monkeyseemonkeydo

Looks good . One big change I found when first learning was stopping having locked brakes so that I was effectively 'rocking' up onto the back wheel. The way to do it is to start in a balanced track stand (or small correction hops or front/rear wheel shifts) and then release the back brake and put a bit of power through the cranks to raise the front wheel and basically drive the rear wheel forwards to bring it beneath your centre of gravity in order to get into the backhop position. By doing it that way you're in full control and using the motion of the wheel to maintain balance. If you just rock up with locked brakes you're locked into judging where you end up by where your weight ends up and also fighting the left/right momentum that will throw you off balance. The timing is critical for releasing the rear brake, inputting some power into the cranks, pulling up with your arms and then finding the balance point and then applying the back brake ready to start hopping as needed. Trying to stay more relaxed also helps as being stiff will make it far harder to maintain balance and also tires you out far faster. Once you're happy with that technique it's only a small step to repeat the 'brake off, crank impulse, brake on' which is required to start forward pedal kicks. I think the important thing there is that you will want to allow the front wheel to drop just a little as a sort of preload so that when you put the pedal kick in the rear wheel is accelerated back underneath you and back beneath your centre of gravity.

Are you comfortable just hopping stationary on the back wheel?

Depends if it's a standard HG cassette or XD. I would hazard a guess you've got a normal cassette so should be fine. XD on the left (newer style introduced by SRAM to allow smaller teeth numbers) and normal HG on the right (what pretty much everything was until they started playing gear wars.

And front probably 100 x 15?

Just thinking in terms of water clearance they would tend to be run the way the front left is on. Granted they aren't symmetric about the centreline but in the wet you'd think they're designed to work one way. In other news:

Front right tyre is on backwards isn't it @Wrayvon?

Yeah that's basically what we managed first time out- I don't see any reason to move from here until the kids leave home and we don't want to deal with stairs anymore!! The extension was something we'd been thinking of doing for a while and we were lucky with timing in a way. The work started just before the first lockdown and the work continued all the way through so that we could actually get it all decorated and finished during lockdown. I think if it had happened any other year it would've taken years to actually finish it (I know what I'm like!). Also having the office was very useful for school work and when Mel was filming Oak Academy lessons.

We bought our first place back in 2010, a 1970s (I think) 3 bed semi detached place and toyed with the the idea of moving for an extra bedroom (two kids plus the requirement for a spare room meant sooner or later we'd like to upsize. In the end we decided to extend above the garage and utility room to give us an extra two bedrooms plus a shower/toilet room. We've effectively now got a 5 bedroom house though the boys are still sharing for now so we have an extra toy room and an office. The extra room is great! What's really good is that we managed to pay for the extension entirely from savings and with overpayments on the main mortgage we should be able to be mortgage free in just over 3 years which will be brilliant. I think when we bought we only looked at 3 or 4 others before finding this one which we were very happy with. We looked at a couple of new builds/more modern places but they were all small with white walls and beige carpets that would've been a nightmare to keep clean! This house just felt right immediately- it felt like a home when we saw it, not just a house if that makes sense.

Parking. Gotta have parking. So many new builds and estates seem to completely ignore the fact that most couples will have two cars (some more) and then if you think about kids then you potentially need 4 spaces to grow in to! We were lucky to find a place that we can fit 7 or 8 cars on at a push (plus a garage for bikes and motorbikes etc. but we'd be screwed if we only had on street parking or one designated bay or whatever.

Orange f**knugget is out. That makes me happy.

Cheers for the replies chaps. I'll give the programme a try using the thermostat but might drop the daytime temperature down so that the boiler is unlikely to fire while we're out at work etc.. Out of interest does anyone get their boiler serviced? We never did with our old one but the new Gloworm has a 10 year warranty but only if you get it serviced annually (£100 a time is about the cost of a boiler after 10 years). From what I've heard servicing doesn't cover much more than taking the cover off and hoovering out the spiders...

Is the alternative a tandem?! Any luck with the Canyon or Polygon?

I know, exciting stuff! So since we bought our house we had an old school combi boiler that just had a timer on the front and wasn't hooked into a thermostat so I just set it to come on for an hour in the morning, a couple of hours in the evening etc. over Winter and could manually stick it on if things got chilly. When we had our extension built our boiler died and it made sense to upgrade so now we have one that obviously can still be programmed but also has a remote thermostat/controller so the question is how do you responsible homeowners set your heating? Do you have it on at certain times of the day only or do you set a certain temperature to keep the house at all the time or what? Interested too hear what people do as I'm sad like that!

Sounds good to me!

Hopefully of use: https://www.tartybikes.co.uk/headset_spares/tartybikes_star_nut/c57p10541.html?pos=1278.4000244140625&search_params=YTo3OntzOjEyOiJjYXRlZ29yeV9pZHMiO2E6MTp7aTowO3M6MjoiNTciO31zOjE2OiJjYXRlZ29yeV9yZWN1cnNlIjtiOjE7czo4OiJrZXl3b3JkcyI7czowOiIiO3M6OToiYnJhbmRfaWRzIjtOO3M6NDoibW9kZSI7czozOiJhbGwiO3M6NDoic29ydCI7czo5OiJwcmljZV9hc2MiO3M6MTA6ImNvdW50cnlfaWQiO3M6MToiMSI7fQ%3D%3D

The boys done good/got lucky rolling the dice!

And you can hardly tell they're wearing anything at all. Not sure if serious...

Someone on PB was saying it might be a different wheel just with a 'dead gear' as he changes wheels for that one shot then switches back to the i9 for the next shot.

Wow, that's a brave choice for them! I can't imagine they do much of a roaring trade if that's all they actually sell!!! Good luck!

I looked at the Stitched 720 when I was looking for a dirt jump bike but was put off by the singlespeedness. I like the ability to change gear both to make it useful for riding to places but also for gearing at spots (3rd for the pump track, 4th for bigger jumps etc.) so I ended up getting a Polygon Trid ZZ. The full build (not what I got mind you) is bloody good value for what is effectively a cheaper Trek Ticket S and may actually be reasonable for you to get hold of as they're based in Indonesia... I'm sure a Canyon would be a wicked little machine but single speed just didn't make sense to me. Edit: Trid https://www.polygonbikes.com/eur/shop/bikes-eur/mountain-eur/trid-zz-2/