Be Excellent To Each Other

Front mech and seat clamp have now arrived. And fit!

Trying to find another bottom bracket at present. hurrah!

I'm having to repair and refit my old Diamondback for a bike ride this weekend - it hasn't seen use in 7 or 8 years.

My brother won'e let me borrow his gorgeous customised Specialized number that he's just finished putting together. The bastard.

Funny that.

Last time I loaned a bike to my brother he managed to crack the rim of very expensive wheel, but then he is a clumsy so and so.

I'd loan you mine but a) it's too big for you, and b) it's too far away

Also, have you seen the price of new high end bikes. Holy SHIT I know the pound has collapsed but jeez, an equivalent to my bike new would cost more than £4k nowadays and some of the carbon fibre full sussers are hitting £6k.

Bottom bracket ordered!

Hopefully, by the end of next wee, it might be rideable!

(Has anyone go a spare V brake noodle I can have, please)

Heh! Hang on - I'm not short!



Tell me about it. Once I've got this weekend out the way I may do the same as Younger Brother, as his (rather nice) bike only cost him £400 all up, all new parts. Hooray for eBay and that.

My Diamondback is a rather embarrassingly heavy and old fashioned lump of steel. It's awesome, but rubbish.

They have hit bonkers high levels of price, now, deffo. Also, I can't but help think that they don't look as nice as the older high end bikes.

Hah. Well, turns out I've lasted just short of a year before yearning for something better. However, it's only in the way of slightly regretting not getting full suspension; although the types of riding I've been doing aren't extreme, some absorption of the relentless gravel I've been going over would be very welcome.

I don't know if I could live without a remote lockout for the rear after having it on the front, mind.

If you mean mine, it's made in Taiwan. The US frames are different tubing.

It's the length of the crossbar on XL frames that might be more of an issue. I know you're not that short but you're probably still about 4" shorter than me and that would probably make you feel "racked" on my bike.



I got lucky with my bike - I got the frame for nothing when it would have cost about £14-1500 to buy new. A bike store owner who became a friend over the years was putting his shop into admin and he gave it to me rather than the administrators - which was very nice of him, but I had spent thousands in the shop over a five year period.

I had it sitting on the back of my sofa for about 10 months while I sourced the parts - another friend with good contacts in the industry got me the wheels and forks at trade which ended up costing me about £500 instead of £970. HC bought me all the running gear - gears, derailleurs, crank, bottom bracket, headset, handlebars, stem, seatpost and cables and I bought the brakes and grips. All in the bike cost me about £850 but would have cost about £3800 if I'd bought it at retail.



There's stuff you can do to make a bike run a lot lighter in feel to it's actual weight.

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A semi decent full susser has such sophisticated rear suspension nowadays that you don't get much bob. I have lockout on my rear end and I never really use it as it feels odd now. I'll tell you one thing, once you've gone full suss, it's very hard to go back. The only way you'd get me on a hardtail now is if I had a custom titanium frame made as aluminium is far too stiff for my poor back.

I have a shit before I go out for a ride.

Thinner tyres, lighter wheels, narrow bars (maybe, I dunno).

But as I'm a superhero, I can just ride around the extra weight.

ONWARDS TO VICTORY!

So how is it going at the Treasury, then?

Drill holes in the frame?

In seriousness, my experience is that although the weight of a bike is important in some respects, you'll often end up end up on the wrong side of diminishing returns.

Going from a rigid bike with flat pedals to a rigid bike with SPDs made a big difference, due to the massive increase in pedalling efficiency. Adding front suspension increased the weight, but the benefits in comfort, and the decrease in fatigue over a ride more than made up for it. I also increased the gearing by swapping out the large chainring for a slightly larger one (42 tooth to a 44) and replacing the 7 speed cassette with an 8 speed one (this cut out an irritating jump in the ratios when shifting gears, so cadence was inmproved.

Tyre choice as well can have a big influence, if you think about the rolling resistance.

This increase in pedalling efficiency (SPDs, gearing) coupled with the decrease in fatigue made me able to ride quicker, for longer.

So, in summary, get SPDs, or even toeclips and get comfy. You produce only so much power, and getting the efficiency up means more can be used to propel the bike forwards, and if it's more efficient, you can use less for the same amount.

I love my SPDs, and that's why I love the poploc on my suspension: I can use my power to transmit almost entirely to moving forward, instead of bobbing the forks when I don't need them; a quick flick of a switch on handlebars for off-road and downhill and I'm back in relative comfort.

It has been said that due to the "unique design feature" of my RTS, pedalling will lock the rear suspension out, until the force is greater than the force through the chain.

Yeah, right you intended to do that, GT.

That's a bloody fast service!

Heh.

They have just stuck it in the post, though.

All of this, plus the oft overlooked issue of having the bike correctly set up which makes the bike more comfortable to ride and the transmission of energy more efficient. When in the saddle, put the middle of one of your feet on the pedal when it's at its lowest point - your leg should be straight but not locked. That's the correct height the saddle needs to be. Once you have that sorted the controls on the handlebars need to be at the correct angle and should mimic the line of your forearm when your hands are on the grips. Both very simple, but will make a big difference to how comfortable the bike is, and as you correctly point out, being comfortable cuts down on fatigue.

Other obvious stuff is tyre pressure - make sure the tyres are correctly inflated, but yes, decent tyres for the purpose make a BIG difference to how a bike feels. My old carbon fibre soft tail was light, obviously, but if you put 1.75" tyres as opposed to 2.25" tyres it became as twitchy as hell.

SPDs are horrid.

Also - my christ, Evans Cycles are expensive.

Wrong, wrong wrong.




I just bought some stuff from Parker International, they seemed fairly cheap.

I've used them and hated them. I'll give them another go at some point.



I need bits for Sunday, so walked into a local bike shop. Will be getting some cheapy bits from Halfords for now (inner tubes, new tyres, saddle, grips, cheap lock)

When you get used to them. Helps if you've got some decent pedals* and shoes, of course.

Number of times I've fallen off, forgetting I've been clipped into SPDs: 2
Number of times I've missed a pedal or slipped off and scraped my shin: way too many to count

*get some hybrid pedals, so you can clip in or wear trainers. Your choice.

Haha, my shins are as knobbly as a güiro.

In other news the cheating bastcunts at the BMX racing have started using SPDs

And after 3 hours of taking stuff from the Kona, and sticking it on the GT, I've gotten this far:



Sadly, the crank puller completely stripped the thread of the crank it was meant to pull, so it has a date with Mr Hammer in the morning, other than that, all is good; the suspension works with no creaks on my "jump up and down on it" test, although I might be swapping the stems about a bit,as the set up looks quite aggressive to me, and I need some new outer-cables. And I need to sort the seatpost length out a bit.....

Weight is on the "acceptable" side so far.

The Kona frame?

Well, I might build it up as a rigid single speed if I can get some decent wheels for it, but I'll finish one project first.

MaliA's process for the removal and installation of head races:

Remove the fork and all the other bits.
Get wooden pole.
Put frame against picket fence.
Put pole down head tube against race.
USE hammer WITH wooden pole.
Retrieve race, place in freezer.
Have a cup of tea and some lunch.
Remove races from freezer, place in new frame.
Get a bit of wood and place it over the top.
USE hammer WITH wood
Job done.

http://www.dailyinfo.co.uk/pic_provider ... a9s93S3viD

Found a Land Rover bike for £50

New chainset ordered.

Does anyone know where I can get a full set of inner and outer cables for not quite as much as I'm looking at now?

Cables ordered. Almost done. Christ, this has turned into a money pit...

You're replacing the whole chainset or just the chain?



Make sure you get some decent cable cutters, especially for the housings as they're a bastard to cut if you try using pliers.

Whole front chainset. The RHS crank doesn't appear to be coming off the bottom bracket, so after 2 afternoons of trying to remove it, I thought "fuck it" and ordered a second hand one from here which'll slip right on, hopefully. I'm going to switch out teh standard 42t front chainring for my 44t one, and see how the current chain copes with the newer inner rings.



Make sure you get some decent cable cutters, especially for the housings as they're a bastard to cut if you try using pliers.[/quote]

I've some knocking about, somewhere. Currently, the bike looks like this, excuse the high seat height, I didn't adjsut it just popped it in:

It only looks about an inch out tbf

I've decided to build a silly and highly illegal electric bike, capable of topping 40mph without pedalling.
My first thought was to repurpose my old Cannondale M800. Seriously stiff alloy frame, and nice looking bike.

But I'm starting to think that the lack of suspension is going to be a bit hairy at high speed on anything other than glass smooth surfaces.

So does anyone have an old full-sus frame they are thinking of selling, that I might frankingstein-ify?

Or maybe I should leave it as a hardtail and stick some good suspension forks on it. Hmm.

How tall are you?

6-2. Perhaps something with a bit more wheelbase would be sensible...

I have an XL frame which is a larger version of the frame I used to build up my daughter's bike last month. It's missing the rear dropout derailleur hanger and the shock and mountings are missing, but vanilla coils are pretty cheap and easy to source. It has V-brake bosses as well as mounting holes for disc calipers.

HAHA! There was a thing about this in the paper the other day about road racers cheating by having electric motors hidden in the seattubes or downtubes of their bikes and stuff like that.

Cheers DBS I'll have a think about that. How much would you want for it?

Malia: yep, I read about that too! I'm sure it's possible technically but not convinced I believe it.

There's a po-po auction through here on the 19th if you want to chance that.

You can have it, conditional on you picking up P&P and me being arsed to organise it.

We should totally organise a BeeX mountain bike ride at some point, by the way...

I'm about to go and blast the cobwebs away on Hackney Marshes, but yeah, it would be good.

I'll say this. I'm going to Wales the weekend of 24/7 and I will be taking my bike to Afan Argoed.

Dammit! I'm in the peak District then.

Also: http://www.gruberassist.com

Front and rear brakes now have cables attached, will do the gears today, hopefully.

New cranks arrived, and look very nice. I'm "umm"-ing and "ah-"ing about swapping the 42T outer chainring out for my 44T as the cranks are 175mm rather than 170mm.


But it's all fucking academic really as the pedals are stubbornly hanging no in their old homes and the chain's a buggar to split.

But, we're almost there!

I have a couple of sets of spds you could have if you can't get them off and as for the chain, just buy a new one for a tenner for now.

Thanks, I'll consider that option. I'll keep bashing away at them today, but I can't remember if you keep the spanner on the axle and rotate the allen bolt, or the other way around....

I just drove MrsA into work, and as we parked the bike shop near there, she said "You know I can get discount in there through work?".

Only 2 months late.

Undoing them is the same direction you pedal in so you apply pressure in the same direction the crank moves to drive the rear wheel when taking pedals off, rotating the crank in the reverse is for tightening the pedals.

I think you've found the nub of the problem, here.

Oops...