Gay pride?

Further proof that your average gap yah trustafarian is an idiot. And I totally chundered everywhere.

Vectors isnit? It's simple if it's explained well.

If they've really been cooked, the seals could be stiffening, which would stop the self retraction of the pistons.

Really, I mean really??

People are really quite bad at working out risks, and they do compensate in strange ways, resulting in a lot of counter-intuitive real world results. There's a paper about appearance and vehicle passing distances – look like a woman and you get the most room, wear a lid and hi-vis and you get the least.

The perception of cycling as a dangerous activity is the biggest barrier to increased participation in cycling, and increased participation correlates with cyclist safety. The links aren't that hard to make if you think about it.

Whatever 2 ring & grill setup is selling cheaply – Go Outdoors have them for around £20 a pop often. Run off a small camping or calor gas bottle – calor is cheaper and you won't run out of it during a holiday on the continent.

Then whatever camp kitchen is going cheap too. The twang together wire mesh ones are quite good, and Aldi have them in every so often.

What you want to do is get the bike on top of that slide, boom, straight down and through the wendy house.

They put the kids in helmets (some don't even bother – clearly they must be less valuable than other families children I guess!) but they think the adult bread winners are somehow exempt. Stupid.

Spot the future organ donor! That's got to be the most ignorant thing I've read on STW; possibly ever. I used to race a Ducati at Club level (New Era), so I have some idea just how stupid that statement really is.

This is the problem with looking at risk in an unscientific manner.

Motorbikes have triple the death rate of pushbikes per km. I'd be amazed if the average motorbike owner didn't cover more distance than the average cyclist. Cycling is in fact on a par with walking in terms of deaths/distance.

You've also completely missed the issue of risk compensation – safety devices often change user behaviour, to the point that their effect is reduced. Nobody has actually proven conclusively that helmets make you safer.

Are you now going to go around ranting about what irresponsible idiots motorcyclists with families to support are?

One of those drop in chain checker things arrived from CRC.

Stella 4, because it was on offer at the offy.

Might save more weight swapping to 23mm tyres.

I once had an off at around 20mph with no lid, smacked my head on the ground, carried on round to my mate's flat and woke up with concussion the next day.

Head injuries are funny like that. Sometimes people die falling over at the traffic lights, other times people will survive daft things.

Just use brake and clutch cleaner. I don't see why people go to the effort of finding IPA when you can buy a can of brake and clutch cleaner in any car spares place for naff all.

Don't use carb cleaner. Your brakes don't work afterwards.

I have one of the cheap Minoura DS30 stands (lifts the rear wheel off the ground). It lets you set the gears up and wash it with minimal fuss, but it's no workstand substitute.

I'm not sure the difference in frame flex is at all noticeable once you've got some decent sized tyres on. I say that as bloke who switched from an ally giant to an on-one when I was about 15 stone.

You're doing it all wrong. 5cm (at least) thick self inflating double mattress of almost any brand. There are some 7.5cm ones around.

Two square sleeping bags, one with a left hand zip, one with a right hand. You can then zip the two together. Just because you're camping, you don't have to pretend you're in an old film where husband and wife have two single beds…

Decathlon do S20 and S15 sleeping bags cheap, so you could get a mismatched pair if she's nesh.

The whole point of car camping to me is that you can make it comfy, take a 4 man tent for 2 people, have thick airbed, picnic blanket, 2 ring cooker etc. so that it's viable as an actual comfy holiday.

PS, don't buy camping chairs. Get Ikea's folding exam style chairs. And Decathlon's folding tables.

Tomtoms are good, in my experience, but I've heard that they can be slow at repairs. Solution is to buy from a retailer who knows what the Sales of Goods Act is, and that normally means John Lewis.

Jordan 😀

I saw a teenager on a cyclocrosser at Sherwood Pines a while back.

I don't like wearing helmets.

To me, the possible increase in risk due to not wearing a helmet is more than offset by the health benefits of cycling, and the increase in enjoyment.

I wonder if those who ware vehemently pro helmet, to the point of thinking that people who aren't wearing lids are tossers / not calling 999, walk around thinking "He's having a fag. Tosser", "He's increasing his risk of XY&Z by eating white bread instead of brown. Tosser".

care to explain why you think that and what could be done about it?

A large part of a school's performance is its intake – I read a while ago that class was the biggest predictor of educational attainment there was in the UK.

However, my experience of state school (comp) is that as a fairly able pupil, I was bored, and didn't do as well as I could have as a result. In fact, a friend and I were talked out of applying for Oxbridge by our teachers.

Talking with friends who went to grammars and private schools, they had enormous drives to get people into the top unis and so on.

If someone has kids and is ambitious for their futures, that sort of thing will make them run a mile from the comprehensive system, and into the arms of grammars and private schools.

As a result, the issue of intake becomes a vicious circle. The only way to break it is to show that you are serious about raising standards.

My view is that state schools are underachieving – if they raised their game, there'd be very little need for private schools, beyond snob value.

The most amazing thing about that Torus XT is that it's not a great deal lighter than a good hardtail these days!

You can cook it, and as others have said, it's a controlled weed, can't be transported without a licence, has to be disposed of at a licenced site etc. Regenerates from pieces as small as 1cm cube.

Others have pretty much outlined the treatment methods – you either remove as much as you can to a tip, and block the rhizomes from resprouting with a geotextile membrane, or, if you have time, you can exhaust the rhizome network (the JK stores energy in the rhizomes, which is why it can come back time and time again). After about 5 years of the new growth being sprayed/burnt/whatever, the rhizome's had it and you've solved your problem.

One of the leading Japanese removal experts is a good friend of mine. He's also a keen biker with a garage of bikes you could only dream of owning

I used to be in this line of work – any idea if he's hiring (I seem to remember JKSL are Sheffield based)?

Edit: No, actually forget that for the time being. I've just remembered the joys of being on site at the crack of sparrow's fart.

I'm sure people have said much of the above about us and Ireland at some point.

as this parliament is the most toff laden in a while i suspect none of them have to worry how long it is till pay day each month 5% makes very little difference

A great deal of politicians went to private school. It's just that some joined the Conservative Club and others joined the Marxist Society at uni…

They're all the same privileged bunch.

Road bike pron needs two things:
Butted steel frames.
Campag components.

I think this looks rather spanking. Drilled Campagnolo brake levers.

Mountain bike pron needs to look stupid. Something like this is ideal.

OEM saddles are often very heavy, as are handlebars and stems. It's really a case of what you have to spend!

It's very difficult to generalise. The OEM finishing kit on my inbred is pretty light – the bars were about 5g heavier than protapers at about 275g. Seatpost and saddle aren't stupidly heavy either.

I'd seriously start taking bits off and weighing them if they're OEM (ie, Boardman branded) and looking up weights online for the parts that aren't – weight weenies is a good website. Otherwise it's very easy to spend money without saving any weight.

I would suspect that the wheels are probably fairly good, as they're kept a fair way up the model range.

On-one have some good deals on light saddles (one of the italian makers I think). I more or less shop by weight & price now and ignore brands…

It's a gesture – I mean 5% is hardly likely to bring the company back into financial health, but at least they have done something and something positive at that.

It's a lot more than I've ever experienced within a business that's hacking everything to the bone…

Right clicking seems to just work for me in Firefox. That said I do run a few plugins that may stop such daftness.

I think the mods are kinda scared of ton.

With good reason.

Good god. The impression you get from the forum is that Ton is the lovechild of Van Damme, Arnie, Stallone, and a really angry yorkshireman.

I suspect the reality is that he's just a big bloke.

How about you check out the list of UN resolutions against Israel for widespread human rights violations, or the fact that they are a rogue nuclear state? I don't think it's unreasonable to mention these things.

You'll change your tune when Mossad drag you out of your bed tonight.

I find it rather right wing myself.

It's all relative. You're looking from a position somewhere to the left of Tony Benn 😉

I guess I am getting rather close to the line myself now.

My theory is that STW is actually an opinion monitoring system operated by the Civil Service, masquerading as a bike forum.

That would certainly explain the generally leftist attitude on here in the past, and if your ban co-incided with a change in government – the PM gets the statistics he wants to get, and nobody stands in his way!

Edit – 😆 just in case anyone thinks I'm actually serious.

Look, we need the damned things because we had an empire, and now we don't. We won the world cup 40 odd years ago, and we've kicked a few smaller nations around. We still like to think that we're important.

If we don't have nukes, the French will make fun of us at the UN and European parliament. It'll be just like that episode of Flight of the Conchords where Murray gets in the lift with the Aussies and they ask if he's got NZ's mineral exports for the year in his pocket.

And we can't have that, so we need an independent nuclear deterrent. OK? 😆

Any attempt to circumvent any suspension by re-registering or using the account of another forum user could result in a lifetime ban from the forum.

I can't see how that would actually be done. You'd have to play whack-a-mole every time the bannee re-registered and started spouting off.

Not really tron – I am using debating tactics I accept but I really can see no logical reason for the nukes and nothing that anyone has posted on this thread gives any logical reason for having them.

You are using debating tactics. What you always want is proof. And in the real world proof is very hard to come by.

That's shown by just how narrow most academic research questions are, and how few papers actually produce proof of anything. Or a simple look through old market research reports – despite experts spending a lot of time and money on them, they don't predict the future.

But of course, you already know this. You know that proof cannot be provided for the majority of things, even things which are accepted by society at large, and even used in the creation of technology, are still only theories, not actually proven. Indeed, you seem to regularly demand proof on subjects which are still matters of debate for field experts.

You use this simple tactic to close down arguments and declare yourself proven correct.

So – unless anyone can come up with a case for Nukes that is not full of logical holes in teh form of unproven assumptions and extrapolations without any justification I consider the logical case for the utility of nukes demolished.

As someone pointed out earlier, we have hairy balls, not crystal ones.

Until you can see into the future, all planning for the future is going to involve some level of assumption and extrapolation.

By your logic, you'd never go to the shops and buy a week's food because that involves assuming that you won't get knocked down by a bus before you get a chance to eat it, and you'd never go to work because you have to assume that your employer won't go bust before payday. You wouldn't even breathe because that's making the assumption that the atmosphere is still there.

What you are postulating, is in effect, an argument against any and every possible course of action available to anyone on the planet.

I'd also link the explosion in skunk use to how easy it is to grow. Personally, I view that as a negative result of the war on drugs. IME, most people don't want to smoke skunk but they don't have a lot of choice.

The rate of marijuana farming certainly correlates with loan sharks operating in an area, purely because it's seen as an easy way of getting money to pay them back.

Make sure that you have a picture of Marx, Kier Hardie or Scargill in the background. 😉