Stumpgrinder.

Last time I went listening to a variety of speakers, I thought Missions sounded gash and B&W sounded gorgeous. I've got some KEF Cresta 2s at the minute, and they sound fine.

Personally though, I reckon a bigger box and driver always sounds better. We've got some ancient B&O speakers from the 1970s, and they sound gorgeous. Probably technically not as good, but the deep bass is incredible.

Light is the problem. When I take Ebay photos, I have a 100W spot, a 60W lamp in the room and try and take them next to the window during the day. 500W cheapy halogen lamps work really well…

Horns are cheap, so why not just wire one up under the bonnet? Can't see the point in trying to bodge a £10 part.

The description seems OK, but the photos are a bit gash and the dings / scrapes would put me off an ally frame.

I suspect you might have made a bit more by taking really good photos – I suppose the ideal for a bike would be some well lit photos of the frame in a workstand / on a workbench in the shed of someone who obviously tinkers with great care – organised and tidy. Or even just laid out on a lawn with good light.

The bed photo would certainly have put me off too. It's not something you want to think about at all really.

I do think the price would have still been limited by the dings though.

TBH the problem that tron outlined will be the same with any £60 tent, you pays your money and all that…

Not in my view. I've got a Decathlon tent that was fairly cheap (though not £60 cheap), and that's stood up to heavy winds quite happily. I think the difference is that the £60 Vango has been made to that price point, whilst the Decathlon tent has been knocked down (they've been sold at at £80-£90 for ages). Inevitably, there will be compromises in anything that's very cheap – that Vango came with sewn in groundsheets for the entire tent, but had a tendency to blow over, whilst the Decathlon equivalent only has a SIG for the bedroom area.

Ultimately though, you've just got to look at the reviews. I'd expect the vast majority of cheap tents to be able to stand up to the weather.

Be careful with the cheapy Vangos – there was one model being sold by CCC/Go Outdoors a year or two ago (a big dome – big enough to stand in for about £60), which I nearly bought on strength of the name.

A bit of a google found loads of reviews saying how they'd blown over, were made specifically for the discount places and were nowhere near what would be expected of Vango kit.

I'd be interested in hearing more about the Decathlon pop-ups too – my Mum's after a tent she can pitch single handed and stand up in – the big ones seem to fit the bill – but do they stand the wind well?

Nice frame, good forks, and a full Deore group – maybe a bit of SLX thrown in to get a 2×9 setup from stock. I'd like to see decent quality forks and brakes too. To me that means open bath Marzocchis and Shimano or Magura brakes.

Decathlon have one of their 4.2 (ie, 4 man, 2 bedrooms) tents on offer at the moment – £60 I think. They're good.

They also have some fairly cheap backpacking type tents.

Astonishingly Sports Direct also appear to be stocking very good brands of tent with big discounts.

I run 2.4s on 521s and they're fine. I'd always go for 521s over 321s as they're lighter and not a great deal dearer.

That said, if you can bear going for non-Mavic rims, I understand there are some that are as wide and lighter than 521s.

I've gone to 22/36, and I think the cassette is an 11-34. Using a double specific front mech (SLX), the shifting is bang on. You don't miss the extra gears on the top end, but I find I do miss them at the bottom end of the middle ring. You do have to use the granny a little more because of that.

Sudafed. The proper OTC ones – the tablets are red, the active ingredient is pseudoephedrine hydrochloride. The other flavours of Sudafed are fairly useless.

I wouldn't advise taking them if later than 6 at night though – they have a stimulant effect and you'll be rolling around bed like you've had 5 red bulls.

They do a cracking job on your sinuses though. Expect to inhale a giant green lump at some point in the future.

Edit: Doublepost.

As far as I can see, Orange have an unusual marketing strategy. They consistently get coverage in all the magazines, but rarely actually advertise. It works in a roundabout way – they've got a pretty high profile in the UK (witness the editorial in ST a month or two ago, consistent test wins etc.), and their kit doesn't get too heavily discounted. They seem to follow the old model of promoting bikes and kit to dealers and press.

On the other hand, if you pick up a foreign MTB mag, you'll see no mention of them. It seems rather limiting, but I suspect that ultimately the firm doesn't want big export markets or to grow a great deal – if I were them, I'd be all over the US like a rash given the way the Americans view UK brands like Raleigh. Firms like Empire, Planet X and Ragley make much more of an international splash.

Simple business sense. The yanks with their capitalist pigdog system have been running MRIs 24/7 for a long time – in business terms an MRI machine is a massive piece of plant, and the best way to get value out of it is to centralise them and run them as much as possible.

Blowgun attached to the compressor. It's the best way to install any non-lock on grip!

Put the nozzle on the edge between bar and grip, pull the trigger and the grip becomes loose on the bar as the air forces it away. Works really well, and there's no faffing around with liquids or getting your grips twisted up.

Stuff that. Burger floating in beans a la ratpack (or other calorifically dense item of your choice – corned beef, chocolate, chorizo), some puritabs, hexamine and some windproof matches.

Add a whistle, some dressings, a photon light / mirror and a survival bag and you've got everything that's realistically needed to "survive" in an emergency in the UK.

Nobody who is having an emergency is going to start catching fish and making a shelter out of branches and bracken.

Croatia. It's roasting and gorgeous.

I dunno why people go on about Henrys. They're just a bog standard basic vac, aren't they?

Because they're relatively cheap, tough and work. There's nothing in the things to break. A Dyson is the space shuttle by comparison. I also find bags far cleaner – the Dyson removes dust from your house so that you can breathe it in as you empty the cylinder into the bin.

this is the only way to see historic rally cars doing their thing. There was lots of interesting stuff the year I went.

I don't think it is. They have plenty of Historics at Chatsworth's show, Race Retro and any number of others. These kind of days are probably the only way to see the actual cars that were driven to wins back in the day used in anger, yes.

But, there are plenty of other historic rallys are around (the RAC for one), with plenty of old machinery. I'd sooner see a replica / same spec car being driven flat out at close quarters than the car that won XYZ going fairly steadily.

Henry.

Though I suspect the Dyson does a slightly better job of cleaning carpets (an upright hoover beats the floor as it goes), the Henry is simple simple simple and lasts a long time. Dysons tend to have 15 filters that need swapping.

I'd seriously recommend going to see rallying at a proper stage. It's nice to see the super exotic stuff knocking around en masse at these shows, but you don't really get close enough to take decent pictures or get a good view.

I'd sooner go to a club level rally and get pebbledashed by a Subaru 😆 No safety tape, get as close as you'd ever want to etc.

That said, Perez did enter his Stratos in the RAC a couple of years back, which was rather fancy.

As for chairs and the like, take a yank style coolbox that you can sit on. Or cheap Ikea exam style chairs. The camping kind last about 2 hours before they break.

I've had some Fat Alberts go wonky (1 stretched bead, 1 out of shape), so you won't catch me buying Schwalbe again.

Even the Fox guide is full of careful careful type stuff. I personally don't want to be chancing a £300+ pair of forks by poking a screwdriver around the stanchions pretty much every week or two.

It's not comparable to cleaning a chain – stick the chain cleaner on, hose it down, oil it. There's no risk of ruining anything expensive and I dont have to take anything apart. And the thing with a chain is that it's the best system we have at the moment for drive. With forks, you can choose to stick a set of open bath Marzocchis on and look at them once a year.

Whereas with the Fox I either go poking expensive things with a screwdriver or take the forks to bits, which means I need something to hold the bike up whilst I do that (workstand?).

I'd get the wheels and tyres off and start weighing them. For my money it'd be pair of 521s with nicer hubs (ie, Deore or XT), and perhaps new tyres too.

I'd also rip the bash off it you're not using it – they weigh a lot!

The tyres are seriously heavy – 890g and 740g.

Once you've done that you'll have saved a fair bit of weight and perhaps have a bit of cash left over. £136 for 521s with XT hubs from Merlin, plus a pair of folding Rubber Queens from ebay for £60.

I've always found powder coat to come off in massive chunks if corrosion takes hold. A lot worse than paint does.

Get the editorial staff to excise all the bits like the following:

"Swooping down squirrelly singletrack on a warm summer's evening, alone but for the sound of chain over sprocket and the chatter of a lone chaffinch."

I might consider buying it then. It seems in danger of disappearing into its own fundament.

That said, I'm might not be much of a bike magazine sort of bloke. Wouldn't by MBR or MBUK either and don't buy a great deal of kit. I'm interested in stuff on skills, routes and bits. Not so bothered about A-Level English Lit on how riding a bike is fun, textspeak, rad to the max etc.

Experience the use of the word "duck"?

Me? An on-one reetard on the front, which I think are about 20mm wide internal, and a 521 on the back.

A mate's sister has just bought one. Looks like reasonable level kit, but I'm not a huge SRAM shifter fan. The nexus ones would be my choice.

I run 25-30PSI in my RQ 2.4 front. Similar in the back.

Don't you mean this link?

http://www.highpath.net/highpath/cycles/info/cranks.html

Derailleur chains are the same internal width, they vary in terms of their external width. Chainsets tend to vary a little in how far apart they place the chainrings in order to optimise shifting – ie, 10 speed rings may be a smidge closer together than 9 speed ones. 9s are closer together than 8s.

Ha! I went down the pub last Friday to go drinking. I didn't know there was a match on, and the atmosphere was pretty ugly in the last 10 minutes. Even I wanted them to bang a goal in to reduce the likelihood of a riot…

As I understand it, the total amount of cable pulled between top and bottom gear is the same. ie, if an 8 speed shifter pulls 4mm of cable a gear, a 9 speed shifter pulls 3.5mm or some such (numbers are hypothetical), resulting in the same total pull between all the gears.

All Shimano rear mechs use the same multiplier ratios (ie, movement of mech vs cable). So an 8 speed Alivio mech moves the same distance for the same amount of cable pull as a 10 speed XT or Dura-ace. The differences are in how well controlled the movement is – obviously more speeds needs closer tolerances on the mech.

As a result, you can run a 9 speed mech on an 8 speed drivetrain perfectly happily. The jockey wheels & cage are happy to work with the wider chain. I'd be surprised if you can't use a 10 speed mech with a 9 speed setup.

Have a look here:
http://www.ctc.org.uk/DesktopDefault.aspx?TabID=3946#Shiftratio

Change the cassette and shifter and you'll be able to go to 10 speed. It wouldn't surprise me if a 9 speed mech worked reasonably well with a 10 speed cassette and shifter.

You can also do strange tricks with the cable routing to change the multiplier ratio:
http://www.sheldonbrown.com/dura-ace.html#alternate

Good condition must mean something unusual to him. To me, it means that everything is in working order. It might be cosmetically tatty or developed a little play, but it'll work.

You should have got in touch and disputed the issues with the bike rather than not paying the postage. Generally ebay disputes go the buyer's way.

Makoto Nagano is fitness.

Or in a longer sentence: Fitness is a combination of strength and stamina, both in terms of muscle and cardiovascular system.

I watched an episode the other day. Mostly it wasn't great but there were some good bits – a mockumentary about holiday reps.

On youtube (Not in the least bit safe for work): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hLvmK6zBt8

What he said. The cheapest kit is generally badged "18-23" and is fairly basic plain gauge steel. 501 is a sticker Reynolds will let you have if you pay them if I recall correctly. Once you get to 521 and 531 you're into decent stuff.

A 531 frame with forks and headset will weigh in at just under 6lbs. The really good bikes were made at Carlton and were branded Carlton or Raleigh. If you come across a Carlton at a good price (or an Edison/Eddison for that matter – built by ex Carlton frameshop gaffer Eddie and his son) snap it up, they're very good frames.

However, the better stuff is more likely to have short dropouts with a hanger. The cheaper frames tend to have quite long semi-horizontal dropouts with the derailleur fixed with one of those claw things – like you see on the really cheap derailleurs today.

The key thing for me would be to try and pick up a bike where some of the work has been done / there was OK kit from the factory. A lot of Raleighs came with chrome rims and really low end Weinmann calipers, so you end up buying a pair of dual pivots and some alu wheels just to be able to stop.

It really depends on your aims though – pub bike or flashy? 😀

Might be worth trying the Uni's security office – undergrads have gone home now and there are a few abandoned looking bikes locked up. I imagine they must have a purge at some point.

Alex – if you're ever in Mansfield, Karl V Cycles has a couple of really nice Raleighs to ogle, and a glass cabinet full of shiney campag bits.

I'm in the process of building a SS road bike out of a 1980's Raleigh and would like to put a older style saddle on it to keep the look of the original bike.

I don't care what they had originally. I'm not restoring it to standard I'm building a bike that I want to ride

😀

I'd not advise restoring many Raleighs to standard – a lot came with gopping groupsets.

Sorry to but in, but is there a good deal of stuff that's worth riding beyond the Kitchener? I've never found much in my trundles round there.