+1 for the above about bikes bought for buttons. My road bike is a Raleigh Banana, bought for a tenner, with some second hand bits thrown at it. All in it probably owes me £70-£80.

It knackers me out (or trains) me just as well as a new one would…

I never got on with the 26" slicks I had, whilst I'm perfectly happy on 23mm road tyres.

Do they roll noticeably better then?

I suspect it's a case of remove & replace the alu? Bore it out then resleeve?

Are the disc mounts faced? My inbred squealed like hell until they were.

Liquid leather?

Nope. I like to be fit, but I find the whole idea of spending ages in the gym, shaving your armpits / chest / sack / crack, eating egg whites / steamed chicken / creatine / protein shakes all a bit too much.

You only learn when the brain calms down.

I did a bit of Outdoor Ed at uni, and the man speaks sense (and has probably done rather more reading on education than I have). If someone is bricking it, their conscious brain is shut down.

I have one of the Halfords pro toolboxes with drawers – red steel job. It's well made and weighs a lot on its own. It cost a fair proportion of what that entire tool set cost.

I've also had a fair few cheap spanners – you can get chrome vanadium kit for very little money, but the problem is that it's rarely made to good tolerances, so you round off nuts. I would suspect (and the reviews suggest) that toolset fits into the cheap and badly made category.

Of course, you could buy it, see if they are well made (ie, try undoing a few nuts and bolts with them) and take them back if not.

Halfords pro level stuff is fine, as are Sealey's socket sets.

It's a hell of a lot better than "Telephone".

I like it, and it may well wake a few people up.

I suspect it's sheer indolence.

One thing i'd like to avoid is telling people that they need to buy us something from a list in John Lewis… Maybe it makes me a bit pikey, but I'm yet to buy anything from there as there always appears to be a better value option available.

JL stuff is often the best value around. Anything they sell that other people do (and that's one to watch out for – some stuff is a subtly different model) is price matched.

Better bikes – even hire bikes? I have a mate who minces about a bit when he's on his bike, and goes pretty well on mine. There's no massive difference in how the two handle, it's just a confidence boost.

Do you have a decent dinner service? Could ask everyone to get a plate or a teapot…

I find there are a lot of advantages to road riding in terms of training:

I start at my front door – no putting cars in bikes and driving to the trails.
What cynic-al said – I don't get beaten up anywhere near as much.
I push a lot harder on the road bike – I can ride flat out pretty much constantly, whereas on the mountain bike you have to slow down for corners and techy bits.
There's a lot less maintenance involved – I don't need to clean or oil the road bike at all regularly.

For me to do the same amount of riding on the mountain bike would require double the time.

John Lewis vouchers? I suspect they're the best in terms of noit voiding vouchers after a period of time / likelihood of going bust. I'd avoid Argos vouchers as they don't sell a great range of stuff (there's plenty of range, but the items in the range aren't great).

To be honest I'd try and avoid vouchers wherever possible, but I doubt you'll get people to hand over cash 😆

If you want to think about the maths, have a look at this:

http://www.pumaracing.co.uk/FLYWHEEL.htm

The figures quoted are for flywheels on car engines, which obviously get up to 8000 rpm or so, whilst bike wheels don't.

However, car engines also tend to produce north of 100bhp (~75kw). Whilst we tend to produce 2-300watts.

And a bit of a google produces this:
http://van.physics.illinois.edu/qa/listing.php?id=7559

Which says weight on the wheel is equivalent to double the weight on the frame.

I don't understand how/why weight makes a difference – other than you'll always get more traction because you're pressing the tyre down harder.

You didn't do physics at school did you? (Granted, increased downwards pressure from weight increases friction)…

I would suspect the subtle differences end up adding to quite a lot when you're up at 20mph+. Rims may be wider and heavier, more clearance etc. all means less aerodynamic, and can add up to a fair few extra watts.

Amazingly, people were going on record as saying they would now change their vote.. WTF!!!?

"yeah, voted labour all my life, but now I've seen this, I'm not going to"

The sort of people who have voted Labour all their lives seem to be fairly apolitical in a lot of cases. They're simply voting Labour out of inertia, and Labour do the bare minimum to convince these people to vote for them – usually "nasty party" rhetoric about the Tories, or a chant about Surestart (which, whilst providing childcare for lots of people, hasn't achieved what it set out to do at all).

I used to be the far side of 17 stone at some points, and ran 2.25 Panaracers at around 25 PSI if my memory serves. They were fine. Never pinch flatted, barring one smack on a square edge, but I did manage to knock a rim out of round.

I'm now considerably lighter, and run 2.4 Rubber Queens and 2.35 Fat Alberts at similar pressures. I just like having big wide tyres – a bit more comfort and a bit more sure footed.

Basics are that you can either run big tyres at low pressures, or small tyres at high pressures. When I first started off riding, I had some 1.95 Kendas and didn't pinchflat them much.

Decathlon do road style jerseys for £8 a pop. I quite happily wear them on the mountain bike.

I've found that dual pivots need to be adjusted really close to the rims to work well. That said, they're never amazing, but I can still pull a stoppy on my racer.

It's a Renault Automatic. Renault's are famed for their spectacularly unreliable automatic gearboxes. You will struggle to find a scrapyard replacement, and a proper rebuild will be more than the car is worth.

If I were you, I'd buy a Merc, BMW or Jag auto as they manage not to blow up regularly, or a manual car.

Yeah but why is she concerned about immigration? If it weren't for the right wing scaremongerers, no-one would be bothered by immigration.

To me, there are legitimate concerns about immigration (not to discount the positives, such as the fact that immigrants are often the brightest and best from their country):

We have plenty of people on the dole who we cannot motivate to work for some reason. Importing people to fill the jobs they should be doing is a very short term way of solving this problem.
Immigrants are more likely to send their wages home, which doesn't really help our economy out a great deal.

Granted, neither of those figure highly in most anti-immigration arguments, where the narrative is that "They're taking our jobs", when it really should be "They're taking the jobs nobody can be bothered to do".

There's just been a massive thread / flamewar about this. Just put cheap bearings in and pull them when they're dead seemed to be a recurring theme.

Plastic bumpers can be welded and repaired, but primed, new bumper shells are often so cheap that it's not a sensible way to repair it.

I suspected they were check questions..

A guy I used to work with amassed a collection of dessicated dead animals & skulls on his windowsill, mainly found on sites or roadkill. Think there was a sparrowhawk, badger skull, few more small mammall skulls and some bats.

The windowcleaners didn't quite know what to do. 😆

PDR is a lot easier than filling. Think £40-50 for a dent, rather than at least £150 by the time it's been filled, painted and blended to match the rest. And yes, it is legit.

That said, if I had a van with a dented roof, I'd just belt it one with the palm of my hand from the inside.

Lower back doesn't get cold. Backside doesn't hang out.

I'm fairly sure D shape fittings are pretty standard – you might need to get a measurement of the D but it may work out easier to order a couple of sizes of knob…

I used a Kryptolok for a few years at uni. Nobody ever nicked my bike (that said, it was ground anchored at home!).

Normally about £20 and occasionally with a free cable for securing saddles or forks.

First result on google for tenerife bike hire is a bloke who hires out road bikes…

Sleepers are bloody horrible things. Absolutely full of creosote + god knows what other foul chemicals. You do know that railway yards are almost always contaminated sites?

The on-one stems are fine – or at least the one that came on my Inbred was.

As for whether you'll notice a difference, do a bit of trig. I'd guess that the bars will be half an inch higher and a half an inch closer to you than they are now.

So out and back is all on one road, with a turn to come back at some point?

Are TTs conducted on open roads or not? Just wondering how my times to do 10 miles on the road (with a few junctions) would compare to a TT course. Are they point to point or loops?

If that's a 1.9TD, then I would expect it was.

Heroes of the Soviet Union.

Oh, not all come with LSDs. I think most of the 1.8s did. LSDs are good.