Hey Cig great review. You give alot of good details about the bike for other potential buyers. I was in your position 2 years ago when my car died and I needed another way to get to work. I didn't have months to wait for a deal on ebay or craigslist because taking the bus took way too long. I also didn't know if bike commuting was for me, so I didn't want to throw down $400 for the cheapest bike at the bike shop. I went to Walmart and bought a Dual Suspension mountain bike for $100 figuring if it made it through the summer, I would get my monies worth (didn't know about the 90 day warrrenty). I had to go over it and make alot of adjustments to get it to shift well and safe to ride, but I did and began using it on my 13-22 (depending if i taske the subway) mile round trip commute.

Then I decided I wanted to try mountain biking, and started riding alot of single track with this bike. After a couple rides, the rims were wobbly as hell, so I had to keep trueing them. The first thing to die was the rearhub, after about 300 miles, which i constantly had to adjust the cones to get it to spin without play. The axel crushed the bearings (maybe to due poor adjustment) but I had to fix it every week until that point. So I bought a used ritchey wheel with a tire and cassette for $30 on ebay and kept riding. Then after awhile I bent the large chainring after riding over a bunch of big logs (around 600 miles on bike), it was easy to hammer back in position, but I avoided big log crossings after that since i didnt have a bashguard. Also a plastic piece in one of the fork legs started popping out at around the same time.

The fork finally died after around 1200 miles and did not seem safe to ride anymore. So I feel i got my monies worth from the bike since it lasted well past summer, and I even got to try mountain biking. Was the bike crappy, yea it weighed 40 lbs and the hubs sucked, but this was my first bike since a bmx as a kid, so I didn't really know any better and I got a crash course in bike repair which I think is pretty valuable; probably worth more than the $100 bike cost in satisfaction and bike shop savings. I upgraded to got a decent (105) road biek since I liked commuting so much and it actually paid for itself after I got right hooked by a car and got some money. A few months ago I found an early 90's steel raleigh mountain bike for $15, which I stripped, painted, and built from the ground up as a rain bike. It ended up costing about the same as my Walmart bike and weighs half as much ~25 lbs (fully rigid though), but it took 2 MONTHS to complete(waiting for dry weather to paint/paint to cure/finding good deals on parts) and required some bike knowledge. No you don't need a crappy bike to learn how to do repairs, but you become pretty good fixing things since you have to do it more. All in all I would recommend the walmart bikes to people like Cig or myself who need something right away, can fix it, may not be accustomed to fancier rides, or are not sure about biking yet. Cig I am sure will put thousands of miles on this bike, and I think the hubs/rims may be the only thing that ever fail. Sorry for taking up so much space in your post. GO CIG!