Originally Posted by
Tourist in MSN
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.
So far the 520 and LHT we have have performed beautifully. One of the main things I truly like about the lht is that even though fully and relatively heavily loaded with a heavy rider, it handles almost like unloaded. Steering takes no effort at all and the load can only really be noticed at low speeds and accelerations. Max speed I've done so far was 50km/h and there wasn't a single wobble even though I purposefully tried to induce a shimmy.
Mind you I have an after 2011 model so it's stiffer than the 2007. I can also understand your attitude towards surly after the warranty thing. Luckily in the EU I deal with the retailer (and a very good one at that) and not surly directly so I won't face such issues if there ever is a problem