Johan Bornman

That's the type of thing I take on. Bring. Chop chop, quick, quick cheap cheap.

It is absolutely normal. If you look at the shape of a Motion Control Damper (google it, I'm too lazy to take a photo now) you'll see that it is zig-zag shaped to flex under pressure. This is to protect you and the internal components. Further, the floodgate lets some oil through so if you keep constant pressure on the fork, it sags with time. However, this is not a standard riding condition, you always bob back to reset the fork. Give is good.

It is a known issue. Warrantee.

I'll be watching this thread. Anakote in Roodepoort that used to do my anodizing has gone belly up it seems. There is an anodizing place in Wynberg (Sandton's Wynberg, not Cape Town's) that specializes in long things. I don't know the street name or company name but I can direct you to them if you phone or e-mail me. This company does items up to three meters long.

Enduro doesn't do ACB headset bearings.

Respect! But I bet you can't do it with a 16 valve head?

44 Gallon drums are quite scarce in South Africa thanks to our cooking habits. Invariably you end up having to weld two braais together.

There's your answer.

The tyre with the lowest rolling resistance will be the least durable one and the tyre with the highest rolling resistance will be the most durable one. Durability is robustness over time. Therefore, you can't have your cake and eat it.

Don't spoil my fun. I'm having a bad day and need to take it out on somebody.

On BB30 you need a internally opening Circlip plier and a pair of fingers. On BB30 PF you need a collet that expands to grip behind the bearing. In other words, a special tool.

What is fast-rolling?

The BB is completely stripped. The customer allowed the thing to go from bad to terrible and there's no thread left. If I go Italian, I can ream it one mm bigger and rethread it for Italian. It's an old trick that seems to have died on with the framebuilders of yesteryear. We helped the customer once before by installing a theadless expanding BB from Orange Cycles (or Velo or whatever) but the quality of those BBs is very poor. Time for a proper solution. I must do this operation, it is on my bucket list.

Does anyone have a set of Italian thread dies and a reamer? I have to convert an English BB shell to an Italian one. Can anyone help?

There's your problem. SRAM uses Torx there, I think.

Tandem wheels will definitely work...with some modification. A tandem rear wheel is 145mm wide whereas a road bike rear wheel is 130mm wide. However, the Shimano tandem wheel is supplied with a convenient set of spacers that can be removed to do trick. That will definitely be the world's strongest wheel, strong enough for the Vleis Visagie quad.

You seem totally clueless on these things. I'm sure someone will soon offer to show you. Guys....surely this tread can still go south a little bit more?

But as an aside, you don't need to know what headset it is. Open it up and on the side of the bearing you'll find a # number, #077 for instance. That tells us exactly what bearing it is.

I have the FSA manual in front of me (hoping to b called clever) but I can't find a headset with that code at all. A typical FSA code looks like this: 121-0464N Otherwise they're known by something like Intellaset ST or No 53CF. Find some more codes and lets see what we come up with.

In The Bicycle Wheel by Jobst Brandt, some measurements were done on the stiffness of tie-and-solder wheels and the result was insignificant. At the end of the day, you want to engineer the wheel right, not bolt on a stiffner dodahd. That means heavy rim, lots of spokes and a beefy hub.

There is no way that a Ksyrium will last for any reasonable length of time. Same for anything with less than 36 spokes. There are two issues at play here. 1) Enough stiffness so that the wheels don't touch the brake blocks when pedaling out of saddle and 2) reasonable durability. You can't expect great durability with any wheel at that type of load but you can expect perfect strength and stiffness, provided the right rim is chosen. It will have to be a heavy rim (Open PRO is nowadays super lightweight and won't last), 36 spokes and a strong hub - Shimano 105 or similar, with a steel axle. I'm thinking old style deep-section alu rim. Wolber, Fir, etc.

Misleading? If the spokes are loose, the wheel will rattle, not flex. Movement that's not against spoke tension is not flex. Obviously there should be spoke tension and that's assumed and I've explained it many times here. A search will show you. I can't cover my answers for absurd scenarios.

I agree. I'm astonished at how short-lived BB30 bearings are. They're even worse than GXP, and that says a lot. I'm now using serviceable BB-30 bearings. They have springclips holding in removable seals. I'm yet to get feedback on their life but I'm hoping for the best.

You cannot reduce flex by increasing spoke tension. Steel stretches in a linear fashion. Let's say 1kg of weight makes the spoke stretch 10mm. If you add one kg, then it stretches another 10mm and so on and so on. Therefore, once there is tension in the spokes, the wheels are at their maximum rigidity and adding more tension doesn't make them stiffer. Your only solution is either thicker spokes, more spokes or a stiffer rim. Lightweight wheels are not all they're cut out to be.

Bliksem!