Jez

Could be a duff freewheel that ain't disengaging properly? I take it it's a rear freewheel jobby rather than having it on t' front?

Wait about 3 weeks until plenty of ali dust from your rim has accumulated. 'course your brake will be poo then. Seriously, find any loose/wobbly bits and pieces in and around the arms and tighten up/grease/use cable ties creatively to get rid of it all, should then be pretty silent. Not sure why you want it like that though. My heatsinks always seem to be at their best when they're obnoxiously loud. EDIT: oh and incidentally, tightening up the canti bolts does NOT make your brake any better. It eliminates any play, granted, but a little play is actually BETTER for the brake. One of the reasons that maggies are so good is that there is a bit of play in the pad assembly, which means that it always hits the rim square, even if the brake is just slightly misaligned. Same goes for Vs; allow a small amount of play and the pads will always be square onto the rim when most of the power is applied (as long as your pads aren't MILES out of line).

Cheapest way to improve a crap V brake is to nick some of your Dad's best degreaser (assuming he drives...) and use it on yer rims (rinse 'em with the hosepipe afterwards). Then get out the allen keys and be really anal about how well the pads are lined up with the rim - they need to be hitting perfectly square-on, not at an angle. I.e. all of the brake pad surface needs to be hitting the rim at the same time. Then when you have some cash spare, buy a coupla sets o' Heatsink red pads and a bottle of muc-off for it and you're laughing. One other thing you might want to check is how much flex there is in the frame/canti bosses. If you can *easily* see the frame/bosses flexing when you pull the brake, it's time to think about getting a brake booster. And like someone else said, if the brake feels spongey at the lever - i.e. a sort of 'tapered' feel, rather than going so far and just stopping (which is how most people like their brakes), then it's more likely to be either pad set up (bad alignment) or flex in the frame/bosses. If the brake lever stops solidly when the pad hits the rim, then it's more likely that your rim & pads need either a ) a degrease or b ) a new (better) set of pads. The other options are for your rim: grinding and tar; but you can only grind a rim so many times before it's useless, and tar is frowned upon around these parts - you get no modulation, it's just on/off with nowt in between.

Save up for Tricks & Stunts, it's worth it. And there's loads of 'how to' sites knocking around. Just surf around the net looking for 'Biketrials' and you should happen across loads of them. A word of warning: this stuff takes practice. Like, years of. So don't expect to be gapping miles within a week.

...and this is me pulling out. I only just finished work so there ain't no way I'm gonna have my ass out of bed at a reasonable time tomorrow. But you may get lucky if it's too hot to sleep tonight/tomorrow

Internal hub gears...on the front, anyone? Or am I getting the wrong end of the stick here? Personally I can't really see the point. Someone might do it, but they'd be doing it for the sake of it rather than for some particular advantage (which I can't see). As MBUK once said about triple-link rear sus: Why? What's the point? How many Meccano sets will it take?

I've weasled out of the BBC job. So I'll be out Saturday. Having said that I'll probably do my usual thing and be well late and miss everyone, then spend an hour riding around brum trying to find everyone, then decide I can't be arsed and trial my way to a band practice... I s'pose it all depends what time my lazy ass gets out of bed in t' morning.

Maybemaybemaybe...I may be working hard at babysitting the BBC big band's sound engineer (hah). If I'm not, I'll be there

You'll start moaning too when you get fed up of breaking hoses and having to helicoil your frame's ass every few years. I think everyone who's been doing this long enough on a budget (and is lazy enough) grows out of maguras.

Most of the V mount mods are low-end/beginner stuff (although that doesn't necesarily mean that they're shit). But I don't like the idea of 4 bolt mounts either. Steel bolt going into a short ali thread? Asking for trouble. Gimme a steel canti stud with a big ass longer (and thicker) bolt though it any day. It won't flex as much and I've never EVER heard of someone stripping the thread in a canti stud. 4 bolts, however... I debated the heatsink adaptor thing when I was looking at Stock stuff, but for the above reasons went with standard canti mounts. Having said that, I'm sure there's loads of people on here who use said adaptors with no problems whatsoever. The problem ain't with the adaptors, it's with the entire 4-bolt mount design.

Tried both of the above suggestions to no avail. I mean, I can get it to spring back quicker by cranking the rear spring tension, but it feels WAY to hard to pull then (way harder than it should be anyway), so something's wrong somewhere along the line, and the cable is pretty new so I doubt it's that. I cleaned it out and whacked some grease down it anyway. Wondering if it's noodle related? I get the feeling from looking at it that I may have the rear noodle on t' front and vice versa (am I right in thinking that the rear is supposed to be a slightly different angle to the front? which is which?) Years ago I knew all this stuff :\

Funnily enough, I believe that 2x2" timber is actually 48mm x 48mm these days (we have a workshop at work)...so finding a piece should be a piece of piss...

Working this sat & sun. Weekend after?

I think it depends what year the TA26 is. Mine looks a bit older and I couldn't run a Ronnie + Avid SD7 on it, so I swapped said Ronnie for a Sun Rhyno Lite, which fits fine. I could *just* fit a HS33 with black pads and old Evo mounts on it when I had the Ronnie, but it was suspect and very difficult to line up (resulted in uneven wear on said pads). I'd reccomend going with something a little thinner to give you room for adjustment.

Just muc-off'd my rear SD7. I think I just deafened everyone within a 10 mile radius. On a similar subject (threadjack alert): anyone know how to get the lever to spring back quicker on a V? My front one's fine, but the rear (with the same spring tension at the cantis) seems to take forever. Almost as long as a maggy...

^- agreed with all of that except the hold, but I'm pretty sure that's down to the amount of crap that's built up on my pads, they held like a...something that holds well when I first put 'em on. (Heatsink reds, btw)

Possible problem you may have is letting the front brake off before the back wheel touches down. If you let the front brake off as a means of dropping the back, it robs you of your momentum. Take it off *just* before the back wheel touches the floor and you should be fine. And like someone said, move your weight back and pull on the bars a bit as your back wheel touches down.

The Wellgo V12s are good except for one thing: the outer rear bit (hard to describe) where the pins are will break. There's no support underneath it; one of mine snapped off after a couple of weeks. Having said that, I've barely noticed the difference, the rest of the pedal supports your foot well enough. Although I do ride in steel toecapped boots at the mo so my boot is probably doing most of the supporting...

I've never had a brake cable totally snap on me while riding (i.e. instantaneously). Usually they go a few strands at a time, which you start notice in the feel of the brake (starts feeling ridiculously spongey), so you can usually catch it before it gets bad. Having said that I've only ever snapped 2 brake cables in however many years I've been riding. One through my own idiocy when I fitted it in the first place, and the second because it was cheap nasty crap. Avid SD7 front calipers (mounted on t' rear) + sink reds are a good budget option IMO. Bin the pads that come with the SD7s though. Maybe useful as a toothpick.

That still won't stop brake boss flex or the stop the seatstay 'twisting'. I've got SD7's all round with heatsink reds (apparently identical to the whites) in heatsink backings with a Brand X carbon booster on the back. The booster is crap to be honest, get something metal instead. The only problem with my set up is that I find I need to clean the pads every so often to scrape off/muc-off all the ali dust that's built up on the pads. After a good muc-off they're forking AWESOME. And obnoxiously loud. Oh and the SD7 levers ate my cheapass brake cable (snapped the cable at the nipple), so whatever cable you get, make sure it's good. And don't buy the rear SD7 canti, buy the front one. The rear cantis flex a lot, but the front one feels solid as hell (I did a post on this a while back).

Argh, I'm gonna have to get out of bed on a saturday when the clock still reads 'AM'. Damn you all.

I usually have mine just tight enough so that it doesn't come off, and no tighter. Otherwise when you bash something and all the strain goes onto your chain, eventually your freewheel will feel the pain. Of course if you're a UCI boy then I don't suppose it matters...

count me in. late probably.

Just out of interest, is this one of those things that feels easiest around one particular height? You know how there are moves which feel silly on small stuff because you ain't got the time to really pull the full move out, and of course it's usually harder on huge stuff, but there's that middle ground where it's easiest? I'm asking because I'm only trying small stuff at the mo and I'm wondering if it'll help to just bit the bullet and go straight for kinda mediumy stuff.

It's helluva weird feeling going from short to long. My Base has 165 (I think, could even be 160, I forget), and my 2.zero has either 170 or 175, and the difference (despite it only being 10-20mm) is huge. Feels kinda like you're riding a bent/f**ked taper crank or pedal. I think I prefer the longer ones due to the fact that the power goes down a lot quicker - it feels like I can approach stuff slower and more controlled rather than blasting at it for ups (which is where I reckon this makes all the difference). Having said that, I hear people going on about how higher gearing makes you gap better (which makes sense), so going longer might have a negative effect in that area. Ride a bike with short and a bike with long if you can, see which you prefer... I think for me it's longs for the quick snappy acceleration. I'm a snappy, flicky guy...