Mavic 521s on whatever hubs you fancy from Merlin.

Stem – whatever’s forged, shot peened and light.

Bars – whatever’s about 680mm wide, and light.

Seriously though. It all used to be about 110mm stems and flat bars. Then shorter stems and riser bars. Then taller riser bars. Then even shorter stems. And now we’re going to “lo-rise” bars.

Give it another 6 months and we’ll be back round to flat bars…

I’m stumped.

£30 gets me a complete 30L Decathlon bag and bladder. The thing is, I know the Decathlon bladders are a touch plasticy and a faff to dry, because I’ve just ruined one…

£50 gets me a Camelbak “the don” which is 17L and comes with a good antidote bladder.

The Decathlon looks less Radcore Disco Freeride! which is a good thing, and leaves me with £20 in my pocket. The Camelbak is a Camelbak, which in my experience means everything fits together very nicely. But the strap setup on the Decathlon looks much better for something that might have a decent amount of kit in it.

Anyone got either?

Bump for the daytime crowd. Any more suggestions?

A lot of 2011 stuff is for sale new with 15-20% off list…

Delivery is generally pretty quick. About 4-5 working days.

All private car sales are sold as seen, zero buyer comeback. If you’re worried about it, just state sold as seen on the receipt.

To be honest, the Dakine looks good, but it’s probably at the upper end of my price range. I’ve had cars for £100, dropping nearly that much on a bag rankles a bit 😉

I’m getting tempted by the idea of the cheap Decathlon “adventure racing” packs and pairing it up with a Source bladder. Anyone had one?

A leccy window is normally £30 and a couple of hours pulling the door card off and putting in a new lifter.

I’ve sold a couple of old vehicles on ebay, always at 99p with no reserve, and it’s the best way of selling a motor in my view. I think we had one person come and have a look at each vehicle, and in the end they both went to bidders who won the auction without coming for a look first, just turned up with cash and drove off.

Both went for more than I’d have dared advertise them for! Far, far less hassle than Autotrader or the free ads.

Assuming there are no major mechanical issues, why would you scrap a 51 plate Polo estate with 180k on the clock?

If it’s running alright and got a bit of MOT that’ll easily fetch north of £500. Anything that can shift a decent amount of kit and not cost a bomb to run sells very easily.

Ideally you want to get a year’s MOT on it and put it on Ebay with a 99p start price. Get your local hand car wash place to do a £40 tidy up, get some photos on a sunny day in a nice spot, and bob’s your uncle.

Went last summer, it’s an ace place.

Stayed here:
http://www.dubrovnik-online.com/apartments_tonkovic/%5B/url%5D

It’s about 20 minutes outside Dubrovnik by bus, the guy who runs it is an absolute top bloke – will pick you up from the airport, take you back when you leave, nip you to the supermarket so you can get some shopping in etc.

Big karst landscape, lovely sea, architecture by the Venetians, things are reasonably priced etc. Locals are all very friendly, and you’re not badgered to go into restaurants and bars all the time.

Weather should be good this time of year.

Speaking as someone who always hated PE at school, and discovered “sport” through having a crack on a hire bike years later…

How daft is that? Spend some £££ on sport at school and you’ll make it back 3 times by not treating people for obesity and heart disease.

Spend a few more quid and get a wider variety of sport on to the curriculum, and you know, you might actually get a decent proportion of the population doing some exercise.

Sounds harsh to me, I would ask to see if they feel this is common or not and if not then to take an uncommon approach and do better to repair or replace under the circumstances in the name of good customer relations.

I’d keep screaming and moaning until Mr Orange had 15 Page 3 models sent over with a new Five, and then had them clean and check it for me after every ride.

I run an old Deore triple with a 22/36 setup. Normal triple LX shifter and a double specific SLX mech. Works fine.

Apparently a standard triple mech will do the job too, but is fiddlier to set up.

As far as I’m aware, on a double specific crank, the spacing between rings is the same, but the rings might be placed further in or outboard…

IIRC the ramped blocks on Nevegals are set up so that the ramped edge faces forwards (to reduce rolling resistance) and the square edge faces backwards.

I can see how having that flipped around might help braking.

Any particular reason not to go for 3/8″? Tough enough to work on the car then.

Anyway, a cheap Chrome Vanadium one with “walldrive” style sockets is the answer. My Sealey socket set cost £20 from Euro Car Parts (so probably £25-£30 now), and it’s tough as. Had a lot of hammer, including using a 1/2″ to 3/8″ adaptor and an air powered rattle gun.

Most people hate change.

At our place, it goes like this (communicated by mid / higher level management):

1) There’s going to be a change, there needs to be a change because of XYZ.

2) There’s going to be a change, here’s what it is.

3) There’s going to be a change, here’s some training on the new process.

4) Lets make the change.

I’d go for a period of letting everyone settle back into regular work, getting used to the new processes etc. The disruption from change means people have to learn, get through their existing work slower for a while and generally get very stressed out.

Add in uncertainty and “let’s try this, no let’s go that way” type changes and people get very very stressed out.

Cheers! Hopefully I’ll get another in my order and the circle of LIIIIIFE will continue.

I think it’s fairly safe to assume that anything you transmit en clair (ie, say or text) over the phone could be accessed by the Government if they were so inclined.

I wouldn’t bother with any of the B&Q own label kit. We bought their cheapy SDS+, and the chuck wasn’t central, so the drill bit drew little circles. As the idea is that the bit repeatedly hammers the same spot, this meant that a) drilling a hole took far longer than it should, and b) getting a hole the size you wanted almost impossible.

We exchanged the drill, and the replacement was the same – chuck was skew wift. We then asked to check replacement for the replacement, and that was the same.

We then got them to agree to give us the next line up in the range. And they were all the same. By this point we’d wasted the best part of the afternoon on B&Q tat, and had checked most of their stock of own label SDS+ drills.

Then we went to Wickes, got one of their own label drills (re-branded Draper) and it was dearer, but spot on. Not as good as a Hilti, but orders of magnitude better than the B&Q gear.

Think of it this way – a Hilti is 203mm rotors with Saint calipers, the Wickes drill is a good set of V-brakes, and the B&Q drill was like a set of badly set up plastic cantis on a 20 year old Apollo.

They have a nasty tendency to turn over and land on top of you. You’d be safer on a motorbike.

What did the powder coat cost you? The paint place isn’t far from me.

They’re grim vehicles on the road. Even the old Discovery is very poor on the road.

I can see the appeal for a laugh, go anywhere etc. but there’s no way I’d have one as a day to day car.

Are the SLXs not all that great then? Reliability, power or feel problems?

TBH I’ve had Maguras for years and they’ve been fault free for a very long time. Might look into another set of Maguras…

Getting interviewed for my own job.

She needs to try some.

True enough, only thing is that trying say, a Spesh Myka in the shop is no guarantee that another frame in the same size will fit.

Does everyone quote sizes based on the same reference points yet?

It’s the mid range that really gets me – I can understand how the top end of road is so high tech, but the mid range?

£600 on a Mountain bike will get you Toras, Hydraulic discs and basic Shimano bits.

£600 on a road bike will get you Carbon forks on a good day, unbranded brakes and basic Shimano bits.

To my mind, the £600 road bike should be coming with a nicer Shimano bits – Tiagra level say, including the brakes. You must have knocked off around £100 worth of bits losing the discs and suspension forks.

There are a few bods around on here who mention what a laugh drugs are, and some who seem to think that anyone who is against drugs is somehow uptight / obsessed with what others are up to.

A proportion of people who meddle with drugs will end up meeting this sort of end. Some people gamble, some people drink, some people drive too fast and some people ride pushbikes. There is always a proportion of people who have the kind of personality where they go for the extreme end of the spectrum.

The problem is that recreational drugs [edited] will send you to the grave pretty bloody sharpish, because they combine a) fun with b) actual addictive qualities, exacerbating any tendency to go in at the deep end.

Hopefully Winehouse will become a bloody good advert for not trying drugs out.

The cheapest Tom Tom that comes with European mapping.

We took hours to France a couple of years ago, absolutely faultless, even driving around Paris.

IMO Tom Tom beats Garmin for usability & the ability to re-route on the fly.

TJ – the brand is not the logo. The brand is everything the consumer associates with the business or product.

You might see “Coca Cola” and think firstly of “evil capitalist pig-dogs”, but a much greater percentage of people think “tasty pop”.

My understanding of the VHS vs Betamax scenario is that it was based on network effects & content, not particularly branding.

Anyhow, there was a bloke on TV the other week. Professional Northerner starting off with a very TJ esque position.

He took two tins of Heinz Beans, warmed them up and did some taste tests with the public. One tin was stickered up as Tesco’s Own Label, whilst the other was honestly labelled as Heinz. The majority of people believed they could taste a difference between the two.

The bloke had done a fair old U-turn by the end of the programme.

Found the iplayer link:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b011fjbp

They don’t look anything like Marzocchis to me.

I reckon Manitou due to the post mount, or a random Taiwanese maker – RST, Suntour etc.

The crown design is where you’ll work out it out – that curved shape where it meets the top of the stanchion is very distinctive.

The other option is that it’s not an Adder at all – did you get a decent look? If you’ve got a compost heap, it could well be grass snake looking for somewhere to lay eggs.

Look up your ARG (Aphibian & Reptile Group) on http://www.arguk.org/%5B/url%5D, or your County Ecologist. They’ll have someone who’ll be willing to pop round and advise you.

RSPCA are a waste of time to be honest – if there’s an Adder knocking about in your garden, its could be in every garden up and down the street until someone takes its head off with a shovel. The ideal would be to relocate it to somewhere more suitable.

I wouldn’t bother DIYing it, and I used to do this kind of stuff for a living. FWIW, if you repeatedly disturb it (and it will be in gardens), chances are it’ll go somewhere quieter. It’s very unlikely that it’s confined to your garden, and if there’s a garden on the street that backs onto some heathland or wasteground, then that’s where it’ll scoot off to.

The MOT tester doesn’t want to blow your head gasket during an emissions test.

I’d see it as a chance to get the cooling system – water pump or rad – sorted before it becomes a problem in a traffic jam on a hot day.

The temp needle moving above “middle” or 90 degrees celcius in any car built in the last 20-30 years means that something is up with the cooling system.

It’s like any business to be honest – it depends on the resources and strategy of the manufacturer.

Specialized love IBDs, but dip a toe into vertical integration with stuff like the Concept Stores, and they use distributors in smaller markets. They’re quite protective of IBDs, making sure that there aren’t too many Specialized dealers in any area.

On-One / Planet X sell direct, cutting out a lot of the bottom end of the supply chain.

Boardman sell into Halfords exclusively because that gave them massive volume very quickly.

Other firms like Ragley and DMR use a distributor to get stuff out into shops.

There’s no one way the business works to be honest. The supply chain choices interact with a load of other business strategy.

Specialized mainly sell on the basis of being a massive, safe brand, and providing good service. The way to guarantee that customer interaction is to either own the retailers, or work very closely with the ones you have.

Boardman and PX / On One both go down the route of providing very high specs for the money, but take different angles on it. Boardman use the volume provided by Halfords, where PX cut out distributors and retailers.

Firms like Ragley are pretty niche and offer something completely unique, both in terms of the product and their marketing. They bring things to market pretty quickly – ie, massive head tubes, but they don’t have the muscle to be using the high tech development techniques the massive brands can.

I expect an 8 year old Astra would be worth £3k tops. They’re simply not desirable cars. Bear in mind that the insurer always prices in a safety margin and will write off at 70-80% of what they think is market value.

Dirt jumping can be done on any little and solidly made bike. Some are almost big wheeled BMXs – one gear, no suspension. You can get a dirt jump bike pretty cheaply. The bike you mention in your post fits into that sort of category. The head angle (the angle of the forks) is can be pretty steep to give quick steering, particularly on street bikes.

Downhill bikes tend to be far more expensive and complicated – long travel forks which will set you back > £200 on their own, ideally a full suspension frame. Probably looking at a grand easily. You’re looking at very shallow head angles on DH bikes, giving nasty steering on the flat, but sorted for DH.

A 4X style bike is somewhere between the two in terms of design and price, and will do a bit of both. They’re normally a little frame like a dirt jump bike, a head angle somewhere between the two extremes, but with a rear derailleur giving you 8/9/10 gears, and a short travel suspension fork.

I covered most aspects of a write off here:

http://www.singletrackworld.com/forum/topic/claiming-on-car-insurance-when-is-a-car-written-off-value-wise