Yup I had to pump out £60 for a replacement Maxle on my Trek EX9. God knows why they are so expensive and why no one makes cheaper alternatives. Come on Superstar!!

Got a b&d one this summer and found it to be excellent. Wish I got one years ago. Saves a ton of time when decorating woodwork.

This happened to me. I told the insurance company and they just said keep the bike. They faxed over a letter so the Police would hand the bike over to me. In all honesty they really aren’t bothered. What Are they going to do with a bike for them it is all small change.

Just look at all the announcements by companies of moving their headquarters and its all Sir this and Sir that. If you run a bank it seems you get a knighthood and it is just the old boy network working together.

They might move their nominal headquarters to London and therefore pay profits to the Uk government but I would be amazed if they moved the 1000’s of processing and admin staff. Lots and lots of banks have their nominal headquarters in London but there actual processing headquarters elsewhere. Lloyds for instance is in Bristol.

Lingcars is just great for how awful it is. Just madness on a webpage. I wonder what they are like as a company as the website must be intentional

+ 1 for COOP banking website
Superstar and Chain Reaction do see overly complicated

Your expecting to much. Them replacing after all that time and so quickly seems great to me. If they don’t make the part anymore in white then thats life.

I got one of these for £23 and am enjoying Game of Thrones

Wuaki – Chromecast

As mentioned upload speed is generally really slow which is a killer for photos and video. Does anyone know of software that will shrink a photo first. In reality I don’t need an image file so large I could print it at A1 size. As the backup is for emergencies only I would be happy to only have photos stored at A4 size. This would massively reduce the size of the backup and therefore speed. I currently use Dropbox which is great for documents, etc but non of the online backups really handle photos, videos, music etc that well as they just take up so much space.

Don’t be tempted to get a Motorola baby monitor as they are cheap but cack. Constantly drops signal with a very annoying beep. The amount of times I have wanted to drop kick it across the room.

We previously borrowed an Angelcare and it was good.

LIKE THIS

Get a simple CCTV camera. At the end of the day it seems if they want your bike then they will get it. Loads of stories of shed roofs being taken off or the sides being smashed into. At least with CCTV there is far more chance that the buggers will be caught. Most police know who does all the crime in an area, they just need proof.

I have one of thesehttp://www.ultrasecuredirect.com/acatalog/Flood_Light_CCTV_Speech.html

There are also loads of simple SD card cameras that will work as well.

Wireless alarms work quite well as they are cheap and simple and as a shed is a confined space the alarm really does hurt the ears very quickly.

As someone who runs a website the problem is that these reminder emails work. So once you see them working you would be shooting yourself in the foot if you switched them off. What they should be doing is limiting the number and frequency that they go out so they don’t annoy people so much. Ours are setup to go out after 1 hr and thats after someone has entered the checkout and not just added something to the shopping cart.

We had a 110 Rangemaster Leisure and it was absolutely rubbish. Considering it cost around £1200 within 5 years 2 fans needed replacing in the oven, the door latch broke and the main timer clock stopped working. What made it worse was that Rangemaster could not supply a replacement clock that would actually fit. There so called replacement was about 5mm out of alignment with the hole in the front of the cooker. Eneded up having to get an electrician to hot wire it to by pass the clock/timer.

I would look for something with better build quality. I think for the price Rangemasters are rip off.

Hi Flange

Yes saw your post the other day and it didn’t fill me with confidence regarding a Tern!!

Decathlon bikes, look good. They have one with a belt drive 7 speed Nexus hub for £550

Thanks all. I always thought that there must be a reason Bromptons were so popular despite the price. Maybe worth looking for a 2nd hand Brompton.

I was looking at the Dahons on Evans as they have some good discounts.

Ive also found that my car does better MPG in France than the UK. According to the computer our car was going about 4mpg better in France. This is driving on motorways to Calais and then Dover to Bristol. Made me think was it road surface, average speed, driving style. To me on many motorways the lanes looked thinner and maybe I was watching my speed more or the equivalent speed limits lower so saving more fuel.

Personally before watching the film the other night I never really thought Armstrong was cheating as everyone else was doing it. So were they all just on the same level playing field, just an illegal one and was he not just the best rider. What I hadn’t realised is how much of a bastard he was at going out to destroy anyone else’s life who questioned him and what was going on. Also how he blatantly lied time and time again and actually proactively pushed the agenda that he was not cheating.

The one thing that they kind of touched on in the film but didn’t go into much detail was all the other people in the sport and industry who wanted to keep the lie going as they were all making money. How many other people both cyclist and sponsors knew what he was doing and covered it up.

The biggest problem with cycling is the same as FIFA and the IOC, there are too many officials who are lining their own pockets and will turn a blind eye to anything. There is a whole establishment of them so to make any changes is almost impossible.

Sam – As someone who also runs a small companies website I would recommend just getting a managed website and not just getting some to create you a bespoke now that gets loaded onto your web servers. You then have a website management company that has to look after all the security details and making sure all the software is up to date. We use Shopify, it doesn’t have 100’s of bells and whistles but does work well.

The problem with the greens is they are all social lefties or that is the impression. There is no reason why a party could not be pro capitalism and still promote and legislate green laws. The two do not have to go hand in hand. They are too right on and I think this annoys a lot of people. The stupid thing is that there can’t be that many people in the country would do not support an environmental policy or would not support environmental laws being brought in. So if they had other sensible policies that people agreed with then they would probably be in a very good place.

WANT!!, Looks amazing. Loved my Flux

Thanks everyone, so it sounds like £1400 isn’t a bad price then. Fair enough, certainly not doing it myself, far to much work and I have moved enough times to know what pain and handwork it is.

Speak to the health visitor and gets child physiologist in. We had one and out really helped, basically her advice was, if you go in when they are crying then it reinforces that there is something wrong. They think mummy and daddy have come in so there must be something wrong with me. When you look at it this way and start to do controlled crying then we found it really helped.

Most of the disc road bikes seemed to be tourers or cross bikes, well from what I saw.

Slate cross bike was lovely as was the Nerve.

After my moan I should say well done to the organisers as you have to try new things and bringing all these people together made a great show. To be honest where ever it is I will go next year

Enjoyed the show and good to see the velodrome but as per anything in East London it is pain in the arse to get to. Sat in traffic on the north circular for hours didn’t help. Half the entrances to the Olympic park were blocked off even though they said it was fully open. Ended up having to jump fences to get in. Staff at velodrome were useless as well and couldn’t tell us how to get to a car park a couple of 100yds away without jumping fences. There stock response was ” I am not from around here” anyway moan over.

There were some amazing bikes and the quality of finish was what stood out for me. Paint jobs were just stunning on some frames. Surprised there wasn’t any disc road bikes as apposed to cross bikes. Good to see that some of the most impressive stuff was from the small guys and not just the larger companies. All in all great show and pleased it will be back in Bristol next year. I think it needs to be less like a trade show and have a more unique feel, maybe like beer festival.

Rear maxle for my Trek EX9 £60 for a bloody large quick release

The problem is that more and more forks are coming in tapered variety and especially when they have a carbon steerer. Therefore you need to have a larger head tube to take the 1.5″ steerer bottom. So that the frame still looks good and the front end isn’t too high people are using 44mm head tubes so you can have an integrated head cup.
Cotic have some info on it here: http://www.cotic.co.uk/geek/44mm

Well take something like the Planet X XLS Shimano 105 Cyclocross Bike which they say has a frame weight of 1223g and forks of 769g so lets call that 2000g

Im planning on using a Columbus Mud Disc fork which is 450g and hopefully the frame should be around 1800g – 1900g so all in 2350g. These are estimated weights but should know in a couple of weeks when the forks are back in stock.

To be fair I am using forks that are loads lighter then the planet x ones so its not a totally fair comparison.

I just built a Columbus Life road frame in a medium size and this came up as 1650g and thats with a 44mm head tube. Tube weights for something like Columbus Spirit are around 950g where as Zona is around 1450g.

I’m just about to start building myself a frame exactly as you describe. Going to use Columbus Life tubing to get a frame weight around the 1700g mark and then pair with some full carbon Columbus forks. Will have 44mm head tube to fit tapered forks, threaded BB and 135mm dropouts so its easier to get disc wheels. I’m looking at around £650 + fork

I can always build you a frame with any spec that you want, bosses, paint colour, etc

If your interested drop me an email (in profile) and I can give you some more info and tell you where I am at, photos of previous frames, etc

We use Paypl and also NoChex on our website. Basically with all payment processing you have to pay fees but some are better than others for small businesses due to volume. The real key thing is customer trust. We found that many customers don’t really understand Paypal and think you have to open an account to use it, which you don’t and they can just put their credit card details in. That is why we also started to use NoChex as a payment gateway. There is no monthly fee and they just take a small %. We have found that we get about a 50/50 spread between the two payment methods.

Im coming on Saturday but haven’t got a ticket yet so can I take up the offer of a free ticket?

See what I don’t get with fracking and the ground water argument is that in the UK all water (well nearly all before some says they have a bore hole) is supplied by water companies. Therefore it is their job to supply me with fresh water. Why should I worry about how they do it. Do you not think that the water companies as both profit making companies and legally bound to supply fresh clean water will not be up in arms if they think the ground water is going to be polluted. They have all the geologists and scientists to argue if fracking should go ahead and if it will pollute the ground water so why as individuals with no real facts and backing behind our argument are we make a fuss about this.

Why would government listen to us and not he experts from the water companies.

Now pollution from the hundreds of lorries needing to go to site is a different argument. Then again this is never put in context. They have identified a fracking site in the village of my parents in Somerset and as you can imagine there are people up in arms. But there is a bloody big Yeo Valley yoghurt farm just down the road and all day and night lorries trundle through the village. So how many extra lorries will the franking need. Are we talking a 10% increase in heavy traffic or a 200% increase? No one seems to know or will say which just leads to concern.

I agree that we all need to help reduce our energy usage, but is this really going to happen on a grand scale when the population is rising. People wont reduce their energy usage when there are new gadgets galore unless they are either forced to or their is some new revolutionary technology that changes the whole playing field.

Funnily enough I was thinking about this yesterday. Just got a rage 3 from Ebay for £66. Looks like the same company that is on Amazon.

House of cards is brilliant. We took out the free trial just to watch it. Best £0.00 I have ever spent

Remember US prices often don’t show VAT until the checkout.

Big brands have to make sure there bikes are suitable for a wide audience and are easy to ride. Hence why for experienced riders they often feel dull, sure footed and a bit slow. For smaller brands like Yeti they know all their customers are experienced riders and they have a smaller more specific market so can make bikes that are a lot more twitchy and often feel faster and more alive. It’s the same with cars between large and small manufactures.

Brilliant series looking forward to tonight.

Get a Tesco credit card as you then get extra points. We stick everything on ours and shop at Tesco and we must be getting £200 in vouchers a year. Use these during a Tesco boost event and that is £400 of free stuff

Never seen the point of nectar cards