My new surly LHT from the first year of production in 2004 had a deformed bottom bracket shell. Surly said it was normal to have to pay a bike mechanic to cut new threads in a shell, they refused to do anything about it - but they mailed me a flask and a pair of socks as their attempt to convince me that they were a great company. <Insert chuckle here.> The bike mechanic had to take a break half way through the work because it was such hard work to cut that much metal by hand. He said he had never seen such a big pile of metal shavings left after working on a bottom bracket shell before. Fortunately the mechanic did not charge too much, I do not remember how much the bill was but I do remember that Surly refused to reimburse me for it because it was "normal" according to them.

I used the LHT on my Pacific Coast tour because it was 700c, my previous tours involved some gravel so I used a 26 inch touring bike before that trip. I went less than 20 miles on the Pacific tour before I decided that I really should not have used that bike on that tour. It had an intermitent shimmy. I am sure that there was some out of specification tubing in the frame, it handled like a wet noodle. After one of the bad shimmy episodes on that trip a friend of mine that was behind me said he was surprised I did not crash it, he works as a bike mechanic and knows something about bike frames. When I got home I put my Surly frame in the recycle bin. Several people told me I should have tried to sell it. The bike handled ok unladen but I was afraid someone would try to tour on it and did not want to sell a frame that could cause an injury, thus it went in the recycle bin.

I know there are a lot of people that love Surlys. I did a group tour several years ago with Adventure Cycling. Of the 16 bikes, 4 were LHT and all 4 of the owners loved them. I rode one of my Thorns on that tour, not the LHT.

Needless to say, Surly is not getting another penny from me. As far as I am concerned it does not matter what their warranty is, when they refused to honor the warranty before it was even built up into a complete bike, that in my opinion is the same thing as having no warranty at all.

Last year a friend of mine brought a very old cracked Trek 520 steel frame into a Trek store, got a brand new frame, no questions asked.