if only i could ride the bike i just bought.

The D3 arrived this morning. It's an pretty overcast day here, and I woke up feeling not so well, so getting the bike was pretty exciting. It was easy to get up the stairs which is about all it takes to make me happy. Or so you would think.



Getting it together was, for the most part, a breeze. I really liked all these clever little hinges. It really does just snap together.

So this it where I started to have problems. As you can see, there's no seat. Currently, as it stands, if I try to put the seat post in, the seat is taller than the handle bars. As I have a 28" inseam, that would work, oh, I don't know, basically never.

The problem is that there is this white piece of pipe stuck up the stem (?- my bike vocab is limited here). There's no mention of this piece anywhere on the instructions or in any picture. My first call to Performance's product support, the guy says, "Yah, that's just a piece of packing material. Pull it out." And I was like, well, funny you would say that because I already tried that, but what the heck. I'll try again. So I hang up, and I try pulling really, really hard, and it won't budge. So I call Performance's product support again, and I'm like, no really, that piece of pipe won't come out.


And so this guy, he's a little more committed to being helpful and suggests maybe needle nose pliers, which would work if I had pliers that had an eighteen inch nose on them. And ultimately he says, well, you should take it to a shop. Which pisses me off to no end, because for this bike, they don't give you the option of shipping it to the shop to begin with, which I would do because I'm not a mechanically oriented person. So now I have no option really, lacking the necessary brute strength to get the pipe out (really, I think most people would- it's going nowhere), but to try and figure out how to get it to a shop. As SEPTA has a no bikes policy (including folding) and I lack bungee cords to strap this shit on the back of the ODT, I feel pretty hosed right now. Going to give the local Performance shop a call to see if they can make this right.