M_V's multitude of bikes and adventures in the land of framebuilding

@BareNecessities will be able to help. Although I can't imagine him having much exp. with jump forks. Is that unfair of me? Idk..

If I were to get the DJ2 and the damping is too slow for repeated hits on the trails, I could swap to a lighter oil and that would speed it up right?

@M_V - The DJ2s that I've seen were massively heavy lumps which were good at what they were designed to do: take the occasional huge hit.

I have a hardly used ( about 3 rides ) 2006 Fox Vanilla RLC that you might be interested in? No good to me, now that I'm all about 29ers.

Edit - 130mm travel

i knew he'd try to sell you one! (he sold me his)

I'd sell you some new wheels, if I had any.

I imagine those are going to be somewhat out of my budget...

Oooh, Fox Vanillas... nice. Buy them.

The new Marzo forks are the Bees Knees! About to order a set of 350's for my Rune over the 2013 Fox 34s I've got on there at the moment. They've sorted out their production line circa 2012, anything from theres good. From what I've heard the new 55s are brilliant too.

Love 'em. Unfortunately can't take anything above a narrow 2.35.

Curious about the new Marzocchi. Used to be obsessed with the Bomber's back in the stone age and FOX are now eye wateringly expensive.

They've sorted out their production line circa 2012.

Good to hear, like @Chak I used to be obsessed with the old Bomber, was a great fork, simple and bombproof (still is), need to grab it back from my old work actually...

So this leaked,

and this was sprung for someone about half my weight,

I considered buying firmer springs from TF for the Toras, hummed and hawed about several ebay forks, listed the Toras back on ebay, hummed and hawed about a load more ebay forks, decided to just buy the springs for the Tora so ordered them and pulled the fork off ebay last night.

Woke up this morning to an email from TF to say that the stock levels quoted on their website were basically a work of fiction and that the Tora springs are now discontinued.

That really ground my gears and spending a couple hours on ebay this morning looking at forks that were either unsuitable or had a leaking this, wobbly that, broken other thing etc didn't help my mood so I decided to just give suspension the middle finger and have ordered a set of these, (but with the Anything cage mounts which I'll hopefully use to mount my Blackburn Outpost)

and this

The wheel is really just a cheap place holder to get the bike running, my plan is to build a wheel with something like a Kris Holm Freeride rim and run a Knard or a Dirt Wizard in a few months.

Also treated myself to this from the Triton sale as it was only £18 and the Renthal I'm curently running is on it's way out.

Soon,

Also soon, but not as soon,

Managed to actually get the front Hope E4 fitted today using the rear hose with a bit lopped off. Hose kit on order for rear and then it'll be replacing the XT.

that bike looks ridiculous

Good ridiculous or bad ridiculous?

My first ever experience of anything 29er and I'm impressed so far.

Front wheel rolls over stuff amazingly well. With the 26" wheel and 150mm travel Pace fork it just felt like it was getting bogged down and not being used to have that much any suspension travel I felt I was getting bucked forwards over the bars almost.

The handlebar width really is ridiculous, you don't see it in ^that^ photo but they are 810mm wide which is 110mm more than the Wingbars I was using which already felt quite wide.

See it better here,

Good ridiculous :)

Oh, here's a (rather bad) pic of how my 1x1 looks at the mo. Guards are off and sold to someone on retrobike, rack is off and will at some point be sorted out to fit onto the Krampus fork on the Fireeye, riser fitted for moar giggles and v8s fitted for moar happy knees.

Good good :)

New bike looks like a lot of fun @M_V

Should look even more ( good ) ridiculous with the Kris Holm/Knard combo up front :-)

Was given a 3 speed Nexus/Nexave hub in part payment for building a couple wheels and today I got it put onto my Pomp.

Nicest feeling igh I've ridden I think.

Long time since I posted here.

On the FireEye front,

Kris Holm rim has arrived - and looks ace, so wide, just plain huge actually - so has the XT front hub I'll build it to and the 290mm spokes that should really be 285mm spokes. Don't trust manufacturer measurements!

A Knard should be here monday.

I decided that as the FireEye will be the most capable bike I have in terms of braking and grip etc that I'll be riding it a lot and that I want at least some of that riding to be singlespeed so I got back in touch with Mike at Onza/Unofix and he built me a ss rear disc hub on another undrilled Ronnie rim so if it'll blend in nicely with the other 2 wheelsets I have from him and it should also match pretty nicely with the KH rim on the front all be it minus the holes.

I went for an undrilled rim to make tubeless easier and have got it set up with a split 20" tube. It's held air for about 12hours today so I'm hoping that's a good sign.

The front wheel will also be tubeless, once I get it built.

Also picked up a few bits of jewellery for this bike in the form of a Thomson stem and a Hope seatclamp - the Salsa clamp I was using was getting really chewed up around the pivot. The Hope I have on the Surly seems to be standing up to winter grit and shit a lot better so gets my vote.

Oh and brakes, I got pissed off trying to bleed and bed the Hopes so I split them down, cleaned the hoses out and fitted them to the M755s (the switch from dot to oil seems to have done them no harm) and punted the calipers and levers on eBay.

The Hopes might have looked flash but the Shimano brakes just work. Bled up so easily, bedded in minutes and just sit there quietly doing their thing.

The Pompino now has drop bars and an old 7speed Ultegra bar end shifter on friction mode working the Nexus hub. I commuted on it today and think I've about got the hang of shifting the hub gear without indexing. I've also switched back to a 700c front wheel/fork and canti brake to work with the drop levers.

Pics of this at the weekend mibbe.

Finally had the Fireeye and a half decent camera out at the same time today.

I hiked/pushed/carried (and pedalled a tiny tiny amount) up Ben Lomond in around 2 hours and it took me 1hour 3 minutes to ride back down!

Brakes should be bedded now!

Bit of snow on the way up, it also snowed, hailed, sleeted, rained but thankfully the sun shone quite a bit too,

At the top, views not up to much due to weather coming in,

And a few once I got back down,

Edit: I'm glad with all the carrying and pushing I had to do that I no longer have the Alfine on this, it's now back on the 1x1.

Also, you may have noticed the XT 4pot is missing off the front, it started weeping from the join in the caliper halves so it has been replaced* with a Gatorbrake 6pot which means the bike now has 10 brake pistons but only 1 gear.

*I will be/am looking into repairing the leak so the 6pot might not be permanent.

re putting more oil in HSCV or similar coil sprung marzocchis

this is a bit late, but you can adjust the progression with the oil level, so yes more oil=less bottoming out! which gives you the chance to put slightly higher viscosity oil too to get a bit more compression damping!..