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Can we stop with the pipe dreaming, people would be more likely to glue their head to the table than properly use industrial adhesives in a frame jig. Most people struggle with IKEA,

It's because most of the dirt is flung from behind by the spinning front tire and the reverse arch blocks the seals from that.

Manitou owners don’t seem to have any issues with the front of their seals being exposed.

How so? Won't those allow dirt and mud that would normally get stuck on the back of the fork arch to be able to push through rather than building up as much on your seals?

This is a fact. A bolted joint is essentially springs in parallel so you sum the stiffness of the aluminum portion of the joint and the stiffness of the bolt portion of the joint. Like anything, it can be done well or poorly. Fun fact, I know someone who was going car brakes and thought it would be fun to swap the steel bolts for titanium bolts. The titanium bolts were not as stiff and they started having issues with leaking due to the caliper halves separating under high pressure.

The bolts are torqued and pre-tensioned so they are not a passive element and are acting on the stiffness of the caliper in a different way, all other things being equal this can result in a stiffer caliper than an equivalent 1 piece design. You can do a bad job of designing either type of course.

One piece is not necessarily stiffer. The steel bolts keeping the two halves together are stiffer than aluminum.

Bs. Shigura is best bang for the buck if you know how to set it up with plutonline and like the hard bite point.

Getting a bit off topic here...

What if Oak Components (also a German brand with simolar looking levers) is starting to make their own brake?

How is pulling a vacuum supposed to be done? Clamp the syringe and try to degas the fluid the fluid that you will be bleeding with. Is this useful for both for and mineral fluids? Attach the syringe to one end of the brakes and pull while leaving the other end closed to pull out small air bubbles. How do you prevent bubbles from going right back into the system ones you release the vacuum?

I can totally envision OneUp's April 1st advert for their new wireless dropper. 'Tired of losing all of that stack height with the other guys' wireless droppers? We at OneUp have the ideal solution... commercial pans to a rider inserting a battery in his anus and looking very uncomfortable, then giving a thumbs up. Then they show a wire going down to the dropper from his riding pants. We have packaged the battery in a simple and environmentally green manner that improves stack height, and also prevents theft! And for the ladies you can now bring a spare battery, 2...

As someone who went from bleeding shocks by hand to using a vacuum pump about 10 years ago, a brake bleeding and pad bedding machine are 2 things I would immediately buy if I was running a general workshop. The time saved plus consistency (which saves even more time on parts coming back to be redone) is crucial for a sustainable workshop. I only occasionally do brakes but I'm still planning on building more tools for pad bedding when I get the time. Actually the same goes for wheel building - I used to do about as many wheels as...

re: same test track for reviews: this is going to turn into a tangent...maybe we start a new thread about it? it's a fun topic. like bullet bassman said, whenever we've had a test session, it's always using the same trail(s) throughout the week of testing, so every product gets the same laps. why not just use race results to pick the best bike if speed or data matters most? any tester with solid riding skills on any test bike they've had a chance to get familiar with would probably lay down nearly identical times on the same track. so...

This is getting dangerously close to a brake forum comment, but I think the reason you wouldn't see a vacuum bleeder for brakes is that the seals are designed to seal against positive pressure, but not against significant negative pressure. I've been testing Mavens and DB8's for the last 6 months and, even though the official SRAM mineral oil bleed procedure recommends drawing a vacuum using the Pro Bleed Kit syringe, I've stopped doing that part of the bleed process because I'm able to draw basically an endless amount of air out of my lines, at the lever or at...