Mark W

Carthy's subsequently rolled his bars back after getting some wrist pain, and a lot of the new random stem geos are to counteract it so you can get your bars in an equivalent position without having to deform yourself in the process. To be fair, there's rolling them forwards, there's Carthy bars, then there's Carthy-wannabe bars. Some people went way over the top with it.

Some tourists, a policeman and a dickhead.

Didn't know DFS had got on board with the Tripod system? Seriously though, bike looks cool Continuing your trend of always having nice looking bikes...

In all honesty, just curbs and whatever low level things I could find They're ideal for learning the basics on - I spent a lot of time in random car parks learning pivots, backhops and so on. It's well worth spending time getting the basics dialled in as it'll make progress in the future easier, and will usually mean you develop a bit of a nicer style or way of doing things too.

The neutral grip position on two wheels doesn't really hold true when you're spending most of your time not on two wheels though? That's why comp bikes tend to have weird sweeps simply because the bars feeling comfortable on two wheels is irrelevant. Rolling your bars into different positions will change the feel/ride of your bike, and that's why people typically do it. I believe Carthy initially rolled his that far forwards to try and counteract some bar height, but typically having your bars further forwards will give some positives for being on back wheel or doing front wheel moves. It's not necessarily just the bars causing your different callous placements. When I used brakes I used a single finger on each lever and got no callouses on my palm by my index fingers, and only lighter ones on my middle finger as your hand wrap is different around the bar by not having your index finger there too. When I ride brakeless I get much more even callouses.

Semi-related, does anyone know which "this land" they mean?

Right?

Do need to bring those seat grab tyre tap things back though Ali, been telling you that for time

Those English hops up curbs...

Gusset DoubleSix Pretty much any lockring will do, either steel (strength) or alloy (lightweight).

The problem was caused an issue with manufacturing not design though. The correctly manufactured ones seem to have lasted fine according to the ones we've sold.

I think it was more that they'd invested money in their new frame/fork/stem 1.5" steerer setup, and for whatever reason that run hasn't worked out. They're still carrying on with their parts (we received an order today), it's just the new framekits aren't being made. For what it's worth I've heard of other companies having something similar - lead times for production in Taiwan are super long, and if there's an error in production that can really f**k things up for a company. For the bars, it seems they had a sketchy batch of them. We had loads go out that were solid, then they suddenly started breaking, then went back to being fine. In fairness to Dom he was sound about getting them warrantied.

Flying short haul I've got to witness my bike box getting thrown around by surly EasyJet baggage handlers as we sat on the plane looking out the window at them, and even getting thrown around in the rain (Gatwick) and snow (Edinburgh) they still handled it. The ones that went across the globe to NZ and back looked fine too - if you click here, the cover shot there is my bike box having been to and returned from NZ: https://issuu.com/cleanzine/docs/clean_-_travel Still pristine. If you've got access to bubble wrap make the most, and take a spare roll of duck/gaffer tape with you. Like Ross said, reinforcing the handles works really well too. If you make your box easier to carry, they'll be less likely to hit rage mode and start going into full-on slinging it mode.

Whoever designed that oil tank is probably looking for a new job right now. That's a major f**k up to make. Still weird having Bottas in a Mercedes. I see Lance Stroll kicked his proper F1 career off well by writing off a test day 40mins in, and requiring a wing to be shipped back to the UK to be fixed

He stopped for a bit because he was living in London but his bike was at his old place, but then he moved his bike over and makes sporadic appearances. Whenever I head down to meet Joel it usually involves a speakerphone call to Nick to heckle him into coming out. He's usually too busy doing some heinous looking bodyweight/gymnastics training stuff...

I flew UK to NZ so technically one of the longest you can do. There wasn't a direct flight so there was some f**king around with transfers but the airline handled that. That also included a final 4hr domestic/internal flight with a different company. All of those flights were as part of the overall charge though, but if you're having to chop between different airlines and actually book the different legs separately you would get charged individually I'd assume. Might be worth playing around to see who can fly you to where before having to get your final flight, just to cut down on costs. You'll be needing to declare it as a bike so it's worth seeing what kind of hidden charges there might be beyond that. Your issue with two bikes into one might come into play here too as different airlines will have different restrictions on the overall weight of your luggage, so getting two into one might get close on some once you've padded them up well. Every time I've flown abroad I've used a normal, standard cardboard bike box, and just wrapped my bike up well. It's handy as you can just throw a bunch of other stuff in there too, so you've got ample room. Some of the bespoke bike boxes seem to be pretty limited on space, so although they're easier to move around airports you're more restricted in what you can bring. There are pros and cons of each, but I'd rather deal with two shit trips to/from the airport rather than being a whole week or more without something I really want just because it wouldn't fit in a 'proper' bike bag.

So 2017 is now officially under way

With the lack of reinforcement, the really short mount and it all ending at the end of the chainstay like that I think it wouldn't do a great job at dissipating the stress you're putting through it. It might be work, but most frames I've seen like that haven't last all that long. If you want to go for longevity it might worth sticking with a rim brake.

You have the bottom end of the brake still closed off, and just attach a bleed hose and syringe to the lever. Just flick the lever blade in and out and any air in the lever will go up the bleed hose and into the syringe. We usually just call it a 'top up' or 'top up bleed' or whatever. It's even easier with the TT levers because the bleed port is positioned in a way that it's always the high point, so you don't need to spin the lever around or anything.

Probably because a lot of newer riders don't have the trialsy/tech foundation that a lot of the 'big name' riders have? Same way that you can go on Instagram and see countless videos of people being able to G-turn better than Ali, but then when they're back hopping look like they've never been on a bike before. It seems being able to absolutely pin bunnyhops up to front is the new G-turn too. See videos of people having perfect technique pinning it to front, but as soon as they switch to rear it's carnage. While people like Ben Travis and Ali are still putting out videos I'm not too fussed, but the next generation might be lacking some of that type of riding. That said, we're still nowhere near what it used to be like when guys like Rowan were putting out mega tech long old lines on whatever interesting setups they found. At least those guys seemed to seek out interesting spots and use them in a creative way. The token creativity thing going on with street trials now is less than ideal. Watching videos where people are trying to shoehorn random moves into a 'line', but not really having any idea of how to create a line in a way that it'll be good for a video - not great. Back in my day all this were fields, etc. etc.

So the new cars look pretty cool... Renault's also looks pretty nice. Front end of the Force India is... interesting. Wide tyres are wide:

Don't worry about it dude, your English is really good! You write it better than a lot of native English speakers Your spoken English is good too. It seems like BMX street is almost plateauing in some ways now. A lot of the riders known for doing big moves have said they're trying to cool it down now (e.g. Dan Lacey), and a lot of other riders have switched to just doing different combos or simply just doing the same stuff but either switch, opposite, or switch opposite. That or throwing a freecoaster on, ruining their styles completely and doing some grim looking half cabs out of average looking fakie lines.

How so? It basically means that if your lever is on the bar you can bleed it at a 'normal' angle rather than having to level the lever off. It's always the high point. Correct. You love it.

I don't know if demos will really make as much of a difference in the future - the majority of people will be getting their first interaction with trials through videos now, rather than needing a demo. It also seems like, putting it politely, the quality of demos can be somewhat variable. It's anecdotal as f**k obviously, but I've never had someone speak to me about buying a bike because they've seen a demo, but I've spoken to countless people who've seen videos and wanted to get into it that way (which also includes 13-year-old me). For pushing streety stuff, from personal experience at a few jams/events in the UK they do go some way to raising the bar. At the Street Light Sessions people were sending shit, people were at Section 01 and again at the Phoenix London jam too. Those events also build the community and culture of it too, and compared to BMX those are two majorly lacking aspects of trials in general. Seeing the top guys in the street scene sending it is pretty 'thrilling' too in fairness. I agree that seeing people going full-bore at places like Simple Session (or other events like the Backyard Jams which were always f**king awesome when I went to them) is amazing, but seeing people like Danny casually doing massive stuff and coming up with new lines/moves is still up there too. It's also worth bearing in mind that street trials has only really started blowing up more over the past 10 years or so, whereas BMX has a significant head start on that. I'm not sure trials will ever reach quite the level of progression that BMX has, but you never know. With a lot of progression in BMX street coming down to clunky grind combos as well I think the gap between the two of them is closing a touch at least.