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It’s on sale! I’ll take two!


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2 hours ago, F_in Ray Of Sunshine said:

It's just you. It looks nothing like an Orbea Orca:

That actually is not a bad looking bike.  I do have to admit that I HATE the current trend of the tomahawk-looking stem that is everywhere, even it if they do have some sort of aero reasoning for being there.

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7 minutes ago, F_in Ray Of Sunshine said:

I do hope you mean the Orbea.... The Pinarello looks like someone beat the hell out of it with an ugly stick, broke it and went and got another one and finished the job.

I did mean the Orbea.  Your description of the Pinarello is unnecessarily charitable, I feel.

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6 minutes ago, F_in Ray Of Sunshine said:

I tried to buy an Orbea, last time I was bike shopping. It didn't go well.

What happened?

I owned an Orca once, the orange one of course.  I got it at EP when I worked at a shop in Portland.  It was ok, but the headtube area was flexy, I thought.  They probably cleaned that up, though, in the last 15 years.

It looked like this:

Bike photo

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4 minutes ago, Randomguy said:

What happened?

One LBS carries them, but the owner is a twat, (and they don't stock any) so they were out. The next nearest dealer is Rochester an hour and a half away....and they had one, and it wasn't even close to my size. Other than that, it was drive to your neighborhood if I wanted to actually see one in the flesh - because I had some real concerns about sizing.

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2 minutes ago, F_in Ray Of Sunshine said:

One LBS carries them, but the owner is a twat, (and they don't stock any) so they were out. The next nearest dealer is Rochester an hour and a half away....and they had one, and it wasn't even close to my size. Other than that, it was drive to your neighborhood if I wanted to actually see one in the flesh - because I had some real concerns about sizing.

Where in the hell would you get one in NYC?  Nobody stocks anything other than Trek, Specialized, Cervelo, and Cannondale. 

Most shops here suck ass.  You should go to Oregon and buy a bike.  Lots of great shops, no sales tax.  Go for a vacation, buy a bike and have it shipped home for far less than the tax would have been.  The vacation will cost you, but there is no better beer state in the country.

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2 minutes ago, F_in Ray Of Sunshine said:

Manhattan, Brooklyn and Tenafly. I think I was talking to one shop that had a couple of leftovers but that fell through.

Manhattan and Brooklyn?  You would have to prove that they MIGHT have one, what shops were claiming ownership of at least one Orbea?  On the wrong side of the river, Strictly Bikes might still stock them, is that who you were thinking of in Tenafly?

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5 minutes ago, Randomguy said:

You would have to prove that they MIGHT have one, what shops were claiming ownership of at least one Orbea? 

It was a year or two ago, don’t remember the details. Vaguely remember they actually had a couple in stock, which were previous year models or some shit. The prices were really good, but they had like one tiny one and one next size up from what I was looking for.....or something like that. 

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35 minutes ago, F_in Ray Of Sunshine said:

It was a year or two ago, don’t remember the details. Vaguely remember they actually had a couple in stock, which were previous year models or some shit. The prices were really good, but they had like one tiny one and one next size up from what I was looking for.....or something like that. 

99% of the shops in Manhattan don't have shit.  In Brooklyn, there are a couple of decent shops (R&A is NOT one of them-sleazy fucking scumbags there), but you really have to go to a cycling capital like Boulder or Portland to find shops that usually stock high-end bikes, Orange County and the bay area, too.  A couple of other spots in the country and that is pretty much it.  That said, if you come down on a bike-shopping trip, I would gladly buy you a Zima.

You are right about Tenafly, though, there are a couple of shops that are worth going to.  Strictly bikes is a bitch to actually shop at, though, it is mobbed on the weekends because it is on the route of some of the only real riding you can do around here and lots of folks use it as a starting/stopping point.

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49 minutes ago, Randomguy said:

99% of the shops in Manhattan don't have shit.

110% of the shops around here fit that description. 
 

There’s the one I used to work at, but I don’t go there because the manager’s an asshole. (The owner’s a great guy). There’s a shop I used to go to, but he couldn’t be arsed to help me when I cracked my GT - even though other shops, that I didn’t buy the bike from, offered. They have a second shop, but the manager there is an arrogant twatwaffle. There’s another one a bit further out from me that’s pretty crappy, so I don’t waste my time with them. That leaves one....and I always get the impression they’re fairly elitist. They make a phony show of being inclusive, but unless you’re in there to throw down some serious money, you’re hardly worth their time. At best, you’re a transaction. But at least they have stuff.

There used to be a great shop -fatbike specialists- but the owners decided they wanted to have a life and not be tied to a shop 24/7 and sold it.

That leaves the one where I brought my Roubaix. They were always decent, but the owner retired and his son took over.
 

When I went in to buy my Roubaix, I told them I was interested in the 49cm. Yeah, that’s a little small, but I always wondered if my previous one wasn’t a tiny bit big. Instead of going through the numbers with me, he just said “oh no, you need the 52”. As it ended up, that’s what I ordered. Come in for the fitting....and they end up throwing a shorter stem on, because my elbows were locked...and the only one they had in that length, had a bit of rise to it. It worked, but left me wondering if that wasn’t approximately what the smaller size I’d asked for wouldn’t have been..... Then I asked to have the lever travel adjusted. He cracked the brake cylinder. Now, at least they owned it and ordered me another one, but after buying a fairly expansive bike,you would think they’d at least try to expedite the replacement... Nope. They finally got it in and squared away.  I asked him about the wireless unit for the Di2. “Oh yeah, I have one of those....I ordered it for a customer and he couldn’t use it....” Given that I had just bought a bike from him and they fucked up my brakes and made me wait two weeks for my new bike, you think he’d have offered me a discount on an item he had sitting on the shelf anyway..... Nope. Oh yeah, remember the stem they replaced? They gave me the takeoff, right? Nope. Ok, they kept it and gave me credit for it towards the new one, right? Nope. They charged me full shot for the new one and kept the old one, so I paid for two and got one.

So now I either suck it up and go to the snooty one, make a road trip to Rochester or shop online (guilt free).

 

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