Thanks for the help. I thought the blend motor door was some kind of in-joke until I looked it up! Yes it’s dumb air con, not climate control. Looks like a problem to ignore for a while at least, as I still have hot, cold, very cold and windows.

I’m going to flip this around and wonder why trail centers need a fancy building with cafe, gift shop etc? When I lived in the UK it was the ‘thing’, but moving to BC, we just tend to have a car park and if we are lucky a basic toilet. Squamish only just got a portaloo type thing recently at the bottom of Diamondhead. If I drive to Pemberton, I use provided parking and then if I want something to eat, I just head to a privately run cafe on the way home.

I’d say 95% of the trails are volunteer built / maintained.

Maybe not a popular opinion, but why not ditch the buildings, go into the local community for food etc, and then with the money saved, contract out trail maintenance as needed?

Shrewsbury, Shrowsbury, Shoosbury or Salop.

You either have thighs of Oak, or that’s an E-bike. Either way, look at the shadowing on the rear faces of those smaller cog teeth. Where the chain is being pushed hard against them. Looks to me that the teeth are slightly flared, which is a sign that the cassette is borked. If you were able to use the larger cassette cogs (by using a bigger chain ring), the teeth would not wear so quickly, and there would be more engagement between the cogs and chain.

Also, that doesn’t look like a 12 speed chain checker. Use something like a Park CC4.

I don’t think frame flex is relevant. Just large force being placed on a few cog teeth.

Blimey. I’d be installing a bigger chain ring too. Not much chain engagement in those smaller cogs and three of them look a bit haggard.

I did it on a new style Levo SL Comp as I had nice stuff on two other bikes that I was stripping down and  / or selling. Just the cranks and headset remain.

I kept all the OEM stuff and will rebuild the bike with it when I come to sell it (unless I see a Stumpy Evo frame going cheap in which case maybe I’ll just build that up and sell it complete).

I’ve ridden a Levo and Kenevo SL a few times, and own a current Levo SL.

There’s no right answer to this. If you are going to the Alps, of course a full power bike will be a better choice. If you are a ‘MOAR LAPS! MOAR POWERRRR!’ type rider, then again a full power bike will be better.

That said I’ve done 2000m of climbing and 50Km on a Kenvevo Sl and the battery (just….) lasted. I did ride unassisted for the first part of the ride on the mellow climb. I have a range extender for my Levo SL but in 7 months haven’t used it. The climbs around Squamish aren’t huge, but they are not small either. Rides are generally between 1-3hrs without stopping for significant lengths of time.

My Levo SL weighs under 44lb with Formula coil fork up front, EXT E-storia coil shock in the back, rear tyre insert etc etc. I have no idea how E-bikes can end up so heavy. Some of the ones at work must be 65lb :D

Trail building / maintenance? I don’t know how that fits in with your injuries but it can give more of a purpose to just going for a walk!

@Edukator ha, yes Solihull>rest of Birmingham, in the same way that Shrewsbury looks down on Telford :D

I lived in Acocks Green for a while and temped in Shirley. Bought a Kona from Red Kite in 1999.

@Edukator ha ha I can’t for the life of me remember. It was Shrewsbury Sixth Form College.

I mainly remember riding my bike up and down the stairs by the bike storage area, and going to the snooker hall 30 seconds away quite a bit.

I think universities are broken because culture is broken. When I left school I had the choice of going to Sixth Form or ‘The Tech’. I chose Sixth Form because The Tech was for losers. Smart people went to Sixth Form. I did an A Level on how to read books. Another one on telling the difference between different types of rocks….

I badly did a degree on Leisure Management. I do spend a lot of leisure time riding bikes so maybe that degree was a success? I also learned how to roll great spliffs.

If one judges life on wealth accumulation and skillz, I bet most people that went to The Tech are better off than me :D

Formula Cura 4 ;)

I’m always rolling my eyes when my mum (always…) starts moaning about immigrants when I call her. Partly because her arguments are deeply flawed, and partly because her son is himself an immigrant (in another country) :D

“Stop comparing the thousands of years of immigration to what’s happened recently, not even remotely comparable.”

Tell that to all the people murdered and molested by those pesky Vikings!

I don’t know about organizing in secret? They’ve been posting loads on social media for a good while now, and posting on other Facebook groups etc. A website will give more legitimacy though.

I hate haggling so if I’m selling something, and it’s something I’ll never need again (touch wood….) I tend to price fairly low anyway just so someone will just give me the asking price fast and with minimal faffing.

But on the other hand, if I have something ‘weird’ I might price high just to see if I get lucky, but still be happy to sell at half the asking price if I get no takers.

Reminds me of buying a used car circa 2004. I went to see a 90’s Rover 214 (living the dream….). I think it was up for a grand at the garage. I drove it, ‘liked’ it but said to the guy that I can’t spend a grand on it. He asked “what do you want to give me?”. I lined myself up for 10 minutes of back and forth, so started at 500, thinking it’d bounce up and down for a while and finally settle at around 800, which I’d be OK with. He took the offer! So you never know ha ha.

For a hassle free experience, new pads.

If the rotor has worn to a uniform thickness you’d probably be OK with the old pads, but I’d scuff them up with sandpaper.

If the rotor has worn so it’s thinner in the middle (which normally happens) then 100% new pads time. The pads wear to match the rotor shape, hence, the pads matched to a worn rotor will ‘bulge’ in the middle. Installing a new rotor will mean that only the middle of the pad will contact the rotor. At best you’ll have poor braking for a while. At worst the pads will glaze over and howl, and have poor braking. Well, at worst you’ll get hit by a bus….

Back in the 2000’s I was ordering fleet cars for a living (yaaaawn….) and one of the dealers we used on a regular basis gave me the ‘industry secret’ that it’s better to do the opposite of the breaking in period, and thrash the pants out of the engine…. It will open everything up better.

May or may not be true, and possibly not the best for the person who ends up buying the car with 100,000+ miles on the clock!

Short term rentals are getting clamped down on here so to be safe, I would book with a place that is adhering to the new rules (i.e. have a valid business licence on their page). It would suck to book somewhere and have it cancelled at the last minute because the hosts are acting illegally.

https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/housing-tenancy/short-term-rentals/information/visitors

I wouldn’t be concerned about rental bikes having brakes the wrong way around. Any rental shop with any common sense here has bikes with brake levers that can be swapped over in a minute with an allen key (so anything other than Shimano).

Depends how many days riding you’ll be doing as to whether it’s arguably worth renting over bringing. I’d take out insurance with rental bikes though! Bikes get an absolute hammering here. Finding somewhere to store bike bags might be a problem. You could risk using carboard bike boxes both ways but it would be a risk. Bikes aren’t selling too well so bike box availability in shops will be pretty limited.

Don’t leave the bikes unattended or on the back of a vehicle unsecured. They will get stolen.

Speaking from the other side of the bench, I don’t think there is a correct answer!

There will be someone who doesn’t drink alcohol. Someone who can only eat gluten free food. A bloody vegan (me….) etc. The sales people will drink all the beer 30 minutes before closing, while the mechs who earned the beer have steam coming out of their ears trying to get work done. Or someone will stay late to work on their own bike, and will drink all the beer.  There will be a Shop Ride, and customers will come back to the shop and drink all the tip beer. Heh heh….

Could leave a great Google review, and recommend the shop to all your biking buddies?

The ‘stick a breaker bar under a shelf and the rotate the wheel’ technique doesn’t make sense in my pea-brain. Sure it doesn’t matter if the bar is 10cm or 10 miles long, if you are rotating the wheel rather than the bar?

A load of heat on the hub shell, token blast of cold air on the drive ring to try and quickly cool it down, a vice that doesn’t rotate, and two people swinging on the wheel with a tyre on it has never failed me (including Roval wheels used with Levo demo bikes), but it’s been really close on a couple for sure.

I’m so outraged!

Mmmm this factory farmed chicken tastes delightful…..

Metallica. Yeah-ee-yeeeaaaahhh……

Looks to me that the HSL-0003 is a rubber bearing cover, not the bearing itself. I’d remove that and see what is behind it. 15267 isn’t an unusual size.

A couple of years ago a buddy was working at a rental shop in Squamish. One day we decided to ride some ‘off the map’ trails outside of the immediate area, starting about 2000 meters up. J and I took out rental E-bikes, and his girlfriend borrowed the local sales reps bike.  I checked my bike over and swapped the brakes over to be UK style.

His girlfriend is a really good rider (can ride Squamish Double Blacks, hit big jump lines in Whistler Bike Park, is a qualified coach etc). The trails in question would be classed as BC Double Black in places, but pretty ‘out there’ should anything go wrong.

Anyway, other than two of us forgetting to turn off the climb switches on the Float X2s for a good chunk of the  descents, the riding was fairly un-eventful given the terrain.

Ride over, buddy took the bikes back to the shop to give them a once over and put them on the chargers.

During this I got a text message. “V’s brakes were on the wrong way around!!!” The sale rep is from the UK and so has his brakes ‘normal’. V managed to ride the bike for about 4 hours, including about 1700 meters of descending on steep gnarly BC trails, and not spot that the brakes were the wrong way around. Our minds were all blown ha ha. She must have subconsciously figured it out straight away, but just never consciously noted it.

Carry on learning computer programming, instead of floating through space for hours on end playing Elite.

Dog toy.

There needs to be some friction in order for the piston seal to flex when the brake lever applied, and flex back when the lever is let go, so the piston moves towards the rotor, and then back again. Silicon oil is super slippy so maybe the pistons slip forwards too easily through the seals and cause the dragging.

Sram say to just clean with Iso (or did last time I watched their internal videos. Shimano say use their mineral oil, which is still less slippy than silicon. Setting the pads a little further away from the rotor when adjusting the brake can also help. These are a bit of a faff and I normally use something else, but the idea is sound:

https://www.birzman.com/products_2.php?uID=2&cID=4&Key=133

He should come over here. We have a surplus:

New Netflix series dives into the mystery of feet washing up on B.C. shores

If you want to be truly culture shocked, you should go to East Hastings Street / Main Street.

In all seriousness, you could hire a bike and ride around the ‘Seawall’. Either around Stanley Park, or head around to Science World area or even on to Kitsilano. It’s a nice ride if the weather is good. Don’t leave the bike unattended or it will get stolen.

If you can hire a bike in North Van, you can take it on the Seabus at the bottom of Lonsdale which takes you into the city center, or ride over Lions Gate Bridge which takes you to Stanley Park mentioned above.

“Taps can’t go in squint if their is a thread, they follow the existing thread”

They can’t follow an existing thread if the one side isn’t threaded properly as there is a super high tolerance bar that joins the two sides of the taps together. That is literally the whole point of the BB tapping tool.

You are owed a frame but it’s impossible to say who did the damage. In a normal situation the shop would point you in the direction of pursuing a warranty, but it doesn’t sound like this in an option.

The thing is…..if a bottom bracket is in perfect condition, I don’t know how a BB chasing tool can wreck a frame due to the way the tool locks together.  They are pretty idiot proof unless one puts the tool in the wrong way around! Some are not labelled so you have to look carefully at the threads (which is really dumb). The tool is also only really designed to clean the threads and get rid of small imperfections, not magically make a wrecked BB shell perfect again.

So if the frame was dead from the factory, the tool could potentially make it more dead than a Monty Python Parrot. Which sucks for the shop who innocently took on the job. Maybe the mechanic was too gung-ho and thought by forcing the tool, it would make everything right. Doesn’t change the fact that the frame was probably faulty and not fit for use in the first place.

I’d be going after ‘Nukeproof’ more than the shop but I’m guessing that you can’t.

Looks like it’s now similar to how it is in BC (outside Whistler Bike Park), although with an extra grade (Red).

Reads like our Green would be the UK’s Blue in order to match everything up. That said, our grading system doesn’t even match up between riding areas so you have to take everything with a pinch of salt. I can ride some Double Backs totally fine and are some of my favourite trails, and others terrify me and I walk the whole way down….

Our gradings are only skillz based though.

Canada was formed in 1867, despite people living here countless of thousands of years prior to that.

The First Nations kids were taken from their homes, and sent to Residential Schools to be ‘corrected’.

The Specialized demo center in Squamish mentioned is ‘closed for the winter’, which in Specialized speak means closed forever. Ridehub does loads of rentals if you end up in Squamish.

Fromme is an easier climb than Seymour. Leppard, Crinkum Crankum, Kirkford, Roadside Attraction / Upper Griffen is good ‘XC way down the mountain as mentioned above.

A more direct way down would be 7th Secret to Expresso. Everyone’s abilities are different but I wouldn’t call this route ‘hard’. Loads of different people ride Expresso in particular. There’s one or two techy corners on 7th but nothing you can’t walk down easily if needed.  Or you can do 7th and straight into Leppard and then down that way. That would be the best bang for your buck.

If you do head up to 7th Secret, you will pass the entrance to Upper Oil Can. If you stand at this entrance, look to the right (back where you came from) a few feet (maybe 10, I can’t remember now. It’s right next to UOC) you’ll see the remains of the entrance to Flying Circus. If you’d like a North Shore history lesson, I strongly recommend pushing your bike into there and hiding it out of sight, and take a walk down for a few minutes (the bike will be safe). Everything is falling / fallen down but it’s still nuts to see.

I’m really confused, but ‘gravel’ and road forks can be tapered with the normal 1 1/8th at the top for conventional stems, and 1 1/4 at the bottom (rather than 1 1/2).

^It’s bonded due to the type of aluminium used. Same as the Pole bikes.

Northwind, that’s the case with the ‘Wellingtonia’ that is in the field behind my parents house. The remains of the ‘castle’ walls and a few buildings remain but the main house was knocked down donkeys years ago. 

For some reason I think you are in Shrewsbury? Sundorne ‘Castle’ is the place. Not that it was ever a castle. Just some rich doods decided to build themselves a fake one. 

Rootes1 may have seen it around 30 years ago :D 

Top tip:

Always go for bags of Muesli or oats, as you can stuff them inside a hoodie easily. Those family sized boxes of Shreddies are a pain to conceal.

“I’ve got the caliper filled etc and the lever is firm”

If the lever feel is firm, it might just be a case of advancing the pistons further. If the lever feel is spongey then that would hint that the bleed is the issue.