Cheap But Brilliantly Effective upgrades

take EPO

Buy a bike that is suitable for the purpose for which you intend to use it.

winston, you just might be right.
but I can't see your revolutionary ideas being accepted on this forum.

have some batteries for you lights

take EPO

... and some decent masking agents.

give up smoking....

Chain tugs, cause I'm shit at getting chain tension right and everyone loves a tug.

+1

chain tugs ftw. never have another slack chain comment.

Have two well adjusted brakes, even if your riding clipless fixed.

Dont run a deep drop stem & deep drop track bars on the street and then only put tape on the bit you cant reach.

£10 = 3 pints. Why the fuck are you spending it on your silly bikes? :P

tosspants

a pair of nos ambrosio montreal medaille d'or rims for €15... with some free hubs thrown in
thats around £6 each
i bought three pairs
might flog one
i love italy!

£10 = 3 pints. Why the fuck are you spending it on your silly bikes? :P

£10 = small bottle of rum + two cans of beer + pasty + mars bar. FTW.

You will ride much better.

well, i just did the spoke-tighten. 1/4 ish turn all the way round.

all appears to be well, though some spokes do appear to be looser than others, which is to be expected, i'm sure.

my question, chums, is this ; should i tighten these errant spokes some more? really bring them back into line? or should i leave well enough alone?

Mark a loose spoke (tape it?) - tighten 1/2 a turn - check trueness - carry on/abort...

ok, will do

how tight should they all be, then?

oh, and - does it matter if the tyre is inflated or deflated?

As tight as you want them?

For general riding, a little bit of flex when you 'pince' 2 spokes towards each other, halfway between the final crossing and rim.

Jesus, I don't know - 440Hz?

You could let a bit of air out the tube, but it doesn't really matter. When you build a wheel, the tension drops a bit when you first stick a tyre on and inflate it - compressing the rim I suppose.

google about spoke tension by pitch. There is a website somewhere with a table of approximate notes which your spoke should correspond to depending on the cross pattern front back, no of spokes etc. Sheldon used to use a tape recording of various notes I read somewhere.

That is so fucking anal. May appeal to nimhbus though... I mean on account of his trade.

That is so fucking anal. May appeal to nimhbus though... I mean on account of his trade.

Yep. Never done it myself but I HEAR it works.

well, almost, except i'm fucking useless at tuning things by ear. if it was a case of Eq'ing them, then i'd be all over it.

Just make sure you scoop out some of the 4kHz to counter-balance the human audiological system's bias at that frequency.

i thought it was 2khz

tyres