this bike p-sses me off

 

The more I look at this bike, the angrier I get.

The Excellent Wife (TEW) brought this home from work as a donation to the New Brunswick Bike Exchange. It was in the hatch of her Prius, with the front wheel removed, and I remember thinking, "This wheel is remarkably heavy...". When I removed the bike itself, it was ALSO remarkably heavy; heavy like a mild steel department-store bike. As I replaced the front wheel, I wondered why: after all, the frame was aluminum...

Let's start with the wheels:

See that deep-section, supposedly-aerodynamic rim? It's made of aluminum. Aero rims are made of carbon, because to make an aero rim of aluminum, so much material has to be used to make the shape stable and safe, that the supposed benefits of the aero shape are swamped by the huge weight gain due to the extra aluminum. This wheel appears to be pretending to be something it is not.

Wait, what's going on with that cabling? Is it possible that this bike was sent to the purchaser with the cables disconnected, in the expectation that they would have to do it? Apparently, yes; the donor said they knew they were in over their head. And anybody who knew anything about bikes would point out just what was wrong with this bike as they worked on it. Read on.

Wait; what's up with that awful front cabling? And why does the bar wrap stop so far out from the stem in the center?

Oh, I see. It's because the manufacturer has stuck shifters meant for flat bars on this drop-bar bike. There's no good hand position from which you can get to both the brakes and the shifters. And the shifters are right where you would want to put your hands when you're riding on the tops.

The frame welds are unobtrusive. Of course they are; they're not very good, but they don't have to be. There's no evidence that the aluminum tubes are butted or thin. In fact, given the weight of the bike, I'll bet the tubes are thicker than aluminum conduit, and could have been welded by a tyro in his first week of trade school.

But wait: what about all that fancy machining around the cap and the headset? Yeah, don't worry about that. It looks good now, but the machining isn't polished. It will oxidize to a dull grey as soon as the bike sees a little weather. 

A quick web search shows that this bike is available for around $150-260 (why such a large range?). For that price, go get yourself something used that works better. This POS is a shonde.