tank_rider

it depends where you lock them up etc, and how much you want to insure them for, and finally where you live. I've used two companies in the past, Endsleigh and E and L. I used E and L last year as they were cheapest, however i had to buy a datatag and new lock to validate the insurance, but they do have the advantage of the cover including up to £1 million public liability cover, so should you land on someone etc then you are covered for that. This year i have gone with Endsleigh, purely and simply on cost, they have re-classified Loughborough as a low risk area and so it was cheaper than E and L (but without the public liability) and i had the decent lock from last year which is still valid under the endsleigh policy. Additionally due to having a T-rex which you cannot fit a datatag to, then Endsleigh policy doesn't require a datatag and so was the only real option. Price wise, i paid £100 for a year to cover my t-rex which is valued at £1200, which is about the same as i paid for E and L last year (this years prices have gone up significantly though) but had to buy the lock and datatag last year.

if i remember correctly, the only difference between the old hope C2 and open 2 brakes was the lever. I cant really see any reason why a mini lever wouldnt work on that system. Why not give hope a ring themselves, im sure they will be able to give you a concrete answer and are still a small enough organisation to actually have time to answer pretty much any question you ask them :sick: in response to your initial question though, mineral oil will cause dot seals to swell up, and dot fluid will eat the mineral oil seals.

I'm with all those who say that the less Brant has to do with trials as a sport the better. Several of us lived through the times when customer service became a joke whilst he was handling all the shenanigans with the px trials frames and i for one would hate to see another generation of trials riders put through what a lot of people were two or so years ago. Now i know it would be nice if there were more 24" frames in production, however this is the one person (apart from a certain PW) that i wouldnt like to see at the helm of a trials product line. His whole approach was wrong and quite often showed a level of maturity more of a young teenage trials rider rather than a company representative.

is melton good to ride? as im in loughborough and am always looking for new and interesting places to ride relatively locally.

sounds to me like you only created one partition and left the other remaining space undesignated, you do know that you have to create two partitions and not just one and leave the remaining space unallocated. If you have done that then just whack your xp cd back in, boot off it like you would do to install xp, then create the partition from the free space available, then exit the installer before you format the new partition (you can do that in windows, once the partition is created). Once back in windows, open up my computer, then double click on the newly partition drive and it should ask you if you want to format it, hit yes and it should do the deed. for the grouping of taskbar icons, right click on the taskbar and then uncheck the box next to "group similar taskbar buttons", that should sort that out :S if you need any more help give me a shout over messenger <_<

see my review in the pads section here

"Having always been fascinated and intrigued by the workings and design of all types of machines, a career in the field of engineering has always appealed to me. The A-levels I am currently taking, which include mathematics and physics have fuelled this interest by furthering my understanding of the principal laws around which machines are built, such as gravity. To gain an initial insight into the varying work undertaken by engineers I spent a day job shadowing an engineering consultant. Following this I attended a two day “Engineering Experience” at Loughborough University. I visited three engineering department, Mechanical, manufacturing and chemical, was shown around them and given a simple task to complete in each, related to the work carried out in each department. The mechanical engineering department interested me most as it covered the widest variety of areas in which I can specialise. My eventual career ambition is to become a chartered engineer in the field of mechanical engineering. I am interested in mountain biking and have a job as a mechanic in a local cycle shop, which has helped improve my practical skills. I recently took part in a 100 mile sponsored charity cycle ride with a group of friends to raise money for elderly people in my area. I have also completed the Community sports leader award. This entailed, over a number of weeks, developing my communication and leadership skills, as well as my knowledge of the rules of a variety of sports. The award culminated in a “sports mania” event arranged by the students for a group of younger pupils which I thoroughly enjoyed. I currently hold a position of responsibility within the school as a prefect, which involves me, amongst other duties, liaising with visitors to the school. I am reasonably fit and play a variety of sports. These include playing tennis, both representing the school and at a tennis club, and football which I play socially. I enjoy playing the saxophone and listening to music. I played in the schools jazz band for five years and hope to join a jazz group t university. A large part of my life continues to be spent as a member of the scouting movement. I am currently a venture scout. This has involved participating in international camps and a fifty mile hike, which I played a major part in organising. My scouting has included the teaching of younger scouts and guides in a marching band, with whom I played at a number of events. I am confident that my varied interests and experiences have equipped me with both the practical and motivational skills necessary to be a successful mechanical engineering student. I now look forward with optimism to the challenges and stimulation of university." theres mine, got me offers from every uni i applied for (nottingham, loughborough, warwick, southampton, reading and hertfordshire to do mechanical engineering masters).

Pads: Heatsink Blue Time Used: 6 weeks Rim Used: Onza Ronnie Grind: Old worn, and brand new Ceramic: No Tar: No Previous Pads Used: Koxx browns, tarty blacks, rimjam greens How you like your brake: Locks solidly with plenty of bite, but with some modulation. I got these pads from Steve a few weeks back as my second set of rimjam greens were nion gone after approx 3 weeks. Initially used them with an old worn grind of about 2-3 months. They required no real bedding in, and gave very good street perfomance straight out of the box, no slipping, very good lock and bite and a small amount of modulation, basically the same performance as the rimjam greens i had previously been using. I used these pads for about 30 hours of street riding and saw very little wear (visually i havent measured them). I then re-ground my rim before heading off up to uni. Rode my first natural with them today, and was relatively impressed, with the rim soaked in water they performed reasonably well, on par with any other brake pads ive used in the wet bar the tarty blacks (which were never commercially available). All in all ive been pretty impressed with the pads, they perform very well in the dry on a worn or fresh grind and perform competantly in the wet, however they are not the best wet pad ive used. If your a fair weather rider then these are definatly worth a look, and would still be plenty good enough in the wet on street, however on wet natural (the hardest test for any brake pad) they hold their own against all other commercially available pads. Wear rates seem to be good on a fairly heftily ground rim, and i can see these lasting fairly well.

i had a good time, the inter sections were pretty tricky, and the rain made them even more solid. I got a 5 on most of the first lap and gave up when the second round of rain started as i would have had to go like the duracell bunny to finish. still enjoyed it and hopefully will have actually have ridden some natty before the next round, rather than a whole summer of nothing but street.

Hey all those pics ae from the fosters weekend at daves show thingy, i think my dads at that today, lets hope he took his camera :)

As Krisboats said ill be out for my first ride of the new uni year in luf. Will be nice to be back riding round the luf area again.

as Haz said, check the interface matches what your pc uses. apart from that the x800 series of cards seems to peform pretty damn well, the only other option at around the £90 would be the 6800LE, if your willing to use software to overclock the card then this is the better option hands down, but if you just want bang for buck straight from the box then the x800 is very good indeed.

cheers for the advice guys, looks like it will be a set of ebc reds then :D ive already done the water, and mud tricks to try to improve performance and its working about as well as it can with the (now 5 year old) pads (i bought it 2nd hand from a guy who hadnt used it in about 2 years)

I'm looking for a bit of extra performance from my 160mm avid disc, i know i could get a 180mm conversion kit, but i was to see if i can get any better performance from a new set of pads. I currently have the original ones that came with the disc. My question being, what are the best aftermarket pads for avid mechanical discs. Im not bothered about wear rates, i just need some more bite than the standard ones give. Many Thanks Andy

at a guess it uses the componants that make up your system, as CPU useage stays rock bottom so its not running any tests. ill run this on my other systems when i get back to uni, i'd be interested to see what a 50% spec system would be as that, you would think, would be the average system in the world.

13% of systems are better than mine as danny said, shame it doesnt take account of the speed your graphics card is running and what pipe configuration, as on paper mine is poo but its unlocked and overclocked like a mofo. must say thats a mighty fine spec pc youve got yourself there SMO, only slight change i'd make is to an amd processor, but meh that will perform damn well. my 3d mark compares 05 compare 03 compare 01 compare and btw overclocking isnt really about fine tuning the componants its about running them above their specification to gain performance benefits of higher clock speeds :)

nothing less than i'd expect, riding wise from matt (damn awesome!!) and editing from steve (i hope it was you anyway, nice and smooth and easy to watch) quality all round vid, defo a keeper, ill be watching it a few more times before filinf that one away!

fraid not, its actually the right way around, the sempron range of budget CPU's is set to continue using socket 754 well beyond the introduction of socket M2 for high end AMD's and the phasing out of socket 939. Saying that, socket A was meant to have been killed by now, but its still up there and fighting.

on the graphics front, i would go for a 6800LE or plain 6800 as they can be unlocked to much more powerful cards very easily and overclocked to performance levels any 6600GT can only dream of. I have a leadtek 6800LE which i have managed to unlock the remaining 8 pixel pipelines and one of the vertex shaders and overclocked to just under 6800 GT speeds. You should be able to pick one up for about the same price as a 6600GT too. as for not using socket 754, there are two ways to look at this. 1) socket 754 has a longer life than socket 939 according to the AMD roadmap for the future, where socket 939 is phased out in the next year in favour of a new socket type, whereas socket 754 is set to continue for the forseeable future. 2) the performance benefits from a socket 939 system are significant and you want the fastest possible for the money. Socket 939 uses dual channel RAM massively increasing the RAM bandwidth and hense performance, the newest cored processors (Venice and San Diego cores) have a supirior archetecture to those found on socket 754 CPUs. In my opinion it would be better to get a socket 939 system as you would be able to get one of the immensly overclockable venice cored processors and a good motherboard within your budget. You have the choice of what graphics card interface you want to use then, either the older and on the way out AGP, or the newer and higher end PCI-Express. This decision will make a difference as to which motherboard you will need. If you go the AGP route then you should be looking for an NVidia nForce 3 chipset based motherboard. If you go down the PCI-E route then you want an nForce 4 based motherboard. With that all said, my advice on graphics cards now needs updating as 6800 cards can only be unlocked on the AGP interface, leaving the choice of either a dyeing interface but with better current performance, or the newer and upgradable interface but sacraficing current performance. There is however the scope that if you buy an SLI enabled socket 939 motherboard then you can buy a second (must be identicle) graphics card (most likely a 6600GT) in a few months when/if you want to get more grphics performance from your system. As for the other componants you have specced, it may be worth going for a sata hard drive to keep the data flowing more freely although these can be a bit of a pain to install windows on due to the need to add a driver before the installation of windows proper. if you go down this route you will need to borrow a floppy drive to install the sata drivers. Also, you would be better off going for a single dual layer DVD writer rather than a pair of drives which doesnt include a dual layer burner. Finally, be a bit careful with the power supplies included within cases as they are often generic cheap units that cant handle anything near the wattage they claim for a sustained period.

i'd go with dmr front and rear dewhore front hubs seem to have a habit of their axels snapping (ive killed 2 riding street and dirt), the rears arent too bad but i would prefer the dmr. in terms of whether to go for gears or not, i have a dirt/street/get to uni bike thats built out of old bits i had lying around and have found that the simplicity of a single gear (nowt to go rong or not shift properly) is a godsend, it took me a chouple of attempts to get the right ratio, but its worth the fiddling.

i do speed, hopwever i keep things nion to the limit in built up areas, and only do it on multilane roads (dual carrigeways and motorways) which have crash bariers (and hense no crossing points). I agree with you chris, i regularly follow people doing 25-30mph less than the speed limit on my route home from work (which goes along a lot of national speed limit roads). Following someone like this adds 10-15 mins onto my journey time which after a day at work and in the summer heat can often result in many obscenities being yelled from my mouth. However i often refuse to sttempt to overtake them as i know on my route there are only 3 or 4 safe places to do it and the rule of sod being what it is there is always something coming the other way when i reach these points. I outright refuse to take risks trying anything remotely near a sketchey overtaking manouver, as much as i get annoyed and scream and shout (to myself in the car mind) its just not worth being painted across the dash.

coldplay - speed of sound nice chilled out sunday evening tune :blink:

Congrats, thats excellent!! I remember a year ago, i rode with the man himself in london, he had a woodstock then and was beasting things that day. The booy certainly has some serious ability!!

every trials rider at loughborough is/was doing an engineering subject, myself included.

i think that one hits the nail on the head :)