The active ingredient in the Avon stuff is IR3535. In France, it's the active ingredient in Cinq sur Cinq, which works really well in my experience. However, stuff with IR3535 isn't very common in the UK.

As others have said, DEET eats plastics. It is good at repelling insects though. You can get a slow release DEET cream made by 3M – it's called Ultrathon or something, which is supposed to be very good.

Just had a brainwave and looked on Decathlon's site (they're Frenchists, see) and their own brand Aptonia insect repellent is IR3535 based.

That would be my choice – I ride with insect repellent all the time due to a hatred of ticks.

Open bath bombers, 2007, worth £90-100 in good nick. The leaky seal is the ETA top-cap O-ring, that gets squashed down against the uppers to seal as the cartridge is tightened up.

I think it's potentially DIYable, but it looks like a fair bit of time to strip, clean, fill the marks and reassemble.

Whatever you do don't wait 3 years, putting her on a pedestal, and building up something as simple as asking her out into a life consuming massive deal thus making you nervous and rubbish when you try to talk to her….oh wait,

Hah! +1. They're all women, there's no working everything out in advance, it's just the luck of the draw. I'm all in favour of the 7Ps for somethings in life, but when you're not working to a deadline, planning can become procrastination. Just go for it.

If it's alloy and you don't trust yourself to cut it square, just cut it a bit longer then take to it with a file. Obviously you can also file steel, but it's more work.

Viking are silly fast & have good service but not always the cheapest.

The two places have very different business models. Decathlon has a consistent range and good pricing. You hardly ever see a sale except for when they're clearing out kit at the end of a season.

Go Outdoors / CCC operate a huge number of short term promotions – literally, an astonishing number. You can pick up some absolute bargains, but the range varies much more, and pricing alters from week to week. Because of this, you need to have a good knowledge of what stuff should cost, and cost in the past, to know if you're getting a bargain or not.

That said Go Outdoors have some consistently cheap stuff – it's the only place to buy walking trousers for example.

Some stuff is very keenly priced, some stuff isn't so keenly priced. Overall, they're pretty good, but aimed mainly towards walking, camping, climbing and backpacking. If I were looking for cycling gear, Decathlon is my go to place.

You can just swap the rings about on a triple crank you know…

I changed my setup to a double – 22/36. Just bought a 36T chainring and fitted that to the middle ring mounts, then made some alloy spacers for the bolts to make up for the lack of a big ring. If you're not a grade 1 tightarse, you can just buy some shorter chainring bolts.

Economics, innit.

Of the girls I went to school with, there's a huge divide. The ones who've settled down in their hometown (which is a fairly grim place), and look like they spend their days drinking, smoking and being beaten, and the ones who went to uni and on to cities like that London.

The ones who went to uni and moved to the cities have discovered gym memberships / sport, make up, decent haircuts and good clothes, and even the ones who were fairly plain are now very presentable.

Crumplers can be picked up very cheaply on Ebay.

As far as the sound quality is concerned, unless someone is listening through an expensive separates system with a good antenna, how can anyone possibly tell the difference?

A mate listens to a lot of Radio 3. DAB has nowhere near enough dynamic range, so a lot of quiet sections of the music simply disappear. They're there on any old FM radio you use.

Ahh right. I don't think there's any play from when I've waggled them in the past. I'll have another waggle in the morning.

Might the Marathons be for sale? I seem to remember they were good forks back in the day – what year are they?

Some of these things make a bit of sense. "How many petrol stations are there in the UK?" and "What would be required to change which side of the road the UK drives on?" have both been used in interviews by Blue Chip firms, and make a bit of sense – it's about seeing if you have a logical train of thought and can work on the spot.

On the other hand, the "Which fictional character / animal / car would you be" are so transparent as to be unreal – it's obviously a question about how you see yourself, so there's zero chance of you giving an honest answer to an interviewer.

Same as these.

Are they a Deore 525 copy? Lever looks very similar.

Magura Julies (old style) are £90 a set if I recall correctly, from Merlin.

The pads last forever, and they stop me perfectly happily, even when I was a 17 stone hunk of love riding round the peak district.

Hmm. I fancy a red stem, orange bars and some lime green grips. Rad as ****!

I wear contacts, but I always wear some cycling glasses over the top when I'm riding. If you get muck in your eye with contacts, it's more painful than without.

On the other hand, when I rode with normal glasses, they tend to fall off, don't cover enough of your eye, and you end up cleaning the lenses of something that cost > £100 with a muddy bit of jersey.

Use a gym's wattbike? Only cheap if you already go to a gym though.

About 42mph on the mountain bike on road. The local fast road downhills are quicker on the mounain bike than the racer as the surface is so bad.

Natural England pay contractors to run bat hotlines which you can ring with any concerns about bat roosts.

Have a look at this PDF for you local number:
http://www.naturalengland.org.uk/Images/batadvice_tcm6-4078.pdf

They will talk you through the ins and outs of having bats in your building. If you're still not happy, they liaise with volunteer bat wardens, who will come and do a survey, and explain the options for excluding bats. Generally exclusion is done by consultants and will cost you money.

As a rule, there aren't health implications and they don't bring down ceilings. Bats move roosts regularly and it's likely that the roost is only be occupied for a small proportion of the year. It's possible that they're actually roosting behind the fascia boards, rather than in the roof space.

I have a similarly brilliant idea but don't fancy the hassle of setting up a business. How do I go about selling the idea to an existing business without them just walking off with the idea?

There's the rub 😀

Basically, you need a patent to make the idea saleable. It protects you (to some extent), but it also proves that you actually have a novel idea, otherwise you wouldn't have been able to get a patent.

You then need to prove that it's a goer, and end up doing almost as much work as you would for a business plan. And then you need to flog it to someone.

One source of free advice is universities – if you've been to uni, your alma mater will almost certainly have some facilities for alumni with business ideas, and if you haven't, you may be able to get the advice of a PhD or Master's student who's spent years absorbing case studies and reading textbooks on entrepreneurship, in return for letting them use you as a case study. Most of the better business schools have Entrepreneurship & Innovation departments now.

There are books on the subject too – Profit from Your Idea: How to Make Smart Licensing Deals comes up with a quick google and sounds interesting.

I have a feeling that this may be an opportunity, but you feel it isn't an opportunity for you? ie, you don't want to be running your own business flogging this device, and developing prototypes?

As far as I can see, your best option is to sell the idea to the likes of Kryptonite, Abus etc. and try to retain some royalty rights. However, it's difficult to avoid imitators / being turned over.

Another option would be to get some expert staff in, but you're probably going to need to go to venture capital with a good business plan to do that. And you're still running a business. However, that kind of approach can work well in terms of exit strategy – you can sell the firm and it won't implode when you leave with your knowledge of how everything works.

I would seriously recommend spending some time on google patents checking out similar ideas to get an idea of how well protected it can be before spending any cash or time on experts / business plan writing.

There is a class of people who sail close to the wind – small time crime to top up benefits and the likes. We are short of the jobs at the moment, but this has been a problem for years. There are serious barriers to these people becoming part of wider society – the benefits system / job centre doesn't work well, and there's an entire parallel criminal economy. Even on a non-criminal level, people who spend their lives on benefits tend not to mix with people who work, and the cultures diverge.

If your social life is full of small time criminals and fraudsters, it's hardly surprising that there's a tendency to dislike the police.

Do the sums for the petrol model. At that sort of mileage you won't really be getting much advantage from the diesel engine, and servicing / repairs is generally a bit pricier.

That said, I'd bet on a 535D losing less in depreciation than a 530. It'll probably cost less to buy the 530 now though.

A mate's bike still has some OE Manitou forks – 2001 or so model. The service manual shows you a spring / elastomer setup in one leg, and a damper stack in the other.

The spring and damper stack is there, but the other leg is empty…

You take everything off, stick it in an ultrasonic cleaner / load of degreaser, clean it, oil it, and find out it's nowhere near as bad as it seemed.

Any suggestions for a particularly strong cage or one that has a retainer to keep the bottle in or is it down to inner tube rubber bands again?

I've repeatedly bent the TA alloy cages my LBS sells. They seem to bend back too. Which is nice.

At a guess, he's retired and bored shitless. If you days consist of Crap in the attic and the likes, you've not got much to talk about other than what you observe out of the window.

I once had a thread come up in a google search and had a look.

Imagine the religious arguments we have over things like helmets, tubeless and communists spending other people's money VS top hat wearing capitalists eating babies.

There's about that level of bile and judgementalism. But about things that actually matter to people's lives – bringing up kids, getting divorces etc. Horrible place.

Get the stuff that matches the specification numbers you need. I suggest having a look at "The engine oil bible" which comes straight up on google, particularly the section on oil specs.

I'm perfectly happy to use oil that costs approx £1 a litre from the local motor spares place in my cars. The thing is, it meets the oil specifications VW set, and VW specs that are newer than my car. So I know it's fine for my VW.

I don't know if bike makers produce their own specs in the same way, but it's a very easy way of checking out an oil's quality.

There are other industry wide specifications from 2 organisations. Even the crappiest oil will have specs from these bodies, but each organisation has standards with different grades. As I remember A3 and SL are the basic specs to look for on oil for a car petrol engine.

I'm all for counting. There are some people in life who are simply see you next tuesdays.

+1 for just letting the bike go and getting a bit back. Hitting roots at right angles helps a lot too.

It's the same sort of technique / riding position as you use for riding on sand & loose rocks. You just need to let the bike do what it wants and make the merest suggestions on the steering. The closest off bike situation I can compare it to is aquaplaning in a car.

Another option for upping your skills would be to nip out for a ride on the wrong tyres. I rode around on semi-slicks in the mud for a while when I first got back into bikes, and whilst I was slithering all over the shop, I got a lot better at catching a sliding bike very quickly. 😆

Maybe that would get you over the fear? If you know you've got a decent chance of catching it, you won't worry so much about sliding, won't tense up so much, and therefore won't slide so much…

39-53 works perfectly well on my road bike, with unramped / pinned rings.

I'd go for a sane front split with a really wide range rear cassette.

Big tyres and low pressure.

It's called Sega Saturn Syndrome. The largest outbreak was in 1996, when sufferers could be found in school playgrounds up and down the country, telling their friends how good their Sega Saturn was compared to the Playstation.

It'll be on a mountain bike, yes.

I've got some 2.1 DTC Nevegals on at the moment – I was thinking of one of those on the front, with a borrowed and well worn Maxxis Ignitor on the rear, which would give a knobbly front and almost semi slick rear tyre.

That said, I have got some horrible Schwalbe semi slicks somewhere – Marathons I think. They are sketchy if there's any mud though.

Oher tyres I have kicking about are Tioga Factory XCs. Don't think the 2.4 RQ or Fat Alberts will be called for.

Tubeless is getting to be a bit of a religious issue.

So yeah, it's your fault, you're a class A windowlicker, you must have put it all together wrong, and it's people like you that give tubeless a bad name.

And of course, tubeless is rubbish, I don't see why anyone would use it, the consequences of failure are too grim to think about.

😕

I always expect to pay less on classifieds here than on ebay. Buying from the classifieds is far riskier for the buyer, and cheaper for the seller.

Ebay is fairly well policed considering the volume of stuff on there, and I've never had a problem with anything I've bought off the place. On the other hand, I have had problems with things bought off, and I've bought much less here than I have on ebay. On ebay, the buyer has the upper hand, whereas here, it's the seller.

I put that down to the ebay feedback system – everyone is keen to maintain as close to a 100% rating as possible. On here, you've got to try trawling through posting histories and the ropey search facility. Which isn't anywhere near as good. I can't see why there couldn't be a rating system – lots of forums have reputation ratings for members.

Freeze spray can help.

Another trick is to tighten it up a little before undoing, or to refit all the other bolts to take the strain off it a little.

Best way to avoid this sort of problem is loctite – no need to torque to hell and back and you have a barrier to prevent corrosion.

If I were messing about with tubeless and didn't have a use for a compressor, I'd do the following:

Buy one old car wheel and tyre. Old Jags have wide and high profile tyres.

Pump it up to 50psi or so.

Get a hose to connect two Schraeder valves to each other.