If you're just joining for the bicycle journey, this is going to be an update post from this post.
I got the bike and it was red flags from frame one. For one, it arrived assembled instead of in a box when I explicitly did not pay for them to assemble it. It's an $80 addon and I know how to wrench on a bicycle better than your average bear.
I spent about three hours with my twitch chat going over parts and doing safety adjustments. Some dumb asshole really did a number on this fucking bike. To list some issues:
- Front brakes so maladjusted the front wheel would barely make two rotations on a throw. Completely fucked for alignment. I did my due google diligence and got it so that it spun perfectly silently. Had to loosen the brake mounts themselves and adjust the pads. It was a perfectly reasonable mechanical disk assembly, save for the part where it'd clearly spent some time moist and had developed some rust. ^(more on this later in the return section.)
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Front forks fuckin' WIGGLY. I could tell at the spacers on the top of the stem that things were not tight or assembled correctly. I torqued down the stem bolt and re-aligned the mis-aligned handlebars."
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Kickstand was at full extension and the bike barely leaned over at a standstill. It was super unstable, so I adjusted it.
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Kickstand super loose and basically falling off. Just had to tighten it.
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The spokes sounded a little untrue in a couple spots when I played them with my wrench. Nothing too terrible, but definitely something I could blown an hour on if I'd had more specialized tools. Nothing was particularly out of line or riding funny, it just sounded a little thunky instead of tinkly here and there. Probably fine.
It was at this point that I was going to tune the derailleurs, and without a proper working stand I'd need to flip the bike over and go pedal it a little. See if I could throw the chain off the sprockets. I turned off the Twitch stream and took the bike by hand and felt... rough?
New paint isn't rough. Hey wait this isn't new paint at all. This is ROAD RASH.
Then I checked the rest of the components and suddenly the weird issues with the front brake rotor started to make some goddamned sense.
Some motherfucker had not only assembled my new bike without me. he'd fuckin' crashed it without me too!
I was willing to sit with the idea that maybe this bike-in-a-box had come out a wet corner of a warehouse and accrued a little bit of residual corrosion. But I paid for a new fuckin' bike. I didn't pay for some scuffed up Craigslist burglar special. It was gonna' have to go back for a return.
I originally set up a scheduled return, but the return specified that it needed to be "in box" and motherfuckers You explicitly took it out of the box when I had asked you not to.
Fortunately my housemate is a beautiful and patient bean, and was willing to drive my ass to the WalMart so I could deliver an asswhoopin'. (I was just gonna' return it, I'm normal I swear.)
We got there and the old guy working the counter was kind of an impatient dweeb but he ended up handing me my $260 back in hard cash, so I couldn't be too mad for long.
Still, I would not be dissuaded from my budget bicycle mission. I decided to head to the back of the store and see if I could purchase this bike in a box. I met with a genuinely helpful guy in the toy section who accompanied me to the bike rack. I told him what I wanted and he let me in on a terrible problem with this entire bike operation.
They don't keep boxed bikes in stock in the back.
I guess What you see is what you get when it comes to WalMart's bikes. You take the bike off the rack as assembled by some clueless rube or nothing. He went on to explain that the bikes on the rack are for display, but they also have the rest of their bikes in the garden center which immediately explained the rust and corrosion all over the bottom brackets of the bike. WalMart has been storing this thing near either their plant sprayers or in the fucking rain.
They're almost certainly assembled and in the garden center so that people can do test rides, and clearly some clod had damaged the product on a test ride.
Which sucks because from what I worked on, this bike is okay. If WalMart would've just pissed off and left their retail product in its package; not strewn about at the Manassus Walmart, sitting around in the elements like their own storefront is some kind of dump; They would've been a couple hundred dollars richer, and I think I would've genuinely had a reasonably good bike on my hands.
In the first post I went over the things that I thought would make or break this setup. The bike seemed fine, and the kit on the frame seemed fine, and I was right. Unfortunately the handling and service at my local Walmart is painfully inept and they're attempting to sell damaged goods.
There don't seem to be any other nearby stores carrying the bike at the moment either according to the online order forms, so I'm going to spend my next outing headed to my local GIANT brand dealer in the hopes that maybe I can find another road bike or drop-bar gravel bike.
Super bummed. I was very excited, and the only thing I could really see wrong with this bike was neglect.
Anyway, if you appreciate the insight and wanna' help me afford a proper bike from a proper retailer, please consider throwing me some bones! Things just got more expensive. http://ko-fi.com/wobblypython
