Cycling UK Forum

You’ll get a lot of good advice here and have already. One thing I’d add is to try not to go hard core but rather to ease yourself into things. A MTB isn’t, I think, ideal for commuting but no doubt it can be progressively modified to improve suitability. Similarly clothing changes and you will find...

I have been involved in projects where woodland has been planted for firewood, and at the time it was billed as sustainable and almost carbon neutral. The idea is that you take a piece of low value land with little more than poor grazing on it and plant with fast growing trees (often willow) that i...

We can always copy the French and build lots of nuclear power stations to generate most of our electricity. It would be one way forward and if the right design was chosen (which is unlikely) not as daft as folk might think. Personally I’m in favour of more renewables in a balanced mix that increasi...

I've now added part two, with a couple of photos of the hub internal parts. One way of looking at it is that it doesn't matter how heavily built a hub gear might be, if there is the slightest weakness, someone will find a way of breaking it. RX-RD5 is one of the heaviest hub gears you can buy; abou...

For the UK climate a good reliable hub gear would be ideal on a utility or commuter bike but are ANY of them reliable apart from a 40 year old 3-speed??? a few are OK but they are the exception. In choosing between IGHs and derailleurs, it is arguably a question of choosing your preferred poison. c...

Hi, For the sake of democracy, (this topic has gone cold), but we need at least one opposing party's of the gov? For me the leader vote is taking too long to be constructive in building a different party to the Tories. Bearing in mind that all the candidates are saying that labour did not get it wr...

The licence system is, apart from a very few who have whole of life tariffs, already universally in existence. All prisoners get out on licence after half sentence. The smallest misdemeanour gets recall. But an effective licencing system require a functional community probation service. That is alm...

I dont think theose thugs that motivated this threadhave much potential to society? They are not highly educated so if they went straight their legit income would be much lower than they think they deserve. Thats why such people become criminals their expected financial worth is greater than their ...

Be careful what you suggest lest it comes true with you getting caught out and ending up in prison till your end of days. Prison is a barbaric removal of human potential from society. For once in our nation's existence I would like to see real attempts at human rehabilitation not human storage in p...

Don't worry folks. When petrol and diesel vehicles are banned, we will all be back to the good old bike! That's unless we have other forms of transport are invented. I wait in anticipation. Toodle pip. well it will be electric, but do we have the power stations to charge how many millions of eletcr...

As I understand it the root of the problem is that driving within the base is done on the wrong side of the road and that driving outside of it is done with vehicles that have their steering wheel on the wrong side. People make mistakes, sometimes very serious ones. The amongst best ways to avoid fu...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8P8m7t6Jp0 Imagine trying to persuade modern medics to do their rounds like this! I suspect that the purpose of the film was to persuade Nurses to take such roles in 1945, a form of advert. (Edit. Spelling corrected.) That bike doesn’t look ideal to me, single speed...

IME forks vary a lot in stiffness, and this (along with tyre pressure of course) can be much more important than a few mm of tyre width in terms of the ride quality. A fairer test is to use different wheels in the same bike, rather than different wheels in different bikes. cheers Absolutely, I’m su...

A couple of points that I forgot to add in my post above. I run the same brand and model 27 x 1&1/4 tyres on two bikes, and one of those bikes also has a mix of wider and narrower tyres of the same nominal size. There is a matter of just a few mm inflation width between them all but the level of...

The rim in question is the old Mavic Open Pro Ceramic which, if memory serves, was recommended to have tyres no wider than 28mm. The bike (wife's) will be carrying her and 2 panniers, mainly on road but with stretches of carefully negotiated forest track. Any suggestions on tyres that may fit the b...