psycholist

Also unless the stuff you do is so big it attracts attention for its size alone, then you'll need to attract attention some other way, either with well polished video editing, smooth, creative lines, unusual locations, distinctive riding style or just out and out fun... Have a look at the tread from a while ago where people pick their favourite trials videos and see what people really remember to get an idea what I mean. The other thing is if you're one of the few riders in your area you may not need to be very good on an international or even national scale for a local business to get some benefit from sponsoring you. In this case you'll really have to make a case for how you can benefit them. You can be an amazing rider, but all that work can be ruined, especially if you're starting out, by one or two careless comments when you're having a bad day.

Packaging a freewheel with similar internals to a King would be pretty difficult - the freewheel would probably have to be made wider and a lot more bearings would be needed to support the moving parts. The cylindrical layout of the mechanism suits the shape of a hub much better than the shape of a freewheel. It would cost something ridiculous too (All the same expensive and precise machining as the hub needs) and produce a freewheel that has the same skipping behaviour as a King hub but with a shorter distance from the outer seals to the critical drive rings, requiring more maintenance than a hub to keep it skip free. Also with an 18:15 gear for example a 72 click King hub at the rear is the same as a 86.4 click freewheel, so pickup is marginally quicker for a hub with the same number of clicks as a freewheel. On an 18:12 mod it's a lot quicker, needing a 108 click freewheel to match a 72 click hub. It's slightly academic really though given the number of people happy with 48 click Hope hubs. I don't know what warranty White Brothers offer on ENO's, but that's mostly because I've never heard of anyone trying to collect on the warranty. The only ones I've heard about failing are so chronically maladjusted and abused that it's already a miracle they've lasted so long to begin with. Also the spares are cheap enough that warranty support isn't a prerequisite to being able to afford to fix them and replacing them outright is an option that won't bankrupt you too. I've had a grand total of no skips from my freewheel since I bought it and have given it negligible maintenance. With King hubs they have to be pulled apart every so often just to keep them running reliably. I'd rather pay less and do less maintenance work to be honest. Regarding cranks - The first set of Middleburn cranks I bought outlasted a few frames and many square taper BB axles and are still going years later after I sold them on. The next set of ISIS Middleburns I got I used for 2 years and sold on with the bike at the start of 2008. For comparison since I went to FFW I'm on my 4th RH crank (One was my fault - unevenly ground the bashguard down, misaligning the freewheel, the others were pedal threads pulling out) since Jan 2008. The cost in replacement cranks is still not enough to justify going to a King hub (And is not the fault of the freewheel anyway but something to keep in mind), but all the failures were safe in that they could have happened in the middle of a big power move and still not affected power delivery enough to cause an accident the way the loss of a full pedal stroke when a King skips would be.

I think to a degree we're splitting hairs on this subject though. King hubs are made extremely well and for the most part work extremely well too. The sealing is good enough to stop big lumps of grit getting in, but given they skip every so often it indicates that enough dirt must be getting in to cause this. The likelihood of a skip being serious enough to leave you eating pavement when the skip does happen are higher with the Chris King compared to a pawl based freewheel and that's my biggest issue rather than the cost. I think freewheels give performance at least as good as Chris King hubs but because they cost so much less they make the decision to buy a Chris King seem wasteful (There may be weight saving reasons if the lightest build possible is your aim, but it's pretty close on that front too AFAIK). I've been running an ENO on my bike since the start of 2008. In that time I had one look inside after a couple of months to confirm it was still pristine and have done nothing more in terms of minding or maintenance - I'm usually out 3 or 4 times a week riding it too and I'm anything but light. If as Tarty Adam has alluded to in a different thread here, Middleburn are now making freewheel compatible cranks (The main issues with running front freewheels is that all the cranks available are junk compared to Middleburn cranks, poor thread reliability rather than snapping cranks though, so very little potential for nasty injuries, just inconvenience and extra cost) there is no reason left to pay out for a Chris King if strength and reliability in the overall drivetrain are your priorities.

From what I've read on the Chris King website they don't seal their hubs particularly well as good seals mean more drag. For trials use really good levels of sealing are less of an issue than for XC, but the consequences of dirt in the mechanism are far more severe. A freewheel with dirt in it will sound pretty horrible long before the dirt is at enough of a level to cause a skip, so its inherently a safer choice (ENO freewheels are anyway, I can't comment on the build quality of others). It also appears that current model Chris Kings are a lot weaker than they were 10 years ago, so old hubs are outlasting new ones. The fact King don't warranty their hubs for trials use is the final nail in the coffin though.

Non marking rubber would probably be more useful as that would allow for more stealth in street sessions. I find that my tyres clean the dirt off some surfaces rather than leaving black marks though - much like the ad campaigns I've seen every so often where a section of a footpath is power hosed through a stencil to leave a message/image. They can't really be done for graffiti because they cleaned an area rather than dirtying it...

Have a look at what Hans Rey gets up to. He goes to a lot of trouble to compile a list of all the stuff he's been in every year and then sends all the cuttings and articles to his sponsors to show how much publicity he's generating for them. The thing to remember in getting sponsorship is to ask what you can do for the sponsor - if you can answer this correctly and well, then see what a sponsor can do for you.

The Chris King hub's strength in engagement is also it's weakness. When it's clean and working correctly it distributes the load over all 72 teeth in the drive rings and the helical section on the floating drive ring forces the teeth together more the harder you push on the pedals, so it's engagement is amazingly strong. However one half decent sized bit of grit between the drive rings means none of the teeth can engage correctly, with only a few teeth transferring any drive (Which will be a higher load then they're designed for, leading to damaged drive rings which may skip even after cleaning) and no certainty of the drive engaging at all, leading to very nasty accidents. A freewheel by comparison will sound like complete crap if there's enough dirt in it to stop the pawls engaging, so you can't say you didn't get warning. Also when a freewheel skips it will jump to the next slot in the ratchet ring rather than spinning for the full crank push. The high EP freewheels don't use smaller teeth in the ratchet ring either, they use independent sets of pawls, two sets of 3 in the case of an ENO freewheel (Which in terms of the metals used, the manufacturing precision, the durability and the availability of spares is justifiably the best freewheel on the market in my opinion), so the ratchet ring has 36 big teeth (10 deg per tooth), every second ratchet pawl is long, so one set of pawls engages at 0 deg while the second engages at 5 deg, so things would have to go seriously wrong before a freewheel of this design slips as one set of pawls skipping would require 3 different engagements to all fail at the same time and even if they do the three offset pawls are waiting 5 deg of turn later to engage in fresh ratchet ring slots (Each pawl is 60 degrees offset, so the same ratchet ring slot that skipped on the first set of pawls will not be loaded by the second set in picking up after the skip). Given it can't be assumed that parts are always perfectly clean and in perfect adjustment, pawl based drive setups win. In rear hubs where the drive ring is a smaller diameter and often made from thinner steel than on a freewheel getting a lot of clicks is a little more hit and miss compared to freewheels, so it's a tougher decision if you want a rear freewheel, but I'd pick the Hope trials hub over a Chris King if I was speccing a rear freewheel bike and I don't think Hope hubs are desperately well engineered.

Is the tensioner or derailleur hanger bent? Is there a twisted link in the chain? Has the chainline changed between the old and new rear sprockets?

What's the bolt stuck in? If it's properly seized you might be out of luck, but if you haven't tried heating whatever the bolt's stuck in that might help. If you're killing drill bits the chances are the bolt is hardened or else you're using Halfords drill bits, which are cheap but won't make much progress through steel...

I'm giving serious thought to going for a dual disk stock frame next time I go bike building. I used to run dual Maguras for years, but disks (Especially 203 rotors) seem to have caught up on the bite and hold stakes while being better on modulation... A rear disk that locks like a mo-fo while giving enough modulation to allow manuals and not being deafening when dragged is all I need - not sure I can top the Louise on the front, but maybe not grabby enough for the back, so possibly a Hope... I've seen a few comments about 26" rear wheels being too flexy under torque from the hub to give the same feeling of brake hold that a rim brake gives, but combined with a squidgy tyre I'm not sure I could even pick this up and it doesn't seem to matter at the front (And fork flex is huge there)... The complete lack of routine maintenance or adjustment for pad wear is also a big plus with hydraulic disks...

Same cranks and a spline mounted ENO freewheel would be the best cranks ever invented...

Look for EZ-out bolt extractors - on an aluminium bolt it should be a little easier to drill the hole into the end of the bolt for the extractor. failing that, drill a small hole into the bolt and hammer an allen key into it...

Want...

If Middleburns came with front freewheel compatibility I'm pretty sure nobody would sell anything else anywhere near that price range. Lifetime warranty on Middleburns including competition trials use...

Try finding somewhere new to go riding - usually you get bored because once you've worked out one way to get up a given obstacle you'll probably do it the same way every time. Try learning brakeless sidehops and backwards wheelies (They're amusing me at the moment, mostly because I can't really do them, but feel like I'm getting close )...

What crank length feels comfortable is more a function of the length of your legs than whether the bike is a mod or stock - BB heights are pretty similar in both, so it's not like the pedals are hitting the ground with long cranks. At my 5' 11" ish height 170-175mm cranks work well for XC and trials, if you're a lot shorter than that, shorter cranks are the way to go. Even though Middleburns are the best cranks ever made for trials (Based on the sheer number of front freewheel cranks I've chewed the threads out of in the past 1.5 years after using the same middleburns for 2 years before that), they're not compatible with a front freewheel, so building a mod using them will end up with you either having to run an 18T freewheel on the back (And a 27T front sprocket to get the same gear as a 18:12 on a reasonably priced hub or if you can get a 16T freewheel you can use a 24T front chainring, but unless there's a 16T ENO I'm not sure what else to trust for trials) or paying for a Chris King BMX rear hub.

My bikes are on the house insurance. Got it from 123.ie - there's a 123.co.uk too. They cover bikes up to €5000 without a specific valuation and above that with a valuation. Bikes under about €500 I think are automatically included. They're insured in the house and while locked in a car as well as while locked outside.

Measure the width of the slot the rim tape goes into in the rim and get tape with as close a width as possible to this.

I thought the whole thread was devoted to answering this question. The lever would feel spongier and need more travel before it bites but you'd get twice the braking power. The results of the poll mostly show that people don't think about their answers before selecting them... Strangely while many people voted in the poll for the brake not being twice as powerful, nobody is defending this view.

Friction is not equal to heat. Friction is a force that always acts against the direction of movement (Friction between surfaces and air friction being two of the most common examples). Since energy cannot be created or destroyed (except in converting mass to energy and back), the kinetic energy that friction takes from a system must be converted to another form of energy, usually heat (Energy taken by friction also gets converted to sound energy as evidenced by squeaky brakes, but heat is a far bigger percentage of this energy). Since brakes start to fade and boil once their temperature passes a certain point and the temperature rise will be proportional to the volume of material the heat is added to, adding a second rotor will also reduce fade (Provided both rotors can lose heat at the same rate as a single rotor).

If both pistons feed the same line that goes to both brakes then you've doubled the piston area and will have the problems attendant with that (More power loads of lever travel and sponginess). If each piston actuates a single brake then there's no power increase as the force you apply to the lever is split between two brakes (And setting both brakes to bite at the same time would be awkward and need a linkage in the lever at the very least), so the lever will feel more wooden but the braking power will be about the same as for a single brake. If you set the brake up with both pistons on one side of the rim and fixed brake blocks on the other side of the rim you'd double the power though...

If you doubled the master cylinder volume by making the diameter bigger you'd be back to the same power as a single Magura as you'd half the pressure in the fluid. If the volume was doubled by increasing the master piston travel you'd have to change the leverage ratio at the lever (To reduce the fluid pressure) to allow a normal sized hand to actuate it, again bringing it back towards to stock setup.

I can't believe this thread is still alive. The comments above for the pressure - force calculations should explain what's going on perfectly. The lever will have to pump a little more fluid before the brake bites (So more lever travel), and the lever will feel a bit spongier thanks to twice as many flexing parts (Between the brake line, pads, pistons and seals) but if the force applied to the lever at bite point is the same a double caliper setup will be twice as powerful as a singe caliper for the same force applied to the same lever. Now to cause more trouble - While opposed piston designs are the most common setup (Done to reduce brake drag and allow the pads to adjust themselves automatically for pad wear without relying on a floating caliper), a 2 pot brake with opposed pistons will be a lot less powerful (Half as powerful assuming each piston acts on the same pad area and the fixed pads are the same as those acted on by the pistons) than a two pot brake with the same diameter pistons where both pistons are on one side and there's a fixed pad on the other. How does this work? On opposed piston brakes while each piston creates a force based on the pressure in the fluid and its area, the force each piston applies is balanced out by the opposing piston. In the case of both pistons on one side of the caliper, each piston exerts the same force, but the forces are in the same direction and are opposed by the fixed pad on the opposite side of the caliper rather than each other, so effectively there's twice the force squeezing the pads into the disk. Have a look at the Magura Gustav (Probably the most powerful brake I've ever used) for an existing design that proves this principle...

I have nothing but sympathy for your ma - not only is she Welsh, but your head is freakin' HUGE!!

I like stuff that's difficult but not dangerous, so while I can do fairly technical things precisely and consistently, you won't find me doing anything big. I'm nothing like as good as the 13 years+ I've spent trialsing should suggest... At the 6 month mark after I took up trials I probably still hadn't found out that it was called trials riding and had been a sport since the late 70's - I just rode my bike over stuff in a local building site with a bit of hopping because it was fun. That's what I recommend: Get out, ride your bike and don't get hung up on how your progress stacks up. It's irrelevant if you're enjoying it... And ignore Tha Goat, he only exists on tha internet. The prospect of him existing in real life would be too damaging to the fabric of society...