You mentioned my pictures; there are some vendor pictures
to be found here.
Well, I took it for an extended ride. I went about 95 miles on day one and 45 miles on day two and stayed the night in a hotel. It rained a good portion of the ride and, instead of making mud, the rain adhered a fine sand to everything.
I will try to avoid commenting on the use of a recumbent in China and try to focus on the bike performance. I was easily able to keep the speeds between 13 and 16mph. That was with the rack heavily loaded down for touring with a lot is stuff I didn’t need on this trip (and quite a bit of food and water).
The bike is pretty unstable feeling at low speeds and the handlebar had a lot of wobble at low speeds (keep in mind, the luggage was only on the rear rack). Above 10mph it started to steady out and felt fine up to the low 20’s, which was as fast as I took it.
The shifting seemed fine; I adjusted the cable adjusted on the rear derailleur once. As mentioned, I didn’t use the big ring much other than in descents. I still need to take a couple of links off the chain; it just comes with three IG-51 chains. Putting them together and adjusting them is the buyer’s problem.
I do have a gripe, the front idler bit me several times; remember, I have three recumbents, and this is not just a case of being new to recumbernts. By “bit” I mean that right leg coming into contact with the idler and being pulled in along with the chain. I have a pretty good bruise to show for it. I finally dealt with it by sitting further to the right than I normally would; I think that may have been part of the problem with the stability issues.
The handlebar adjustment screw needs some form of a tensioner on it. This is the screw that adjusts how far the handlebar leans back. It kept walking in. The result was that the bar would not stay in a comfortable position. Yes, I could adjust it back with my fingertips; but, the fact that I could adjust it with my fingertips was the problem.
As far as the brakes, nightmarish! The sensation of “No brakes!” was not at all uncommon. I Flintstoned it to a stop several times. It is odd, both this bike and my Bacchetta Giro 26 ATT have Avid brakes. The difference seems to be that the Bacchetta has Avid 7, while the Allegro has Avid 5. I suspect that one of the biggest problems is that the preload adjustment on the back of the Avid 5 is so hard to adjust. I have found some instructions for adjusting the BB5 brake and am going to give that a try this evening.
I took the wheel off at the hotel and managed to get enough force to adjust the brake. However, as I look at it now, the rear preload has, again, backed all the way in. It should come as no surprise that I returned with that brake not working at all (fortunately, it was the rear brake that completely failed). I don’t want to damn the bike for a third party part. However, they need to use a different brake (or include instructions for properly adjusting the brake. . . for that matter, some instructions in the box would be a real improvement, it comes with none), they need to figure out a way to tension the handle bar adjustment (I can think of several), and it would be nice if they can do something about the chain-bite; otherwise just plan on sitting a bit to the right.
It is not a bad bike; but, I could be better.
Here is a page with some information about the ride.