Change the lot, simply not worth taking chances with brakes. Assuming that bike calipers are pretty much like car calipers but smaller, it's very, very easy.

I looked into something along these lines recently.

The big issue is mobile signal. You will get people setting up a check in and then finding themselves in a signal deadspot, which will lead to false positives. I would suggest perhaps doing it (and charging for it) via text message (much bigger market than via mobile web).

I can see from that picture that the pin is vital to the function of the device. It does exactly the same thing as the pin on a V-brake does.

If you've actually got the thing in your hands and can't work out whether the pin's needed or not, you probably should give up doing mechanical things…

Yes. Most ISP's have given up on "you need our special guff" and just provide a set of router settings.

I think the entire thing is disgusting. The police act like tossers – they seem to think their role includes suppressing any vaguely political protest.

The other thing that I find distasteful is the reaction of the people standing around. If you go to the museum of communism in Prague, there's a video of a Charta 77 protest, and one of the secret police hits a women. Straight away, about 6 blokes lay into him, despite the fact that they were living under a communist system, where the consequences of doing something like that can be horrendous.

It absolutely amazes me how cowed people have become.

Ta very much for the answer. Web would be a primary means of marketing & sales so low Ks seems like the right answer.

And all the logos and graphics. It's a new venture that may or may not go ahead, so I just want a rough idea…

I'm not the usual STW bod and can see that something that costs £80 is going to a) be pain in the arse to update and b) have had a total of half an hour spent on them.

Maybe something on a par with the http://sugru.com/%5B/url%5D website, which isn't incredibly designed looking but has a half decent look & feel to it.

They are the whole car equivalent of a jesus fish. Whenever I see one (which is pretty damned rare) they seem to go out of their way to straightline roundabouts and swap lanes without any signals / mirrors.

Bikes are as good as the rider most of the time. On the other hand, a good car can flatter you and put a huge grin on your face.

I'd probably go for an E30 M3 (white, with blister arches), a 190 Evo (yes, the one with the aero kit, in black), a Delta Evo 2 (Martini or Red, obviously) or all of the above if I were spending my own money. If I were going to go for a real supercar, I'd be tempted by an Ultima GTR or the new Mclaren. Or an old 911 RS.

I really love that kind of stupidity. There are farmers who can't get a decent price for their meat because they had BSE 20 years ago, and now have an entirely new herd. But if you've ever had BSE on your farm, you can't get onto most supermarket / farm standards schemes.

There were a few scandals with melamine being used to bulk milk out last year, as it passes some of the tests used to check if it's been watered down. End result was people dying.

In all honesty, I'd drink black tea and coffee if you're worried about it. Some countries are very funny about you taking agricultural produce in, and China is not somewhere I'd want to be banged up – I don't think "Wo shi ying guo ren" will get you very far.

Tinned curry (surprisingly pleasant) & rice. I can't really be doing with cooking much in a tent. I also quite like ratpacks, but they're pricey.

Suck it and see. In my view, brake pads are brake pads – you can get soft ones, you can get hard ones, but the technology is all fairly similar whether you're talking bikes, cars, or motorbikes. If you overheat the pads, you get white smoke, a very noticeable smell and a loss of braking power. I've done it a few times in cars, and never ruined a set of pads, even when I've had glowing discs.

On the other hand, if you overheat the fluid (the boiling temperature of which is reduced by water absorption – DOT4 and 5.1 are hygroscopic) then you lose braking power but don't have smoking pads…

To be honest, Aldi & Lidl both do vices for very little cash on occasion. They're the swivel kind with a little anvil on the back, and I'd be amazed if they could be broken doing anything bicycle based.

Mavic reckon both the 321 and 521 are 28mm wide…

521s are welded, 321s are pinned. And the 521s are lighter. I reckon they're probably stronger too.

Eh? Are there people who helitape the whole bike?

Kona Blast from last year looks pretty good on Pauls Cycles, but has mechanical disks. They also have a GT at the same price with Tektro hydraulic disks, but Suntour forks.

On the other hand, they have Giant XTCs with lots of lovely bits on for just north of £400… That'd be my choice to be honest. 9 speed rather than 8, proper hydraulic brakes, better groupset etc.

I just don't wear clutches out in the first place then they don't cost to change them, I bought a Citroen BX with a slipping clutch years ago, just treated it gently and did another 70,000 miles on it.

There goes a man who doesn't have a diesel with a DMF. The DMF goes, which then transmits massive torque spikes through the clutch, making it slip more and more. Nothing to do with the driver's technique at all.

DMFs are fitted to pretty much everything these days. They only seem to fail a lot on diesels, which makes sense as they're lower revving and produce more torque, in a more spikey fashion than petrols. Hence the need for DMFs / very heavy flywheels on diesels in order to reduce drivetrain stresses / vibration.

Take the wheels off, the discs off, and the cassette off & weigh them if you like. It's then easy to work out whether another wheel is heavier or lighter. I would suspect that there's not a great deal to be saved in the wheelset unless you have PG spokes or the DT hubs are particularly heavy (are they?). Possibly more to be gained with lightweight tyres.

Welcome to the world of modern diesels. Most decent garages will quote to change the flywheel at the same time one the basis that they go sooner or later (in fact, a dead clutch can be a symptom of a dead flywheel), and it's a very expensive job to take everything to bits again when they do.

As for:

A friend is having a clutch replaced on a Ford Ka for £130 quid today. I had a complete new gearbox fitted in my mini for £600. Both prices are parts and labour.

Completely different technology. A Ka is horribly tightly packaged from the top, but it's basically Ford Fiesta kit – the clutch kit is cheap and the flywheel is a normal piece of steel / cast iron.

Nope. Absolutely no point on taking out that kind of insurance on a credit card in my view due to the glories of the Consumer Credit Act. In short, any fraudulent transactions on your card are not your problem.

If I worry about anything, it's the potential for compromise of one's personal computer and therefore online banking.

I'm in the process of doing it. Doing a master's in business after working the ecology sector (probably the reverse of what most people do!) and it's a pain in the neck trying to get a job at the moment. Entry level positions now require a good degree, possibly a masters, occasionally fluency in a foreign language, very often perfect A-level results, and voluntary work that involved saving several thousand starving orphans. Still something of a buyer's market as far as employment goes.

I know the Army won't have you if you've had it done. Suggests to me that your eyes may not be that robust afterwards…

To be honest, when you look at the reason cars get scrapped these days, you're very rarely looking at dead engines except in the case of folk who do without oil changes & checkign the dipstick. More often than not, the car's rusted away, the interior's ruined, or some component or another has failed that's not worth replacing.

Last car I sent to the scrappy was one I'd bought for £225, and had a dead power steering pump. Still ran fine, but the whole package was so rough that there was no way anyone would consider buying it off me and repairing it.

I've heard good (adequate) things about Asda 20w50 for minis…

The ones that use 50 year old engine designs? :lol:

Normally it's a reprogramme via the diagnostics port. On old cars (ie, Bosch K-jetronic injection & VW Digifant – pre 1990s tech) people actually swapped physical chips.

Just buy the stuff in 25 litre containers, split it with your mates if needs be. Or go to the local motor factors and haggle a bit. As per the story above, I generally get oil meeting VW spec (not the fully synth stuff mind) for approx £1 a litre when buying 25L at a time, and that's from the factors, not the oil firm. For what it's worth, that oil is above minimum spec for my 20 year old Golf and my girlfriends' 12 year old golf.

I really wouldn't run cheap oil in any car on the basis that you change it more often – by the time you account for a new sump plug, filter, washer & your time emptying the sump, refilling it and taking the oil to the tip, you've saved tuppence and risked your engine's health. The Asda 20w50 would be below spec for my 20 year old Golf, and probably anything short of a Morris Minor…

I've insured with Brentacre (broker in Wales somewhere – google them) for years. They've always been cheapest for modified / quick stuff for me, often insuring a modified car for less than I was getting quoted for a standard model. I've no personal affiliation with them…

To be honest, I'd be wary of that size of power hike. I had a 25bhp increase on a 406 (110HDi to 135), and the bloke told me he could do more, but you risked lunching the dual mass flywheel, which is a big bill. 60 bhp is a big increase and I think you'd be seriously risking drivetrain damage with that. I eventually lunched the flywheel anyway…

On the other hand, 25bhp wasn't seriously noticeable – felt adequate rather than gutless in 1.5 tonnes of car, whereas some people would tell you it's like a rocket booster. The power increase was there – measured it with some RaceTechnology kit. I didn't notice any fuel economy difference to write home about. You'd probably make a bigger saving switching to EcoContacts or another low rolling resistance tyre, but I think they're hateful things – noticeably less grip. Or tape over all the panel gaps & fit all the undertrays from the Bluemotion model.

I have a few friends who work in the law enforcement side of things. What I hear from them is that drug addicts (mainly heroin & crack) repeatedly commit crime and often have absolutely appalling lives and backgrounds. The types of crimes they commit rarely lead to long sentences, and their lawyers will always aim to get the minimum sentence they can. The other side of this is that drug treatment programmes are generally only available to people serving prison sentences longer than 1 year. The end result is that it's almost impossible to break people's addictions.

On the other hand, there are a lot of people taking other drugs and there are people who are prescribed opiates for pain relief, but they're not stumbling around asking for 50p for the bus to see their nan…

Personally, I view the problem as being that drugs are a more attractive option than real life for a large slice of society. And I include alcohol in that. Until we produce a country where people are capable of looking after themselves and coping with life (and life is something that can be coped with – ie functional social services), we're going to have problems with drug addicts of one form or another.

CSR is a crock of poo if you ask me. Noticed the other day that something that was Co-op own brand was made with palm oil, and they're about as nicey nicey as companies come.

How much to set up with kit? I could pinch / borrow a down sleeping bag, pick up a cheap self inflating mat, but what about the the rest?

I'd probably be going with a mate – would we be better off going halves on a cheap backpacking tent?

A mountain bike. Something like an Inbred with a sensible build (ie, big volume tyres – maybe Schwalbe big apples) should be fine. First thing th let go would be the wheelset, and that's easily fixed by speccing 321 or 521 rims…

Obviously steel is less likely to go catastrophically wrong, but I reckon any cheap mountain bike frame will be more than up to it.

A mate did the army hand to hand combat stuff when he was in the OTC. That's vicious and effective…

I quite fancy a new martial art. To be honest, I'm not interested in waiting for the grand master to turn up and grade me, bowing, patterns, counting in foreign languages or any of that business. I just want to do a bit of fighting, but also avoid ju-jitsu style ruining yourself by training too hard.

If it's not got the lastest software, upgrade that before you do anything else. I'd think they'd all be shiping with the latest now though as the update came out in November or so.

This has now planted the "Bad Sex" sketch from Blue Jam into my head. Whack my bonobo! Cackle my Gladys! More feeble grandad!

That and "The Gush".

Get on the 206 / Pug forums. I'd imagine they have a fairly dedicated if "yoof" following. Normally owner's clubs / forums have a fair few people who have the factory online manuals, which detail what has to be done when. Peugeot have A & B services if I remember correctly, then a few special ones on long intervals for glow plugs etc. It's printed in the front of manual.

Anyhow, the normal service tends to consist of oil, filter, possibly air filter & cabin filter (generally on a B or 2 service), diagnostic check, underbody corrosion material check, brake friction material and check the door check straps / grease the hinges. Gearbox oil is normally on a hugely long interval, if at all – 80K plus.

The owner's clubs also usually know how to reset service lamps and do diagnostics checks for cheap – I have a cable to diag the VWs off ebay, and there's a procedure for the service lamp – usually a dance with the ignition key & the trip reset button.

Is she making you wear an Art Garfunkel wig?