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It is Italian. It is a Lancia engine. But it's not from an S4. The S4 engine was twin-charged (single turbo, single engine-driven supercharger) and had a conventional cross-flow head:

The engine with the central intake and twin exhaust manifolds (and an opposed valve arrangement like the BMW M10 Apfelbeck engine) is a Lancia Triflow engine from the experimental Group S car.

I've heard differing views on this- are banded steels legal to run on road?

Yes - there's nothing in the Construction and Use Regs which prohibits them. However, a lot of insurance companies won't insure a car with them due to their reputation for catastrophic failure. Some will, but only if they're done by a firm which knows what it's doing. It was covered in PPC a while back.

In engineering terms, however, they're still an abomination.

Still available?

Brazing titanium would be quite tricky.

To be honest, I've never felt the brakes on the Brompton to be particularly lacking. They're not brilliant, but they do the job. Must be my mighty upper body strength.

Oh, and I do occasionally use the luggage block on the front, so bottom-entry calipers are a necessity.

This. The Garmin maps don't have topographical data, (the topo maps show contour lines but the Garmin can't 'read' them) so they will occasionally take you up a 30% ramp to avoid an extra 200m of road.

Ventoux was a non-story. The race jury allowed feeds on Ventoux up to 5km out due to the conditions, and announced it to all the teams over the race radio - that's why it wasn't just Sky handing out musettes just before the 5km banner, but at least two other teams as well.

Today's feed was illegal though. Stiffer penalty than normal though.

Started the day 4m34s in front of Bertie, finished today's stage 57s ahead, so it should be a 5m31s lead, but is shown as only 5m11s in the standings.

Yep. Looks like it.

New Liggettism - 'there's moisture in some of those clouds'. Presumably the others are made of bricks. Or big piles of cotton wool.

IIRC ti welding requires an oxygen starved work area. You gonna DIY one? Also, seems like the BB shell is missing.

Nah, you just use a gas lens on the torch and back-purge the welds by filling the tubes with argon. That's how companies like Seven and Firefly do it. If you look at the fixture that Firefly use here you can see the purge lines and fittings. In fact, the titanium compressor blades on Rolls Royce aero engines are welded without using an argon chamber - just a big gas lens on the torch.

The tubeset doesn't include the BB shell or dropouts or other minor fixtures but I can source them from Paragon, Nova or Ceeway.

This arrived today, courtesy of Brick Lane Bikes:

A Reynolds 2000 double-butted titanium tubset. OK, so this one's CP2 rather than 3Al-2.V, but it's still titanium. Time to fire up the TIG welder. I've never welded titanium before, though, so I probably ought to practice first.

I'm building the wheels for other people who have entrusted me with their shiny new purchase. Even if they say they don't mind a few greasy smears, they do mind. If they were my own wheels I wouldn't care so much and probably wouldn't buy shiny rims in the first place. I don't even clean my bike. Well, maybe once or twice a year.

Sure, I appreciate that. If I'd got someone else to build my wheels, I wouldn't want forensic evidence of their identity all over them. Just can't see why a quick wipe down with a solvent of your choice wouldn't solve the issue. Just in case I'm unintentionally coming across as an aggressive wally (again), my real reason for asking is to make sure I'm not doing something horribly wrong in my wheelbuilding with imminent wheel exploding consequences.

Sounds similar to me, although I've already got 43 Mega SIDIs. When I used the Specialized heat-reactive foot matt thing, I was definitely a ++ type foot, but there just wasn't room for my foot and the footbed in my SIDIs. At the bike fitting I had a + footbed put in instead, which is much better. Still not perfect, but better.

You could just as well be describing the impact of big money on sport.

I don't think that comparison really works. If you doubled Sky's budget, or the budget of any of the big teams, what could they really spend it on to improve their performances? I can't think of anything which would they could buy with the extra cash which would come even close to the additional performance which a USPS-style doping programme would provide.

To me the equation is quite clear. Doping = cheating. Of course you could change the rules to make doping legal, but for me it would still be cheating. But YMMV.

Let those who dope race with those who don't, some of whom will have been provided with 'gains' via other means.

I think that's how it was viewed before EPO came along. A quick dose of amphetamines might perk you up at the end of a long stage, and a wee bit of cortisone might help you recover at the end of a particularly long stage. But it gave you a slight edge, in the same way as having a light bike or the best tyres. And so it was condoned and tolerated, because doping in those days just gave you an edge, but no more.

EPO changed all that, turning 'carthorses into racehorses' as they said about Riis. It wasn't just an edge, it was a 5%, 10%, 15% improvement. This led to the 'two races' syndrome. If you weren't on EPO it wasn't just a case that you lost an edge, you weren't even in the race at all. Pre-EPO dope might meant you won, but not being on EPO didn't mean you didn't win, it meant you weren't even competing. And that's when it stops being a matter of personal choice and personal ethics, at least if you want to even stand a chance.

Personally, I'm happy with the idea that winning means having the best bike, the best training and the best team. I'm not that happy with the idea that winning, and not dying in the process, should be determined by who's best at doping.

And no, I don't think Froome's juiced. There's really no evidence to support the rumours that he (or the rest of Sky) is, and trying to prove a negative is impossible.

Why are the greasy finger marks a problem? Given the fact that my wheel builds are lubricated by copious amounts of Mobil 1, the rims usually end up pretty greasy, but I just give them a wipe down with some acetone once I've finished. Never really found it a problem, but that may be because my standards are incredibly low and easy to achieve.

I've used Phil's tenacious oil to build wheels with, but generally I use Mobil1 10-40W. About a centimetre in a highball glass, bung the spokes in threaded end down, and then wipe off the excess when you pull each spoke out to lace it up. Haven't had any problems with spokes unloosening yet, except on my 29er wheels, and I think the spoke tension just wasn't high enough on them. I'm rebuilding them with CX-Rays rather than the DT Super Comps I originally used and building them with a higher spoke tension.

+1 on the Nuun Kona Cola tablets. I switch between High5 Zero and Nuun tablets and while the Nuuns are slightly better there's not much between them. A couple of Kona Cola tablets in a pint of water is also a pretty effective hangover cure in my experience. Certainly takes the edge off, anyway.

This weekend's confession - I set off home from the train station on Saturday night making my way back to Cycliste's flat. Unfortunately, I forgot that I was in Switzerland and they drive/ride on the right hand side of the road over there. I'm not sure who was the more surprised - me or the car driver.

Max speed on a public road? I plead the fifth...

Isn't this build totally about your aesthetic? And making things work a bit better?

I'd say that's a pretty fair summary, yes! However, the trouble with the calipers is that they're rather unusual in that the cable enters from the bottom. It's possible to re-route the cables so they enter from the top, but that rather screws up the fold and so doesn't make it work better. It's possible to bodge an adjuster and clamp onto standard calipers to reverse the cable direction, but as you can probably tell from the word 'bodge' I don't find that option particularly aesthetically pleasing.

If I find some billet titanium upside-down cable calipers, I think there's a fair chance they'll make it onto the bike. But at the moment I haven't.

Thanks people. I'm currently in the process of sanding and polishing the carbon mudguards, having given them several coats of clear Plastikote. I'm planning on using the standard calipers, Kllow14, but with Swissstop Green pads. A brake caliper's basically just a lever in my book, and unless it's made of cheese changing the caliper's not going to make much difference to the braking. Changing pads, on the other hand, can make a real difference.

Time will tell if this utterly convincing theory is entirely correct or complete bollocks.

I've got Corsa Evo CXs on the Dentist's Chair, and I'm perfectly happy with them. Allegedly, they're rubbish in the wet. I've never found that an issue. Mind you, my descending in the wet makes Wiggo look fast by comparison.

can you open a window?

Yes, but then I can't hear what they're saying on Radio 4 unless I turn the radio up really loud.

Why do you need air con in the UK?

It's a black car with a small, black interior and a relatively large engine inches behind you. Without air-con it's impractical to drive any time between March and October.

Well, it is for me anyway. I'm a cold weather person, and I tend to sweat a lot.