aener

I know... Had naughty thought about mine, but then I don't think it'd get much as either Ali or Rich had drilled it out to 4bolt at some point in its life. Doubt people would want that

Is this always the case? I thought clearance was an issue with the vee lugs being further down the seatstay than the bottom 4bolt mount. Curious now!

Well that I was not aware of! The '05 I had was 375mm with 1055mm, so I dearly hope they weren't longer than that one

They were made as a Python replica

Based on the dropouts, and especially the spec it's built into, I'd hazard my guess at a Zona Zip.

I've been wanting a short, steep and cheap get-around with a bit of fun bike that I can lock up in town without fear of being nicked for quite a while. Done loads of searching through DJ etc to not much joy, but totally forgot these existed! If that geo is close, it could well be the one. Edit: Although good luck finding one, apparently.

Holy moly that's a nice build. Love the proportions, even in spite of the too-low toptube. What's the geo?

What rear pads are they? Very quiet, even for a vee.

I went to Womad last week and saw a guy with a pair of Rubber Queen 2.2s on. Presumably just for mud, and would have more conventional tyres elsewhere, but it looked so f**king cool. So I'd say that.

Damn you for snaking my pre-edit post! For everyone else - I added that extra bit about history books before his reply was there

The NLP attempts in those videos is so blatant it seems impossible it could ever take root. Then again, there's empirical evidence that placebos still work even if the taker knows they're taking a placebo. It bothers me that they repeatedly state that these things were done "effortlessly". Even if they had the insane tech these videos imply, it still wouldn't be "effortless", else the feats wouldn't have been held in such esteem. If it was effortless - they would be literally everywhere, not major monuments. They did it somehow, and of course it could be with less effort than the history books say, but it was obviously still a big deal. (That's a major aside from the point, but a little gripe I have.)

One thing to bear in mind is that for smaller, more mundane structures like houses etc. it was just so much easier and more efficient to make wooden buildings - wattle and daub being a go-to. Or mud-bricks. There's a strong argument for only doing the really big stuff in stone because then it's worth the effort. Smaller stones will have been taken and recycled into other stuff too which we see all the time at sites like Avebury - some of the original standing stones having been found as filler (!) between two layers of wall in the church. There was likely a lot more small stone structures that have been dismantled and reused. In Scandinavia with traditional wooden churches (medieval era) it wasn't uncommon for the entire thing to be dismantled just so that it could be rebuilt somewhere else. Bonkers effort. I personally find it particularly interesting that the tipping point of going from small to large scale civilisation didn't coincide with the development of writing (~3500BC for a genuine writing system, with many places later). If anything was going to give a sudden boost in progression, that should have been it by my guess.

It's in the hands of the reader almost as much as the writer. A good writer reduces ambiguity, but it's never going to be completely their fault. There will always be better, but you're by no means bad at writing. You seem to understand the uses and placement of apostrophes so you're better than 75% of other English writers by default

Ah - that's very different from what I thought you meant. Haha.

Love this whole setup, and how on-f**king-point Clarke's First Law is. ("Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Show someone from the medieval ages a smartphone... In fact, ask the average person of today how one works ). It's getting pretty meta now, given that no human on the planet fully understands or knows the physical layout of transistors in of bleeding edge CPU chips. They're all computer-designed, so we made the things that made them, but we have and use this technology that we don't fully understand. (Ok, it's not nearly the same thing as this topic, but an interesting modernisation of the concept of not-necessarily-lost-but-perhaps-"missing"-technology, and I appreciate that we don't necessarily NEED to understand what goes where and why so long as we do know exactly and predictably the output of a given input when using it, but still - I'm a fan of the arcane.) That would be fun, but I'm pretty sure it would boil down to coincidence. Stone was just the material of choice because of its endurance. I'd love the Steinlords to roll in and smite us with their granite-wrath, but I think they're unrelated. It's hard to keep the span of time in check in our measly mortal minds - there was around three THOUSAND years between Stonehenge being in active use and the Romans invading Britain. That's 1.5x longer gap than the gap between the Romans invading Britain and today, and a huge chunk of it can't really be accounted for because those bloody Celts couldn't be arsed writing anything down I'm not saying it's impossible, but if you put "something dodgy is going on with current world politics" as a 1 and "the Queen's a lizard" as a 10 on the conspiracy scale, I personally would put a single organisation not only enduring but remaining in global power for five millennia at about an 8.6. (That's putting aside the 10-20,000+ year old masonry claims just for now.)

I say it every time so sorry if it's boring now, but that style... Damn. Not to mention the size of things!

But... But... But... Mustard yellow?

I'm referring to the year of production when the model name listed on sites became TP rather than Typhoon. They're of the same lineage, yes, but I was asking about the distinction between the 08 Typhoon and TP.

I have a vague memory of Ed Potts telling me it was simply because Leeson didn't have a tube bender, and having the super-wide extended BB shell meant he could get away with using straight chainstays. (Hence also having brazed straight tubing for the seatstays.) I kind of want that to be true and not at the same time Edit: Which could be marketed as "for rigidity" if desired. Funny how that whole thing came back around but more purposefully with the Crewkerz frames.

I'm perfectly willing to accept otherwise as I never followed them too closely, but isn't that a TP rather than the Typhoon? From the year they suddenly went from doing just Typhooons to doing the TP, LE and DD all at once? I thought even the latest of Typhoon's gusset stopped a bit further up the downtube and had a more gentle curve between toptube and seatstays. Doesn't matter either way, but curious as to the accuracy of my memories now

I had dreams of a system almost exactly like this years ago - super cool that someone's made it real. Major downside of rear hose unquestionably getting torn in the event of a front-end-spinning crash though. I reckon it's more likely to damage it than a crash with traditional routing, despite much less of it being exposed.

I presume you're talking about motorbikes? For reference, this forum is aimed at push-bike trials. I've ridden here a few times - not that great for me, and I don't know if motorbikes are strictly allowed but they've been in there each time I've been, so they must not be too strict on it if not https://www.google.com/maps/@53.8400415,-1.6153773,1195m/data=!3m1!1e3

To clarify, I was defending the Vader. Your 24" SL with dual Spank/Conti/Disc is still my favourite looking bike ever. The Vader was still pretty nice looking in a similar way, I just think the top-tube could've come a bit higher to meet the saddle instead of the seat-tube extension. Wouldn't be an obstruction since it would still be lower than the saddle. I liked the Vader. The Jitsie is pig ugly.

Haven't looked at specsheets, but from the picture it looks like your frame has shorter chainstays, longer reach and steeper head angle (which combine to mean shorter stem) and it's steel. Spec-wise... FFW and Kendas? Appearance-wise: that white stripe, standover angle and temporary seat are all yuck. The Vader's standover still looks a bit weirdly low to me to still have a saddle, but it's nowhere near so bad as the Jitsie, which may as well have zip-ties on it