Steve-A

AFAIK Clive is no longer building frames. With Kris' interest waning and both of their interest in cars increasing I believe he's making parts for track cars. Thats said if you had an old frame that needed repair I'm sure he'd sort you out.

Thats pretty good. Back in the day Worcester was the trials bodge center of the world. There were some classics, small allen keys clamped in mechs to hold them in a gear when the cables broken. I ran a piece of pepsi can as a leaf spring in my ACS freewheel for a couple of years. Matts classic mech hanger bodge using either the broken halfs of the mech hanger to build a new one, often with welding it back together by melting it a bit over the cooker, or using an old skool magura booster as a mech hanger. That said personally I think the best bodge was this: 24" wheel in a Pashley GHZ, rear brake consisted of a Leeson booster bolted upside down to the GHZ, then jubilee clipped to the frame at other end, with the bolts upside down. This bodge then leveled up, after crashing a rail gap in bristol I broke one of the jubilee clips, so we tired the bottom end of the brake with Jon Shrewsbury's spare brake cable.

I still think you'll make the bike feel really odd with bars that high. Take a bunnyhop for example. Comparatively between my BMX and my Leeson 24 the Leeson takes longer to pull up the front and more effort, but one the front is up leveling out is easy. On the BMX lifting the front is easy, but it requires much more of a hip thrust to lift the rear wheel and level the bike out. I think if you have high bars it will feel more like a BMX bunnyhop technique, but because the basic wheel geometry is of a trials bike it will just end up feeling rubbish. It will also make most TGS type moves really hard. So you just end up with a trials bike trying to be a BMX and failing. If you stick with a lower bar set-up with slightly longer stem then although it might take a bit longer for the bike to feel natural and for you to re-adapt your techniques, but once you have you will end up with a bike quite capable of trials and you're prior knowledge of how the BMX tricks work its surprisingly easy to do them on the 24. As for brakeless, its great IF you have the right spots to ride. I've ridden brakeless for a couple of weeks, and more recently I rode the 24tour bristol ride with no brakes and its great. There's plenty of scope and cool lines to be had. But that was bristol... Back in Worcester very few of the spots lend themselves to brakeless riding, I just felt very limited. Its well worth a shot, and can be great fun. Just don't discount the option of fitting a rear brake. I've been riding without a front brake for months and it doesn't bother me, on street there are very few times where it limits what I can do, but a rear brakes just opens so many more trials opportunities.

I think you've just gotta find you're own way with bars/stem on a 24, there seems a huge range in bar rise/width and stem length between riders. When I got my 24 back off sam with that bar set-up it felt plain wrong to me, but it obviously suited him and his riding. I agree it made it a similar riding position to BMX. I'm now running some 24" wide 1" rise bars and a 10x90mm stem and it feels much better to me. If you're considering set-up coming from a bmx background one thing I'd say is don't compromise trials too much. I've tried plenty of bar and stem combos on my 24 over the last 5 years and I've personally found that going for a really short stem, say 40/50mm and some higher bars really make the bike feel more bmxy. Really noticeable in things like stability of hopping up out of manuals. BUT it made riding any sort of real trials a complete pain. At the end of the day its a 24 trials bike and so is never gonna be like a bmx, the difference in riding feel to have a 90/100mm stem is minimal but once on the backwheel it makes a huge difference. At the other end of the scale I've run 28" wide bars and a longer stem. For me this made backhopping nice, and made the bike feel more like a 'real' trials bike BUT it was horrible to bunnyhop and spin with. I also couldn't ride trials aswell. @$s generally being short seem ot respond to the old fashioned riding with 'pop' kinda like riding a short mod, rather than the feel of riding a long modern stock, and so I think feel better set-up with light tires and a medium length stem with comparatively narrow bars. If you are seriously looking into buying a 24 its worth getting on a ride with all the 24 guys as its amazing how different the bikes feel even though most are running the same frame.

Awesome ride in bristol thursday guys Was most intensley I've ridden, and most I've really got stuck into nailing stuff, in years. Was definatley the right call to remove my brake at the start of the day Nice to meet and talk to some of you guys a bit more properly. Will have to try and catch up with some more of the 24guys type rides, though I'm fairly sure I wont make any more of the tour dates.

I like. I wonder what he'll try next? Tandem stunts? That said, I'm most interested in seeing him ride a normal trials bike again, and see him incorporate all the skills he's learnt by riding brakeless/fixed gear/tandem. I also agree with revolver, that it would have been more interesting had he used his normal bike but with fixed gear.

Ashton bikes ET frame was the first 24" trials bike. Was a signature frame for Ed Tounge when he still in the scene, because he was riding lots of BMX too and wanted a trials bike more street orientated. They ride pretty simiar to most modern 24" trials bikes, if a tad shorter. It was a slow beginning with only a few people taking up 24" trials becasue it was so unknown, and all streety riders rode short stocks so had ot buy new wheels, tyres and forks in order to go 24". After the ET Leeson started making the 609, then Curtis made their 24 too, it was quite a while after the ET had been discontinued that any other alu 24s came about. The heatsink 24UK came next.

Oxfordshire is good with me. Anyone know any particularly pleasant roads around there?

I'm happy to travel a bit, but Portsmouth is about 3 hours of dull motorway away, so too far for me.

bump? New date, at original location?

No. IMO the ending was no more filler than the rest of the show, cool wall not just filller? More importantly, most of the editing on top gear is heavily stylised. It has evolved across the 11 series to become the aggressive, jumpy, glitchy style we come to associate with top gear. That style of editing would be just plain wrong to convey the message that Clarkson was trying to put across with that piece. There were still some neat tricks in there, like the pans from road across the dashboard where the scenery kept changing mid pan, a nice way to show time/distance passing. One of the things about top gear is that to try and make the same old cars going round and round more interesting they spend lots of time in post trying out different things, like the shaky black and white stuff seen in series 10, or some of the day/night cuts they did on the z4 piece, they go out and try different things. What your saying is equivalent to saying that the editing in a children's film is crap because its not cut like a horror movie and colour graded in the same way.

I like my modified car. As others have said if you're gonna mod it make sure you have a reason behind it. Having a bit of taste and being realistic about the mods is very important. I liked having a 2 seater soft top with a great chassis and nice weight balance, but it just wasn't quick enough. So I went with power mods. I've put about £4k into the car now, including initial purchase. I cant think of any car that would offer me the same balance of daily usability with speed, power and agility, that I can insure for the money I've spent on my mx5. I think there's plenty of point modifying for the road, I enjoy driving my car about 5x more and a day to day basis than I did before. Almost as important is that fact that I've really enjoyed the experience of learning about the modifications I made, learning about , spending time with friends in the garage.

It'll be 16:9 FHA, i.e. proper 16:9. It makes it 16:9 by recording oblong pixels, there will be a setting in vegas somewhere for either 16:9 or more likely 'anamorphic'. what you effectively have to do is stretch the video to 133.3% of its current width, but vegas should do this for you automatically if set-up correctly. I've never used sony vegas so cant be of any more use.

Yeh that last 5 mins was the best bit of this series of top gear. to be honest I was pretty disappointed by it this season, and probs wont bother turning on the TV for next season.

Maybe the innovation should be a switch to 150mm rear ends then. Wide spaced flanges building stronger wheels, with better chainline. Though it'll never happen for the same reason as the 25" backwheel.

I used to do quite a bit of climbing. Was climbing indoors a couple of nights a week then going outside whenever possible. It was infact how awesome outside bouldering is that killed it for me. After I'd been outside I never wanted to go back to climbing indoors. but the nearest outdoor stuff is all an hour or more away, so I wasn't able to get round to it as much as I liked. There's a few nice bouldering spots in Staffordshire, there is a specific guide book about the place.

Nice looking bike, but looks like its barely been ridden. Why swapping so soon?

I'm some ways I agree with you guys, in that when you're a bit older you make slihgtly more calculated decisions when riding. If its 50/50 that you make the gap you're more likly ot say ' I'll go work on my gaps and come back when its 75/25 I make it'. On the other hand I had 18 months out and went climbing. Climbing required way more continued concentration and commitment that could last 1/2 hour once you're half way up a climb, rather than the 30 secs to do a big line. Now I'm 22 and 6 months ago or so I started riding again, I'd say my bottle has actually gone up. Although I'm not taking stupid risks, I'm less likely ot bottle things that I know I can do just because they are scary. Having an older and wiser brain can work both for you and against you.

Damn, I only joined you guys for one ride of those years, the 2005 bristol ride, but it was awesome. Great memories

As has been said try some different bar and stem combos. The frame is gonna be fine length, especially as you're only 5'6". Its worth considering that often the short mods have short chainstays too. So wheelbase 1000ish, chainstays of 360ish. Then for example the old python was 1025, but it had375/380 chainstays. So the bb to headtube length isn't really gonna be much longer at all.

1st movement, beautiful. 2nd movement, nice. 3rd movement, awesome.... Youtube Video -> ">" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" width="425" height="350">

I'm tempted to think that the Ken section was shot by the same guys that do his internet vids, rather than usual Top Gear crew, it had a very similar feel, unless they simply copied his normal style. I suspect it would have been shot on red for those slow-mo shots, they did look awesome.

Sounds like you've got a good gig going there Decade Ago. I've been working in TV for 3 or so years now. Again the same story, you've gotta get lucky to get in, then work pretty hard at times, starting as the tea boy no matter what your qualifications are. I've always been on the post production side, mostly editing. I work for a small production company who generally do leisure Tv, have done car restoration type programs, DIY, fishing and poker programs over the last few years. Its not the BBC, but its still working in TV, and its been a great way for me to get the chance to go from TV to edit assistant, to VT editor. And its looking like I'll be one of a team of 2/3 editors for a couple of series based on poker, one tournament and one lifestyle, for terrestrial TV in Australia, fox sports, and it'll probs come to one of the satellite TV channels over here. There's a few people on here who've made steps towards the industry. I believe grant peters has works as a runner for bbc and looking to move forward, Jonny Jones sounds like he's starting to get a foot in the door, having done a few corperates now.

Where can I get this wallpaper? I NEEd it for my work computer. Would look swish across 2 times 2560x1920