Steve-A

Good stuff. Nice change to have instrumental music, with a reasonable amount of sync mixing it up. Really helped make it more interesting for the whole 15 mins (part1 and 2). Some of the shots were lovely, the light and shallow DOF really coming together. At other times everything was soft, which was a shame, the vignette was a bit OTT and there was a reasonable amount of camera shake. Pretty small issues considering the rest of it flowed quite well. Ashton is so comfy in front of the camera, and really natural with his chat. He would make a pretty good presenter if he did have a TV show like he says in the video Edit: Ah its made by Rob Kitchen using a 5d. The 5d will be much lighter than most video cameras, and not as easy to hold steady due to its shape.

Awesome. The physical feat of doing those moves brakeless is amazing, and some of the moves look so amazing. The hooks look so smooth/flowing and gap to front wheel to manual was inspired.

Bumpiness depends purely on where we go. If people want to drive fast flowing A roads, or tighter windy A roads for that matter, they are reasonably smooth. But there are lots of awesome B/unclassified roads that are definitely on the bumpy side. They are great fun, but I dunno how many we will drive as they might be a bit slow/narrow for some of your guys cars. Lots of corners where 20mph feels quick and always the risk of tractors/sheep/etc. So yeh I'd add a few mm of ride height(Y) I hope my clutch lasts. I've been running 12psi and heading on for 200hp for a week and its ruined my clutch, so I'm back down to 7psi and about 150mph, its holding at the moment.

Just as a bit of a taste, these are a couple of bad camera phone pics from one of the roads that goes round here. They don't do it justice, but either way its a flimsy excuse to bump the thread!

Yeh thats the KHE I meant. If you know where to get Racing Ralf for a good price I'd be very interested. I've only seen them for £35+ each

Schwalbe Racing Ralf has to the be the lightest big volume 24" tyre. Big volume, paper thing side walls, folding bead. I liked my Tioga Comp Xs, very light and super fast rolling. I've run both Diggers and RTs, and I think the Digger is a better allround tyre. I notice little difference in rolling speed and I prefer the larger volume and deeper tread pattern for trials use. I'm going to try and go back to racing ralfs again soon. Just had a look around and for reference: Moto DT 2.2 720g weighed mine worn down at closer to 600g Moto Digger 885g weighed mine worn down closer to 750g Tioga Comp 3 460g Tioga Comp X mine weighed 650g slightly worn KHE 2.2 480g Racing Ralf 2.4 530g acording to swalbe weighed mine about half worn down at 480g

Taps are still plenty possible. I'm fairly rubbish at them, but Matt Burrows tapped my 24 about 47/48 the other day. Thats with riser and stuff. Personally I can get higher with a bunny hop, but if I need to be able to stop on top of the up, i.e. up to gap or up to drop kinda moves then I prefer a tap.

Cant be 100% but I should be about. Date: Sunday the 31st of may. 1 - Tom Booth 2 - Robin 3 - Jardo 4 - Prawn 5 - Steve (od404) 6 - Steve-A

I'd be fairly confident thats what its all about. Most bars are wider than our shoulders, so when holding them your arms are out infront of you and slightly spread. This means to make it comfortable for your wrists handle bars need to sweep towards your shoulders by a few degrees to match the amount of spread from your shoulders. With the bike on two wheels this sweep is most comfortable coming mostly back with a little bit of up. As you bring the bike up on the back wheel the bike is now tilted up and so the bars need to be rolled forwards to find that same comfortable position. When you put the bike on the floor again, this will mean the bars seem to sweep up. So for most trials situations a compromise must be found to make it most comfortable on your wrists. Flatter more back swept bars being more comfortable for moves where the bike is mostly level, and more up swept bars for moves where the bike is mostly on the back wheel. The amount of up sweep/backs weep you need is purely personal preference and will depend on your shoulder width, bar with and what your wrists find most comfy. I should also say that if you are using riser bars rolling them forwards and backwards effectively changes the length and rise of your stem. Rolling them forwards will make it feel like you are running a longer stem, added to the greater upsweep it will feel even more back wheel inclinded, rolling them back will make the stem feel shorter. I personally think its best to just angle the bars so they are comfiest for you, then change the stem to adjust the riding properties of the bike that are often why people roll their bars forward.

I didn't pinch the saddle, like you I had a slammed saddle (probably the same stripped back roady saddle as I have now thats would be mighty uncomfy to pinch!). IIRC I spent a few minutes with the rear wheel up against a wall just standing over the bike, pulling up no the front end and flicking the bars back and forth, getting used to the feeling of throwing and catching. Then I just went out to a field and had a go, rolling pretty damn slowly, just pull back on the bars and flick them round. Its a kinda odd feeling as I found I had lean quite far forward as not to fall of the back as soon as I let go of the bars! Then, kinda like when you learn to manual, every time I was rolling along slow enough I'd just keep trying. After a few days I could catch them fairly easily, just pulling up the front and doing like a mini manual and barspin. Nest stage for me was to go down the skatepark and I got really familiar with feeling of jumping out of a quarter to flat on the deck, and then just gave it a go. Because the quarter to deck threw me quite high but with little forward momentum, I had time to try the spin but when it went wrong most of the time I just put my feet down as I landed. Finally I got round to kinda putting the two together to do bunnyhop barspins, but then by that point I was starting to get out of riding and I never really got those sussed.

I like running 170s on my 24, but them I run a lighter gear than most and like to have the ability to really spin the cranks to get some speed.

Nice. Kinda mixed vid for me, lots of it looked like it just needed to be done on a bmx really. But then other moves were awesome, back hop barspin for example was totally awesome. Dave, learning barspins on a 24 isn't too bad, just go out to a field or something and keep trying. 2/3 years ago I used to have them fairly well on my 609. Doing them as comfortably as the guy in the vid might take some time though!

I'd be tempted to pop along if you guys were gonna meet gloucester way. Should be mapped for 10psi in the next couple of weeks so hopefully wont get too left behind. I know this might be taking the piss slightly, but if you were to push slightly north of Gloucestershire into Worcestershire I know the nice fun roads Its a shame its getting a long way west, but out from Malvern down towards Ross and then from Monmouth down to Chepstow, Worcester to Leominster and all the little B roads winding their way round the Malverns are all awesome stretches of road. Ledbury to Evesham is a ice bit a B road, there's plenty of good roads around here. Example from the meeting place mentioned: Google maps link Its 70 odd miles but an awesome loop.

Nice. Finer street trials than I've ever seen, unbelievable lines. I've watched this vid back to back about 5 times now. I've not done that since trials kings.Awesome music choice too, I don't know what the track is but it works really well. Video isn't how I'd cut it, but its nicely made and serves its purpose well to demonstrate just how amazing those lines are. I'd like to say I'm inspired by that vid, and I'm sure I will be, but nothing I do is ever gonna compare to that. Damn!

Thats fair nuff. The project sounds a good one, I wasn't knocking that. Just the notion of starting a big project like that with out doing your research properly first. Sounds like your going about it the right way Good luck

Good plan. Not such a good plan. Ambition, yes. Enthusiasm, yes. Research and knowing what you're doing before you start a massive project, essential. Tom_ have you much experience of serious car modification? I've only done fairly minor stuff, fitting and tuning my turbo being the biggest step by a long way, but the sort of modification you're considering is really going to require some good fab skills. Its going to need lots of time and money and dedication. to be honest why not just drive a 924 rather than a Rocco with 924 gear? Is after all that work a rear drive rocco really gonna be any better than any other rear drive car you could have bought for the money you'll need to spend on the project? By all means go for it I'd be interested to see how you get on, just make sure you know what you are letting yourself in for.

I like 22:18, but then I used to run 22:19 on a stock. With 170mm cranks I can spin the cranks fast enough to get the speed for pretty much any move I do. And because its a fairly light gear it doesn't hinder my gaps/sidehops. As for tyres I've run various combos on moto Rt and diggers, tioga comp X and maxxis tyres of the years, but for the moment I'm happiest with schwalbe racing ralf on the front and a moto digger on the back. It would be nice to have a rear tyre that folded a little less, and had better puncture protection, but its a price I'm willing to pay for light weight fast rolling high volume tyres.

Got my on the cheap static adapter up and running now, had a bit of a play in bristol yesterday. First impressions are: I love the diffusion, the light response of the focussing screen and the soft focus. I loath the excessive vignetting, how hard it is to film riding when the viewfinders upside down and the wrong way round and how much a single speck of dust shows up! Next port of call is to try moving the focussing screen further from the video camera with slightly longer extension tubes to see if this reduces vignetting. Might need to pick up a macro lens so I can zoom in enough and focus on the screen still. I might also see what I can do about the vignette in post and make sure I turn image stability off in the camera. Edit: A quick test reveals that if I had the focussing screen further from the video camera it would solve numerous issues, so more cheapo ebay macro tubes are in the post!

I think I'm gonna come down and play, not 100% sure, but fairly

Was just a little test to see if my camera could focus on the screen or if i needed a macro lens as well. For this the sandpaper worked absolutely fine. You really need a plano-convex lens in there somewhere to reduce spotting and to vignetting, as most SLR focusing screens have this built in that was always going to be the way to go

Thats what I was using, but you need a grain effect for the image to focus on. So i carefully sanded the one side with wet 1200 grit, I could see the concept was gonna work but the 'grain' was huge. I've ordered a proper focusing screen now so the project can move up a notch.

When I was going to be camera assistant an a low budget feature film I used a movie tube adapter ( one of the professionally made DOF adapters) with a panasonic hvx200 and some awesome cannon 35mm film camera primes (10k each kinda awesome) on a test shoot and the results were stunning. The first shot we set-up we ended up just standing around looking going 'wow' for 10 mins THese DOF adapters can really help give that lovely soft filming look to video. On the down side they are heavy, and you loose quite a bit of light through them. A good couple of stops, which when shooting indoors and stuff can be a right pain. I've been looking into this for a while and I've started building one on the cheap just to play with. I've got some macro tubes of ebay to fit cannon EF lens, I've glued a set-up ring from my cameras 37mm thread onto the back of these, so they mount on the camera,. Next step is to get hold of a SLR cameras focusing screen. I've had a little experiment with a wet 'n' dry'ed clear CD as a screen and its going to work, but the sand paper scratches in the CD were huge.

I'm enjoying using chrome rims again on the Leeson. I ran them a number a years ago but had problems with the consistency of braking. I had the Odyssey pro factor II rims before. Some days it would be great then others its just seemed to lack that defined lock and confidence. I found I needed to spend a lot of time making sure the braking surface was super clean before I could get the brake to work. This time round I'm running yellow Bloxx on the Alienation rims and they are working great. They don't appear to be suffering from dust and fingerprints in the same way that many other pads I tried did. When it comes to riding in the wet, as I'm not going to be riding comps on the 24, I'll just effectively ride brakeless. On a more on-topic note my old Odyssey 24" rims were nigh on indestructable. I had some super hard slams, inc. quad pinches and never dented them. I only trued them once in the 3 years I rode them properly, and they held grinds like Mavic rims. If the new ones are a patch on those then they will be good.

037, you sir have taste I always used to think the ultimate super car was either a Stratos or an F40. Since seeing a Stratos up close I didn't seem to have the presence of the Ferrari or even of a Delta. I've not been up close to a 037, but they are so super rare and just have that great 80s aggressive front and rear ends with the flowing lines over the roof. Kinda like a 328 or something in that respect. To be honest my 'super car' list would be pretty long. Deltas, 037s, Stratos, 60s Alfa GTVs and GT Juniors, most 60s and 80s Ferraris, most Group B homogenated cars. Last years I went to the Bristol Italian Auto Festival on my bike, basically cars line all the back streets of bristol. Lots of Lambos, Ferraris, Alfas, Lancias and Fiats. @00 Ducatis turned up last years too (inc me!) and lots of other Italian bikes. Last years featured marque was Fiat, this year its Lancia! 25th April, if your into cars its a cool thing to go along and see.

Awwww yeah..... Frame weight is about 4.9lbs. Made a few changes to set the bike up how I prefer it and its riding great. Having lots and lots of fun!