Double 0 Soul

The place we stayed in Sicily had no kettle but it did have a stove top coffee pot.. when we got back to the UK the instant coffee i was drinking previously seemed more hideous than i remembered.. 'i can't drink this shit thought i' so i made steps into the world of online coffee for recommendations.. jeez, it's more repulsive than the instant coffee i was drinking, i watched a few youtube videos.. my god! coffee influencers are a right bunch of wankers!, i did read great things about those 1Zpresso grinders but repulsed by the coffee scene, i thought 'i can't become part of this world' ..and i've gone back to instant

I've been buying this stuff

When my pair died.. i harvested the cinch, laurel buttons, tab, and a few patches of the 13oz fabric so if anyone needs to do repairs on their M41030s, give me a hola for spare parts.

I was in A&E with a wrist fracture, i was chatting to this chap who said .. he used to suffer with a lot of fractures in his fingers because of the cricket ball hitting them.. his dad started giving him Masala Haldi Doodh (turmeric stirred into warm milk) before every match and he never suffered again.

Ive been getting into overnight oats recently.. This one is a cup of oats, half a cup of coconut milk, half a cup of cows milk, handful of chia seeds and left in the fridge overnight.. I’ve sprinkled it with *turmeric superblend, handful of flaked almonds, handful of pecans and a squeeze of blossom honey. *remember that Indian fellow in the cricket whites I was chatting to in A&E when I got knocked off my bike.. he suggested turmeric as a cure all.. I’ve been into it ever since.

Wow! Beautiful I love those arcs

I might do at some point.. i'm not using any editing software at the mo so i'm not recording anything. The inbuilt speakers are shite but they sound incredible through headphones so i've been programming them, sat in the chair, sequencer on my knee with the headphones plugged in (+ i'm not sure the family really want to be listening to repeating drum patterns for hours on end) i've programmed patterns into lets say 8 of the steps (some i've made up, some i've copied like VooDoo Ray) and i leave another 8 steps open to fk around with.. I've since synced the TR08 and TR09 together with a midi cable which opens up a whole new world of sounds.. mainly using the TR-09 for the heavy baseline and TR-08 for everything else.. then i've connected them together with a 3.5mm jack from the phono socket to the 'mix in' so no sound comes out of the units.. then i've connected the master unit to my amp via RCA into the output so all the sounds come out of my main speakers.. then i can plug my headphones into the amp and all the sounds come through the headphones which is just mindblowing..

It has it's benefits but i wouldn't swap it.. when my kid was little we were out in the Peaks every weekend, camping, hiking, fishing, bike riding and such, it was exhausting but incredibly rewarding.. our tent got trampled by cows so i bought a swanky replacement Snow Peak tent.. lockdown happened and he turned into a teenager thereafter, the tent never got used so i sold it.. he now goes camping with his mates.. he's got a Pure e-scooter so he doesn't even rely on me for transport.. His hands were cold last week so i suggested we went to Decathlon today to buy gloves but he was too busy with his mates.. we're supposed to be doing some father / son clothes shopping in Manchester during October half term.. i can pretty much guarantee this ain't going to happen due to his busy schedule.. so make the most of it while you can. Peeps who i used to ride with are either too busy with young families or too out of shape to keep up so you end up doing a lot of shit by yourself.. which might sound heavanly now.. but trust me, it gets old fast.

Briefly.. during lockdown, i acquired a Roland TR-909, i was really enjoying it when my friend who it belonged to, sold it.. what an inconsiderate wanker! I've since bought the boutique versions of the TR-08 and the TR-09 I can't play them live, a'la Jeff Mills so i spend hours programing them ..It's my birthday in Jan.. i'm hoping for a TB-03 squelsh box to add to the mix..

Nothing exciting for me, got up early.. Cat was still fast asleep Yawned .. rolled over Made myself a chorizo omelette and made some pancake mix for the attic full of sleepy teenagers.. who were still up at 4am Remember those flip down seats i put in last year? When you look behind them.. it's become a nursery for all the li'll snails.. cute!! Shhh.. don't wake them up, they're only babies Rode up to my old childhood playground ..everytime i come here it gets more extreme.. When i was a kid, I bust my front tooth on this track when i took a slam on my Kuwahara so i had to have it capped till i stopped growing and had it crowned when i got to 16.. when i was 20 i bust my ankle here.. but after writhing around in agony for a while, i kept riding till the sun went down.. chucked my bike in the back of my £550 Mk2 Fiesta and drove home (with a broken ankle).. the next day it was massive and heavily bruised so i went to get it x-ray'd then plastered.. it was my right foot so i couldn't press the accelerator in the car but rather than use public transport, i used one of the crutches they gave me to press the accelerator along with left foot breaking.. within a week, i had it down.. i was a much less responsible adult in those days ..saying that, i'd only been there for 5mins when i came off on the berm.. grazed my arm, my hip and my saddle.. thankfully, it was 9am so nobody was there to see it ..rode back home and made the sleepy teens so good old northern pancakes.. none of that American nonsense! ..walked down to Sharrowvale to pick my racket up from the shop ..the cat which lives in the pet shop ..spotted this lovely old E-Type out in the rain Ive gone for Luxilon Alu Power 125 Rough, strung at 52lbs if anyone is interested... No? ok, i'll move on.. ..a spot of crate diggin .. a little blast around the plantation this afternoon ..followed by a pint of Moonshine at the Norfolk arms.. featuring threadbare arm of JMC ..

If you're going to make another sizing blunder aho.. could you make it 32W x 31L instead?

My god! .. Congratulations!! Feels like i've only been away for a few weeks.. Have you chosen a name?

I was just working my way back through this thread and nearly spat my coffee out on pg330 (just between you and i Chaz.. i think the father could be Casper The Friendly Ghost)

I've just seen @beautiful_FrEaK baby scan What brilliant news to wake up to.. congratulations!!

You told me it was Tarquin?

You was all made moderators .. there was more moderators than contributors

I've tried to multi-quote this from the vintage thread and failed miserably.. so @AlientoyWorkmachine Regarding Denimbro.. I'll try and nutshell this mo-fo I think the catalyst for the downfall became apparent years earlier when there was a Denimbruin event. To mark the occasion there was going to be a special run of Roy's available for DB members, the anticipation was palpable.. folks couldn't fkin wait.. i think there was going to be 30x pairs or sumat.. Roy only managed to get around 6 pairs made, but instead of distributing them fairly amongst the forum via a raffle or first come first served, they went to friends of the DB hierarchy most of whom having not contributed fk all to the forum for years.. @shredwin_206 called them out over this.. i remember Mr R saying the fallout soured his relationship with Roy and he stepped back for a while, i don't think this was malicious or intentional.. the situation was just very poorly managed... a management style which came back to haunt us years later. A couple of years on and the forum was getting close to maxing out it's allotted server space or some technobollocks.. we all contributed £20 or so to buy a few more boxes to put our pixels in and keep the old ship afloat.. at this time it was still quite buoyant and sufu had slowed to a crawl.. there was zero transparency in the financial transaction, we just trusted the money was going to prolong the life of the forum, i'm in no doubt that it did and i fully expected having to put my hand in my pocket again in 12mths time to buy more space.. Mr R became a bit more active for a short period thereafter which was nice to see.. Time passed and most of the OGs had all but disappeared.. i was always trying to push back against what i saw as fake lifestyle BS.. what would become Influencers / denim-bloggers / Instagram culture in the years following .. poor old Doc_H was left as lone mod to keep our outrageous egos in check with next to zero mod-powers... a helluva lot of weird shit happened, which i could write a book about but isn't really relevant to the story so incredible as it is, i won't bore you with it. The end came when the server maxed out again.. the mod-gods had been absent for quite some time but instead of saying "it's that time of year again folks.. we need some $$$s to keep the forum alive" they just started deleting threads.. as @julian-wolf alluded to.. there was never any consideration taken.. it was just blind panic.. the threads which hadn't been updated for the longest period (the sub-forums) were deleted first.. years of denim history and painstaking, academic-esque research gone at the click of a mouse, we'd put a lot of our time and effort into building this and they didn't even give us a heads up if we wanted to back up our own shit.. it was just management meltdown.. There was talk of rebuilding, most of us were prepared to contribute but i wanted them to hand over the keys to the forum to someone we could trust.. i always thought @CSL was a safe pair of hands (Hi Carl) but no, they wouldn't hand over the reigns, so we migrated back here and it was left to die.. we did have one last push to save the old place.. i set up a email group chat.. it was me, Ooms, Julian, Flash, Maynard, Bartles, b_F, Duke.. a motley crew if there ever was one.., we contributed more to this group chat over a few short months than we'd contributed to the forums in years .. thanks lads, i'll love you always for that. I've got no hard feelings, i never thought Mr R was a bad guy, he would send me postcards out of the blue from his holiday destinations which i've kept, he annoyed the shit out of me at times and i'm sure as hell i annoyed the shit out of him.. the only sadness i feel is for the loss of information, the slice of our denim history gone and it could have been so easily saved.. A forum member T-Bone Slim recovered the M-Series thread for me from the upside down, which i posted here, for that i'll always be grateful.. most were not so lucky. The weird shit, of which there was much.. @Duke Mantee .. having single handedly built the Freewheelers thread from the ground up (like the gifted architect he is) got banned from the forum for.. if i remember rightly 'having an agenda' ? Nope, still doesn't make much sense.. @beautiful_FrEaK was comfort eating throughout Even years later.. i hadn't contributed to DB for quite some time.. lockdown happened during a denim tour.. it was Foxy's turn with the jeans, but this was 2020, the world had changed, Foxy had left his job in Moscow, he and his wife drove across Europe from Berlin to his house on the Isle of Eigg before the borders closed.. i've stayed at Foxy's house, it's fkin miles from the post office, the post is collected weekly by ferry to take it to the mainland, I doubt the ferry was even running, he'd relocating his entire life, lets cut him some slack, but No! .. the DB hierarchy thought this was somehow my doing..@Maynard Friedman tried to step in as the voice of reasonbut they still thought Foxy and I were trying to sabotage the tour because i was still grouchy over what happened.. as i say, fkin bizzarre but that's just Denimbro in a nutshell. ..the jeans turned up sometime later and no apologies were ever made.. The End..

Sorry guys.. late to the party. I've always washed my 100% rayon SunSurf shirts in the machine on a delicates cycle, bit of washing detergent, take it out after a short spin and put it on a hanger to dry, they always come out just fine.. i think i've posted about it somewhere in the midst of this thread. I was unsure for the first wash but what convinced me was the plethora of rayon shirts in the vintage shops.. most of which are in pretty good shape considering their age/material and there is no way they've always been dry cleaned with the utmost care... why would you if you're donating it?

Thanks I always go overboard with the deets.. I over-engineer everything The cabinet under the sink was a redwood frame lined with 18mm marine ply which was coated in some kind of primer by the tiler to stop the ply absorbing the moisture from the grout and weakening the bond.. it went on red but dried clear.. i've since lined it out with WCB grade Scandi ply (which is what i used for the door because it's perfectly flat) and painted it with Zinsser mould resistant paint.. the push/release latch was from LAMP .. the ply + grout + tile had to work between 23mm and 32mm for the hinges to clear the reveal. The cabinet behind the toilet is double 18mm marine ply.. it was bent .. so i laminated 2x pieces together ..like this^ 2x equally bent pieces oppositely laminated together will counteract the tension in each and give you one flat piece.. The cabinet for the shower is the only part which comes into contact with water so it was fully tanked before it was tiled over Oh.. the steps i put into the cabinet behind the toilet are to account for the thickness of the tile + the grout.. i didn't want the wooden plinth under the sink to be stepped when it was tiled over so i stepped the cabinet to allow for the tiles.. if that makes sense

..after all that^ hard work, i needed a break so we headed to Castellammare del Golfo in northern Sicily.. considered the jewel of the north-west, a bit like Barrow-in-Furness. I nearly missed the plane because security didn't like the look of my fishing tackle.. a small pouch filled with lead shot and scissors.. I picked up a Fiat Panda Hybrid in the airport..the driving in Sicily is just insanity, much like Mario Kart, the only way to get around is to drive like an Italian, never stop, never give an inch, push in at every opportunity, shouting shit and gesticulating wildly while throwing banana skins and tortoise shells at other road users.. they know you're a tourist if you're indicating so i stopped using my indicators on day 2 and pushed in at every opportunity they soon accepted me as one of their own Luckily, when they're not behind the wheel of a car, the people are lovely, we rented a house on a dirt track in the middle of nowhere, my sat-nav freaked out and couldn't locate the house, outside the capital, nobody speaks a word of English and my italian is considered 'offensive' at best but after 30 mins of driving around the dirt tracks i had to go to someone's house to ask directions.. i had a phone number but the guy who owned our house didn't speak english so i couldn't call him and explain where we were because i had no fkin clue where we were?!.. ..The guy who came to the door lived in Milan (originally from Sicily and spoke a little english) and was staying at his holiday home with his family, wearing nothing more than Speedos and flip-flops, he called the house owner who came to our rescue on his dirt bike. Our house, nestled between the sea and the mountains.. with my hire-car... it's been 37ºC and 30ºC at night ..down the dirt track ..to the sea ..this is where we spent our days snorkeling with the beach babes The food / restaurant culture is incredible, albeit.. very expensive.. there are no fast food outlets or burger chains.. even the supermarket was deli quality food but priced accordingly. Over here.. if you don't want to pay Waitrose prices, you go to Tesco but over there, you didn't have that option, we ate at some shitholes just to save money towards some of the most fasntastic restaurants i've ever eaten at, one place was serving €290 steaks, we had burgers .. but the most incredible burgers i've ever eaten, dripping with fatty parma-ham, we ate in a forest overlooking the sea and a walled courtyard in Scopello (Ssee last photo) The restaurants open 8.30 till 2am.. most folks come out to eat at 10.30, crowds of peeps queue for tables.. i'm not proud to say that we spent £1150 just on evening meals in one week Messina was the local brew.. it's far, far, far superior on draught ..kid caught a baby gekko Cactus fruit was growing by the side of the road The first night we drove into the local town for pizza, (8mins away) it looks beautiful ...but look how densely populated this place is.. it reminded me of the favellas in Brazil but these buildings are mostly ancient, pre-car so the streets were narrow with no footpaths, always one way and heading in the opposite direction to where i wanted to go.. restaurants would just drag tables and chairs out onto the street and put a metal barrier across the top of the street blocking your way ..trying to negotiate this madness was a pain (getting parked was a fkin nightmare) but 1000s of peeps were out in the streets, from babies to grandparents enjoying each others company instead of sitting in the house typing shit into the internet.. i mean, contributing to forums This was the local town during siesta.. ..my teenager on the rare occasion he wasn't eating gellato ..it seems even Sicilians have love for Yorkshires finest square tubed mountain bikes ..this was Scopello, just around the coast ..on the morning we left, the wind woke me up at 7.30am, blowing a sun shield outside the house.. i had to get up and take it down, odd? .. it started to rain .. hot rain, this wasn't forcast? wtf.. by the time i got to the airport, it was beautiful blue skies again, then i heard the news about the billionaires in the sunken yaught when we got back to the UK.. we were staying just to the left of Palermo, the yacht sank just to the right of Palermo.. half an hour around the coastal road ..anyway, nice to see you all again!

Get comfy.. i've got a long overdue photo-dump We moved into our house 5yrs ago and the bathroom was already fked! I've been bodging the electrics to keep shit working Being an 1880era terrace house, there was never a bathroom, toilet would have been at the end of the garden (now a bike shed) and washing facilities would have been a tin bath in front of the coal fire.. so our bathroom would have been a back bedroom.. It looked like this.. .. there was a false wall to house the electric shower but designed by fkin idiots so one would open the door onto the sink which you would shimmy around before you could close it *face palm* I chalked out my plans full scale on the floor at work ..and started building the cabinets ..bought a lovely hand made concrete basin ..and some wood from https://www.albiontimber.co.uk/ We're not posh enough to have en-suite so much to the families disgust.. i bought a camping toilet from Amazon and put it in the outside loo ..I started building the cabinets in ..took a break for Pakistani mango season ...droooool! ..i didn't do any of the plumbing or tiling, i just planned it all out to the nth degree and bought all the stuff (well you know what i'm like, i spent months doing this ).. turned out the tiler was some kind of tiling god! Now it looks like this.. ..had the shower tray imported from Ireland I wanted the windowsil to drain the water back to the shower tray so rather than taper the fluted pink tiles i made a wooden plinth and cast a silicone mould ..then made a concrete windowsil instead ..turned out pretty well I bought this mid-century Italian medicine cabinet from https://vintarama.com/en-gb in Germany These are the plinths i made from the Ash i bought from Albion ..bits and bobs from Ferm Living ..and Zone Denmark ..i've built a hidden cupboard into the cabinets ..push the door and it clicks open Stacey Solomen can fk off with her scatter cushions.. i've missed my vocation in life as a bathroom designer!

So it seems that i'm a judge :0 Almost as many as the contestants.. If y'all think too many judges will spoil the broth, i don't mind stepping down, i'd never heard of this brand till 10mins ago. I'll quite enjoy the judging process but i might not be around too often so could i judge this blind? .. ie- avoid the thread entirely and @MJF9 just email a front and back shot of each pair at the end.. i could be completely unbiased?

These were my old Silverstone 47s before Doc_H turned them into sexy hot-pants Non of the wear is down to me.. they looked like this when i bought them from Yahoo sometime around 2013

Sorry for the slow response @rbeck.. it's been at least 6mths since my last confession Sure, the frame is a Mid-90s Pace RC200, They were made in Yorkshire, very light, very rigid, very quick The forks are Pace RC31, Flight saddle and Syncros post It's been through a series of incarnations but i think i'm finally done tinkering with it.. It's got Pace Renthal bars, Pauls levers, Pauls Thumbies (with Dura-Ace shifters) Pauls Klampers and Onza grips X-Lite L168 with Ringle Slamma Cooks Bros Racing crank (which @beautiful_FrEaK proxied for me) Pace rings, Syncros Ti BB, Suntour XC Pros, XTR M952 front and rear, CK hubs and Ultradynamicos

Oh.. and a friend of mine had her art book published I've finally been recognised for my contribution to the arts