The bike itself is rock solid, and the pedaling experience is good. It's quiet, with a nice smooth resistance.
There is some small wobble on the handlebars, which is a result of how the adjustment is designed. However, they don't make unwanted noises, so I can live with it.
Position adjustment is convenient enough, and the markings make it easy to reproduce your setup when sharing with other family members.
The seat is rock hard, which I expected, but some may not like it and will want to replace with something softer. I feel the seat is fine for the intended market for the bike though.
The biggest let down is in the area of resistance adjustment. This - like most of this kind of bike - involves a knob that lets you adjust resistance by feel, but provides no way to set a consistent reproducible resistance level. Every time somebody else uses the bike, you have to reset it by guesswork and endless twiddling. It's like an old fashioned shower where you can't quite find the sweet spot between too warm and too cold.
Also, the resistance has no integration with the stats tracked on the display. It reads the same calories and distance no matter the resistance. This may not bother some people, and calorie displays are always a bit fictional, but it's obvious this takes zero account of resistance, and I expected more from a bike at this price point. The stats display is totally underwhelming. It would also benefit from a back light so it's easier to read in dim light.
It's a very heavy machine, so you don't want it on your carpet as it will quickly crush it to destruction. The weight is reassuring when getting on or off the bike, but can be a bit of a pain when you need to move it.
As you might expect, there's also no option to let the flywheel freewheel. While spin bikes almost never have this, I think a lockable freewheel would be great for people in a family where a bike needs to do double duty as a spin bike and a traditional upright.
It's great as traditional spin-bikes go, but for anyone interested in stats, it's hopeless. If you want to collect performance data, you need some other product.
For those that care about country of origin, the product I received was marked as made in Taiwan.
In terms of delivery, the courier let it sit in their local warehouse for over a week before scheduling it for the last leg of delivery, and I don't think they would have delivered it even then if I hadn't complained repeatedly. G&F were not pro-active in resolving this, and I had to pester them to get a delivery, which was much later than the tracking estimate. However, I did get the bike eventually. The box had obviously been left outside in the rain when I got it. Fortunately, the bike is wrapped in plastic inside the box.
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