forteh

Why not have a look at what cannondale have done with their latest iteration of lefty? The caliper is mounted on a sub-bracket that has a quick release on it, undo QR, caliper falls off and is relocated on pegs.

Alter rock?

Not to mention a cylinder, head and carburettor I wonder how different it is riding with a clutch on an electric motor compared to internal combustion?

Heretic!

£4700? You're only a few hundred quid off a hope hb160!

This is mental....

Tensioner? What's that all about then?

Had another play and got it to 3x, spokes are now 190 and 188 but will obviously give a stiffer wheel Reckon I'll get away with this level of spoke/flange interface at the hub? Obviously I will be prebending the outside spokes inwards as I lace it.

Pedal car weight will be in the region of 20kg + driver, problem with radial lacing is that we need to be able to drive and brake with the wheels as well I did fiddle around with the angles to try to get 3x but it does go a but squiffy and the spoke lengths seemed to go off on one! I'll have another hack around with it on the model when I have a fresher head (not 1am) and see if I can't balance them up a little. The car should be used on fairly smooth tracks (possibly some road use as well) so wheel strength isn't of utmost importance (with regards to bashing), as long as they can stay straight and not noodle all the time then jobs a good un. @Mark W, thanks for the heads up, I could probably get by with 175 and 177; I've used the same set of spokes on the triton for the last 8 years, despite changing rims and hubs - fiddle with the lacing . We do have a couple of local bike shops on board who would be preferential (as they'll do them for trade price) but push comes to shove we've still got money in the kitty

Good info, I've now accurately measured and modelled both rim and hub so I can play more with the lacing. The spoke holes are offset from the rim CL by 1.7mm ±0.1mm, will play with putting them in the wrong hole (fnaarrr!) and see what happens. I'll see how laying it up on your sketch works out and fiddle with lengths accordingly, the beauty of having it fully modelled is I can play around with the position of the first 4 spokes and instantly pattern them around the rim to see how it looks Would have been sooo much easier if tarty had 4 of the 32h monty rims in stock instead of 3 edit: Something like this, red spokes are 178mm, green spokes are 176mm; both lengths are within 1.2mm of the spoke bed which is plenty of scope to take up with nipples. Not sure how I've ended up with 2x but setting it as 3x really seemed to screw things up, as it is the spokes are evenly spaced and pulling from the correct sides of the flanges so should be much easier to tension! Now where can I get 178 and 176 (64 of each) from?

The 2.0 tdci smax is a peugot motor Apparantly the only real weak point of the smax is the rear trailing arm bushes take a fair bit of hammer, mine were replaced at around 150k. I use mine as a family bus/load wagon and it just works, may need some front suspension bushes and top mounts looking at in the next couple of years but it's a 12 year old car that has done almost 170k now. FWIW it flew through the mot with the only advisory being a repeat of the previous year (rear pads getting low and I've been too lazy to change them).

Ford smax will give you all the space you need, 6 foot completely flat load bed, 7 seats if you want to road trip, comfortable and reliable by all accounts. Perhaps not as frugal on fuel as the mondeo, I get around 53mpg at 70 on cruise control on the motorway, drop down to 60 and it'll get up to around 55-57mpg.

So I've got the wheel modelled in 3D now, based on completely arbitrary rim and hub dimensions I can build it with equal length spokes on the disk side, valve hole is at 12 oclock. The non disk side then needs alternating spoke lengths 7mm longer and 5mm shorter respectively, this puts all of the spoke thread ends within 0.5mm of the rim bed, empty nipple holes inbetween each group of two spokes. It's not ideal because I currently don't have directly opposing spokes so relying more on the rim strength than the build as it won't be possible to tension it quite as high. Only a case of rejigging the assembly model and tweaking the lengths

Long nipples is a good idea! I've modelled the wheel in solidworks, I can play around with spoke lacing and lengths to see what I can get away with and then try to make it work from there. Looking at building it as a dishless wheel (it's for a pedal car so offset isn't an issue) which should help.

36 to 48 is harder isn't it due to the lack of a common demoninator? 32 to 48 will be missing 16 spokes from the rim with 32 spokes fitted, that will give equidistant spacing of the gaps around the rim (fit two miss one). 36 to 48 will be missing 12 spokes which doesn't play nicely with 32 no matter how you shoehorn it I've tried some combination of 32/36 before and that was all over the shop, I think trial and error is the key phrase here!

20" rim onto a mountainbike hub, building 4 wheels for a pedal race car but unfortunately finding 4 rims with 32 holes was virtually impossible! It might be a case of sit down in a local bike shop, lace one set of spokes up and see what lengths the others come out at. Might make them dishless wheels which will simplify things with not having to have offset spoke lengths side to side.

I need to lace some 32 hole hubs up to 48 hole rims. Obviously every third spoke is missed out but should spoke lengths be the same as a conventional 32 hole rim build? I'm guessing that there will be enough thread spare on the nipple to pull it up but has anyone got experience of lacing wheels like this?

Wheelbase is 1080 I think, nominal bike lengths are about 2-300mm longer these days I think; the reach measurement is comical though, about 330mm Back when the 5.5 was designed (2003-4ish?) it was considered a very focussed geometry, very fast but you have to really be on it to not get unstable; short wheelbase, high BB and 70° head angle. I'm running mine with 160mm forks (as opposed to the 140mm max recommended) and offset bushing on both ends of the rear shock, this has slackened the head angle to 65.5° which is considered moderately steep these days. Personally I have no issues with it stability wise but then the bars are high and the weight is back, with seat at full height (for my stumpy 29" legs) the grips are level with the saddle. I can't compare it to modern geometry but I certainly don't feel uncomfortable chucking it down a hill

Or the Ross's Rides selling group on farcebook has some good deals on there. If you're happy with 26" then some great bargains can be had but be aware that they're likely to be older frames so potentially a bit tatty/hammered. Edit: https://m.pinkbike.com/buysell/2480974/ There you go

I picked up my 2008 intense 5.5 from pinkbike for 260 quid and quite frankly it's awesome. Short, playful and very efficient. For reference it's a small and I'm 5'7" ish

Did you just assume the gender of your impact driver? Have used milwaukee stuff before and it's stonking kit

But that's a GHZ

Isn't there a roaring trade just jumping across the border to the states? Might make the holiday slightly more than 5 months though...

In a similar not similar vein, I'm designing and building a pedal powered race car for a local community cycle project Going to have to break out the tig again

Can't offer any advice on suitable laptops but I set up my photographer mother in law with a new machine (windows desktop) with a 250gb SSD and a 2tb HDD which was sufficient for her needs at the time. I set her up with both drives as locations in lightroom, imported and edited on the SSD then moved the location to the HDD once the job was finished. Unfortunately she got all in a fluster because she read somewhere on the internet that she needed to make backups (ignoring the external drives she was already backing up to) and randomly made multiple duplicate copies of everything. Suddenly realised that she was out of space and found a local computer expert to put some more drives in. Cue a 4.5ghz machine running windows on an SSD trying to edit data saved on stupendously slow, 4tb 5400rpm low power drives and she consequently starts complaining that the machine is slow broken.... Cleared the machine out, deleted over 6tb of duplicate files and relinked the whole lightroom catalogue to the right files. Ripped the two drives out of the box, got her a 2 bay synology NAS drive and set that to mirror the data across both drives. She is now back to the original machine design of working on the SSD and dumping the files to the NAS for storage. When the NAS drives are full she takes them out, puts them into storage and plugs a new pair in, that way she has duplicates and can go back to old catalogues by putting the drives back in. I reckon a 250gb SSD will fine when used in conjunction with the NAS, the beauty of the system is you can set up a VPN to the NAS so you can remotely access and work on your files as long as your network is good enough.