Originally Posted by
culturejamming
I guess the takeaway message from this thread is that the bike industry is one that does not place any real amount of significance on support for older or preowned models. Fair enough. It's news to me and I suppose a learning experience, albeit not a desirable one. I cited parts support for my very old lawn mower as an example. Power equipment, especially lawn mowers, is an industry in which any worthwhile company will stand behind its products, even one from 1989, because that develops loyalty and trust with consumers. I like knowing that a good dealer is willing to help me find, say, a mulching kit for something which is almost as old as I am. It assures I will buy a brand new eXmark when I have the money and it's time to replace the old one (which, btw, is an investment of at least $3500). The way KHS has handled this makes me think it is a fly-by-night company (probably not and I'm sure someone will chime in to defend its legacy). If they can't back up a bike from potentially "5-10" years ago... well... I don't think that's too much to ask on my part. Btw, the OS analogy isn't so good. Microsoft supported XP up until recently and, although I never needed to call in for support, there is a very large body of information about the OS available on the internet, unlike the F-300 folder. Googling the F-300 yields a handful of topics, most of them simple mentions without any accompanying spec info.
There is not one thing about this bike that you could not easily either figure out how to fix yourself or find out with a small amount of research. There are great forums on this site (and in others) that will help you problem shoot the bike. There is a vast amount of data on the web on bikes and there is nothing that complicated about a bike.
You don't start with googling the bike. You google the various parts. You google components such as square taper bottom brackets, headsets, hubs, etc. That's the way you find out the specs. If you knew something about bikes, you wouldn't feel this way about KHS (which is a fine company) and you would not try to figure out the specs on your bike by googling the model name of the bike.