psycholist

If your frame doesn't have mounts for a bashguard there is still the option of making a custom guard with aluminium grip plate and a few jubilee clips... Trials frames are designed to take the odd knock on the downtube anyway, so unless you routinely hit the downtube or want to keep your frame pristine you're pretty unlikely to break the frame doing this...

I had a disk that behaved like that but the reason for it was that it was leaking really slowly from the pistons onto the brake pads. On a mechanical disk I'd pull the pads out, give the caliper a good clean (Make sure that the oil or grease on the caliper mechanism isn't seeping out), clean the disk with IPA (or loads of soap and water), sand the pads clean and reassemble. If it happens again have a look for fresh contamination... Does your cycle home involve oily puddles? I've seen it happen occasionally on XC bikes where forestry machinery contaminates the puddles on trails with oil, but it's a very long shot...

Just fit the freewheel with the holes for the extractor on the outside - it'll still freewheel the wrong way if it's screwed onto a RH crank run on the left of the bike.

What happened Dane Hemming? He was a regular back when MBUK was worth reading... He showed up in Dirt on a skinny ass steel framed XC bike... If my memory serves, he's the one that does the nasty over the bars SPD crash into a ditch...

Dirt is still the epitome of MTBing - it's all about having a laugh riding bikes with your friends - the best feel good MTB film ever... The extras on the Manifesto DVD are brilliant too - pretty much every appearance Ryan Leech has made on film since he started riding bikes ...

He was also about the only person doing jumps that still qualify as 'big' on the Dirt video... Was it just me or did Getta Grip suck compared to Dirt and Chainspotting though (Jez Avery's bits were about the only good parts of that video IIRC)...

Loctiting won't help the pedal stay in at all. If you take a pedal off a bike that's got a lot of miles on it you'll see that the pedal axle has chewed it's way into the crank over time. This is because the thread direction causes the pedal to tighten as it's used (Due to a phenomenon known as thread precession). The forces involved in precession in pedals are much higher than loctite can resist. Machining a 45 degree taper after the thread on the pedal and a matching taper on the crank will potentially allow you to run a RH crank on the left. Of course the threading direction for a freewheel and the freewheeling direction will be wrong, and loctite definitely won't hold a freewheel with reversed pawls onto a crank...

If you can find Tandem Cranks that take a 22T chainring and a BMX LHD hub you might be able to make something with stock parts on a modstock frame or a mod. Running a RH crank on the left will leave the pedal working loose on you all the time (Wrong thread direction). Presumably you're happy enough with the LHD freewheel you have on the BMX to trust it for trials? Finding cranks with a LH thread for a freewheel on the left crank may be possible if you want to try that. If you can get a LH thread crank you could run a fixed ECHO hub flipped over with the built in tensioner and you're sorted - big if on getting the cranks though...

If the lazy piston is the one furthest from the lever there may be nothing you can do to sort it out. The easiest thing to do is accept that piston is slower and set the brake up so the piston nearest the lever has its pad near the rim, while the lazy one is set further away from the rim, forcing it to move further to reach the rim, giving it a higher spring tension to make it retract after you let go of the lever. It's what I did with my brake and it's behaved perfectly since.

It's awesome is what it is ... Look up The KLF on Wikipedia for more weirdness... Here's another classic - possibly the best animated music video ever made :

This is the only tune you'll ever need: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gzkllCIyww - If you haven't heard it before then you probably weren't around in 1991 when it came out... I'm just hoping this matching music taste to activity doesn't descend into a version of the letters magazines like Metal Hammer get/got along the lines of: "I listen to X, Y and Z. What clothes should I wear?"... Jamie Hibbard from MBUK used to get the job of answering these IIRC ... I listen to a few of the mixes The Scientist puts up here for download while riding too - they're brilliant because they run with a continuous beat for 30 or 40 mins subtly changing all the time, so I don't get bored and don't stop waiting for the next tune... Some classical music is brilliant to ride to, but I'll have to find out how to normalise them to make the quiet bits louder as they get lost when you listen to them at a volume suitable for most music made now, especially with background noise like traffic to contend with.

I've had a quite a few FSA pigs on XC bikes and after about two years something in the bearing races seems to deform and the play can't be adjusted out of them. The one I used in a trials bike lasted longer than that, so if that's the money you feel like spending it seems a good investment. The Echo headset in my current bike creaks when I load up the front wheel, but I haven't pulled it apart and greased it in a while.

Seconded - Easily the best made freewheel out there .

First link on google when you type spocalc.xls into the Google search: http://www.sheldonbrown.com/rinard/spocalc.htm The ERD is Effective Rim Diameter. This is the diameter of the rim as far as the spoke length is concerned. It's measured by getting two long spokes, cutting the bends off them to take them to a known length and fitting spoke nipples to the threaded ends (Superglue them in position to stop them unwinding) so the end of the spoke is flush with the back of the spoke nipple (The ideal location for the spoke nipple relative to the spoke in a wheel with perfect spoke length). Stick the spokes through spoke holes directly opposite each other in the rim and measure how much overlap there is where the two spokes meet. The ERD is equal to [spoke length 1] + [spoke length 2] - [overlap between spokes]. It's a good plan to measure this for several different pairs of spoke holes in the rim and average the results as not all rims are perfectly round.

If no air bubble got into the brake when it leaked (If the lever didn't feel too spongy before the extra fluid leaked out), just take the reservoir cap off, pour more brake fluid in and pump the lever, making sure the lever reservoir is at the highest point in the brake. Pulling the lever and letting it go suddenly tends to drag bubbles through the top of the system more quickly - lever the pads as far apart as possible to drive more fluid towards the lever. Bubbles should appear in the reservoir for a while, then stop appearing, hopefully coinciding with the brake no longer feeling spongy. If the lever is still spongy after trying this you'll have to do a full bleed. Instructions for this are around the place - the basic rules are: 1. Bleed from the lowest point in the system to the highest point. 2. Make sure you don't pump more air in at the low point when you attach/remove the syringe. 3. When replacing the reservoir cover make sure you don't trap any air bubbles at the lever by rolling the diaphragm onto the top of the reservoir, displacing brake fluid, rather than putting it in flat.

There's a wide range of hardnesses available for the plastics listed there. If you have some brake pads you like, then getting them hardness tested and buying polyurathane in the same hardness would be a plan (If there's a university near you try the materials department). Here's a rough guide to the Shore hardness scale: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Durometer - it's not absolute, but is a convenient way to compare plastics/rubbers. 90A sounds about right for brake pads. If you just want something that works for cheap I find these to be very good (Though they get eaten quite quickly on very harsh grinds): http://superstar.tibolts.co.uk/product_inf...;products_id=88 or http://superstar.tibolts.co.uk/product_inf...;products_id=39 The reds have slightly more bite I think, but there's very little to pick between them, so I'm using greens for colour coordination reasons ...

The only thing that might suggest this isn't definitely stolen is the preference for pick up rather than courier. This means he's willing to give out his address so you can come around a kick the living piss out of him ...

I've been using Citroen LHM in my mineral oil brakes for years. It even smells very like the magura stuff, just isn't as scary a colour. Next time the brake needs bleeding I'm going to use water though - water feels a lot better in HS33's, I'm just too lazy to bleed the brake while it's still working perfectly...

Google for a program called spocalc.xls to calculate the spoke length you need - it may not have the specific rim/hub you want, but you can measure the ERD and the hub and put them into the program manually.

My guess is that it'll suffer from the same problem as every other planetary gear system for bikes I've tried and have loads of backlash, so pickup will be rubbish. Regardless of whether it's strong enough it'll feel like going back to a 16 click Shimano hub after using a Chris King... I just hope I'm wrong on this though, it would be a very cool option...

I wouldn't use a good chain to do it with, but it should work. On a trials bike the sprocket will be a lot tighter than a track bike thanks to the smaller diameter wheels and lower gear ratio, but this looks like a safer option (From a user injury point of view) anyway, just sit on the bike and roll it forwards .

I recommend trying to improve the technique you use to get the tyres off first: The centre of the rim has a smaller diameter than the rim has just inside the braking surfaces where the tyre beads sit while the tyre is inflated. Let the air out of the tyre and lift it away from the rim at the valve (The only spot in the rim where the tyre bead can't be moved to the centre of the rim (The valve is in the way...) and while keeping it under tension at the valve, push the tyre bead from one side of the rim towards the centre of the rim. You should be able to feel more and more slack developing in the section of tyre you're holding by the valve until the tyre bead can be lifted right off the rim. I don't need tyre levers for most road tyres using this technique and I've got tyres off with my bare hands that the owners of the bike keep telling me they need steel tyre levers to remove... Also it's funny to see people's shock when they tyre they've been wrestling with tyre levers for 10 minutes comes off effortlessly after 30 seconds with this method. To refit the tyre just reverse the procedure so the last bit of tyre bead to pop onto the rim is at the valve...

If his head was more than 1.5 feet above the higher of the rocks it would have fallen 6 feet before hitting anything...

Very nice - does the chain run quietly on that roller? Only modification I'd make is to slap a bit of rubber between the derailleur and the frame and cable tie them together to stop the derailleur knocking the frame on landings.

Landed on my forehead/face on to concrete from back wheeling off a 2 and a bit foot drop when my freehub jammed, preventing me from kicking forwards off the wall. Put a flat spot along the front edge of the helmet, got away with a black eye, no headache even . It would have been a very bloody injury at the very least and more likely a concussion without the helmet taking the shock of the impact.