven most 3 series sized stuff.

There are two sides to the 3 series. One is the image – “I’m a go getter who needs to sit 6 inches off your back bumper, because I’ve got a photocopier lease to sell. RAAWR!”, and of course Surf Mat, and the actual car.

The other side is the actual car. They’re probably about equivalent in terms of reliability, fit and finish, comfort etc. to their competitors. However, they win out on two big points. Firstly, BMWs don’t lose much money, and they don’t emit a lot of CO2. This makes them fantastic value as company cars. Secondly, the 3 series is streets ahead of the Merc and Audi equivalents to drive. Hugely, massively better. The 320d actually does a decent impression of a big petrol engine, and the car goes round corners.

Some can’t seperate the nobby image from the actual motor, which is very, very good.

Sounds like something Alan Partridge or Adrian Mole would pitch…

Hayes seem to have a terrible rep for reliability. If you need one new set, I’d go for Shimano or Magura.

You can often get the middle ring and outer over the spider and pedal without removing the cranks.

No need for a chain guide / device unless you were already losing your chain a lot.

I’d just buy a 36t ring and a BBG bash guard. The bash is generally only there to stop your chain jumping off to the right, so just get a superlight one.

Don’t worry, if I kick the bucket overnight, my girlfriend should notice.

Get some new tyres. You can’t get rid of the standing water, so tread depth and speed are the main factors. The other issue is width – if you have 295s on, you’ll suffer far more than with 165s.

With decent tyres aquaplaning normally happens at 70mph and above. Mind you, I always buy directional tyres, generally Uniroyals.

Nope, it’s just a load of columns with LEFT, RIGHT and LEN functions and it’s a bit hard to follow from cut and paste…

Set out the below across Row 1 – the | sign is there to show the breaks between columns:
Original | Year | Month |Length | Day | Date | Paste values

Your date goes into cell A2…

Cell B2:
=RIGHT(A2,4)

C2:
=LEFT((RIGHT(A2,6)),2)

D2:
=LEN(A2)

E2:
=LEFT(A2,(D2-6))

F2:

=CONCATENATE(E2,”/”,C2,”/”,B2)

You then copy the contents of column F and Paste Values into Column G.

Set the format as Date or Datestring it, and you’re sorted.

All the above could be condensed into one formula, but it’d make your brain ache…

Worked it out. Drop me an email.

Oh, and Leading Zeroes don’t exist in excel (if you can see them, that’s because someone’s set the number format as 00000000 – press Ctrl 1 to see it)…

You’ll need to work from the right to get it into the right format. Take the first 4 digits on the right to get the year, then the next two to establish the month, then whatever’s left to get the first digit. Not got the time to work out the formulae, but I’d do it with a load of columns (ie, one for year, one for month etc.), using LEFT, RIGHT, MID and LEN functions.

Left takes a chunk off the left, Right- I think you can guess, and Mid takes a chunk out the middle.

Len gives you the length of whatever’s in the cell so you can still make things work if the length of your string varies.

An alternate method would be to concatenate a 9 (all months should be at most 31 days long) onto the front of every leading zero date, and then strip that out later. This would mean you could just take the left two digits, the middle 2 digits, and the last 4 digits using pretty simple formulae.

You’d get your 9 with something like =if(“(Len(A2)<8”),(concatenate(“9”,A2),) if your first date is in A2. Copy and paste values again to strip out the formulae…

You’d then do another if statement to pull out the right hand digit if the number starts with a 9…

Mash the text into a date format by whatever method, then do copy, paste values or paste values and format.

Lots of functions will not work with the output of other functions..

Got mine from CMC in Clay Cross. Was years ago mind.

You could stick the wheels and drivetrain on a new frame. On one 456s are cheap at the minute, and you could upgrade the other bits as and when required.

Rose bikes in Germany are great for cheap bits.

On one have decent cheap frames and tyres, and often cracking deals on factory wheels, finishing kit etc.

Don’t believe the hype about XT. Non series and Alivio shimano gear is pretty good, and Deore is generally very solid.

Merlin is the place to go for custom wheels.

Spesh taking a stake in Merida is pretty much a textbook example of outsourcing.

I can’t know that it’s the exactly the same as one sold by a popular brand of bike near Doncaster, but I’ve had a pretty close look at a “Doncaster” bike and to my eye’s it’s identical.

Bit of a chicken and egg thing to me. Could be a catalogue item, could be the usual IP problems of having your stuff manufactured in China…

Does this explain why the Specialized frame is more expensive than the unbranded frame even though they can come out of the same factory?

Same factory does not mean the same end product, or even a product of similar quality. We’re talking about very small scale production, in factories that might make carbon iphone cases one week, bucket seats another etc.

Undoubtedly an unbranded frame would be cheaper, because Specialized have umpteen selling points and overheads the unbranded seller doesn’t. A large part of it will be retail availability, a guarantee and known quality. Some of it will be marketing bull, glossy ads and a nice paint job.

Of course, some people see the word branding and associate it with the selling of ordinary product with a nice narrative attached and a big price tag and turn purple…

And how do you establish who has or can afford the know how?

If they have it, or they’ve bought it, they generally boast about it and offer a decent warranty…

Specialized, as an example, have written reams of stuff about their testing and R&D.

Once you get to this point, you are talking branding, at the most basic level. A Victorian style stamp of quality, driven by the economics of the situation.

You have a point but I think its a bit of an extreme case and could be applied to any product from any material.

It could, but the information gap is generally much bigger with carbon than it is with say, a steel or aluminium frame.

People have been building bike frames, car and aircraft parts out of those materials for decades. Assessing whether the frame is actually made out of the material it should be, and whether the joints are any good or not is relatively low tech. As a result, it’s well within the grasp of any bike firm to assess the quality of a factory’s welded frames. The average STW poster could probably give you an opinion…

Carbon, on the other hand, is far less well understood. Which is why I would only buy carbon bikes from firms that either have the resources to buy in the know how, or have the know how themselves.

You did realise that Giant is/were a factory untill they started making their own branded stuff?

You’re missing my point spectacularly here. It doesn’t matter where the factory is, or if the firm owns the factory or not.

There are hundreds of factories around the world that will make you an object to your or their specification to a price. The one thing they all have in common is that they exist to make a profit. There might be an Artisanal Carbon Knitters commune in Todmorden, but by and large, that’s the way it is.

There’s a problem with this, especially when the factory sets the specs or helps with the design process. The factory know a lot more about the product than you do. This means you have no accurate way of assessing the quality of the goods. They know this, and cutting costs helps their bottom line. The incentives for the manufacturer are all pulling them towards the bare minimum in terms of quality.

My view is that is exactly the situation you’re in if you buy a random frame from the factory, or from a brand that doesn’t know a lot about carbon. It might be great, it might not. I’d sooner spend my £200 on a decent steel or aluminium frame that I can be confident will be alright.

On the other hand, the big bike firms

I’ve had smart lights mounted on the seatstay.

Icetech brakes or 2×10 I reckon.

Also what personal experiences are you basing this on?

I work in a company that buys a lot of stuff from the far east. It’s not about owning your own factory, employing your own staff etc. It’s about understanding the economics of the situation. There are two major issues – information inequalities, as I mentioned above, and economies of scale.

Say you have two firms selling a frame that hits a £400 price point, one shifts 1000 units a year, one shifts 20000. I’m not in the bike trade, so these are all finger in the air numbers. The actual numbers themselves don’t matter – it’s how the maths works out that does.

If both firms spend 5% of of the sale price on the quality and warranty side of things, the small firm has a budget of £20k, the large firm has a budget of £400k. £20k will get you a buying trip, your CEN tests and some cash set aside for dealing with warranty claims. £400k pretty obviously goes a lot further, and the smart thing to do is to increase the quality and minimise your warranty costs. This saves you money as complaints are very expensive to deal with, and improves the perception of your product, improving sales.

This was pretty well demonstrated a while ago by a thread on warranty lengths. The warranty length matched pretty well with the size of the firm…

There are a whole load of other economies a larger firm can make that simply wouldn’t be possible for a smaller one, and mean there’s more room for quality. Your suppliers suddenly become far less keen to mess you about if you’re 30% of their turnover.

Pretty much all but the most ancient and cheap CRTs will have a SCART, so you’ve got no problem with connecting the thing up. I expect an old B&O will probably have S-video, SCART, Composite and Component sockets on the back, so you’ll be sorted.

I’d get a PVR (ie, a recorder) because they’re not that pricey, and they’re ace – record entire series of programmes, pause and rewind TV etc. You may find that you need a new aerial.

I’ve got a Humax PVR, and it works fine. Everything is as it should be, doesn’t crash all the time, the remote is sensible, menus all make sense and the guide works well. I’ve never felt the need to take things off the recorder and onto a DVD, as there’s tonnes of room and I just delete stuff after I’ve watched it.

I’d avoid the real cheap kit as it can be a pain to use and to crash a lot (never imagined a time when a telly could crash!). Try and have a go on the kit in the shop, as some can be horrible to use.

In many respects, it’s not about marketing. It’s simply not economical for a small firm to put the same time and money into R&D, testing and QA as a large firm if they’re going to hit the same sorts of price points.

The major thing to be aware of here is that there’s a huge information inequality – the layman buyer (either the end consumer or the specifier at the bike firm) cannot easily assess the quality of what they’re buying. The manufacturer will always try to maximise return and that can mean cutting costs. As consumers, we generally aren’t in possession of the specialist knowledge required, and so we pass that task onto the bike firm. If the bike firm don’t have that knowledge, you’re stuffed…

double post…

Do you not think these Chinese companies selling frames by the thousand could just be ‘composite specialists’?

They are. As a brand / retailer, you don’t really want to be in a position where you’re at a big disadvantage in terms of knowledge compared to the supplier. That’s basically the situation most small brands will be in, because these aren’t commodities that meet a standard spec. If you had ex aero or F1 composites bods doing all the specification, then you’ve got a degree of confidence that they know what they’re doing.

Have a look at what Spesh do:
http://www.specialized.com/bc/microsite/fact/testing.html

Then pop round to my house and I’ll show you an inbred with the disc mount welded on in the wrong place. The R&D and QC isn’t in the same league…