Magneto Turbo Trainer

[Schornsteinfeger]

There seems to be no mention in the documents of this forum of the Thorn indoor bike trainer. This submission seeks to remedy the situation.
The Magneto Turbo Trainer is composed of three basic sections: a substantial steel frame,   a magnetic wheel unit and a pair of turn screws, which engage the back wheel nuts to lock the bicycle in place.
I ordered one on Tuesday at lunchtime; it arrived up our muddy (French) village lane on the following Friday at breakfast time; it took about twenty minutes to assemble and fit.
The turn screws seem to engage Pitlock wheelnuts quite firmly and satisfactorily.
This trainer costs & weighs about a quarter of any ordinary indoor exercise bike and packs away nicely for storage. It is sturdy and steady, the magnetic wheel whirrs quietly and the trainee simply climbs aboard, pedals and changes gear to change resistance.
Such simplicity, quality and speed are appreciable, even to one already accustomed to the obliging service provided by SJS.

Less successful, however, was my attempt to send a couple of hubs back to Thorn’s, for wheel rebuilds.
The Rohloff and front hub were cosily packed up and posted off at the end of July by registered mail, they managed to get across the Channel but promptly disappeared into the arcanes of the English postal service.
In mid September, the French post admitted that the parcel was missing and sent €40 to console me. More comforting was the insurance company, who paid out €280, although this scarcely covered the £858 cost of replacing the hubs.
My hypothetical explanation is that the postal security staff on duty during the silly season simply asked the policeman who killed Mark Duggan to blow up my bike hubs, as a supplementary precautionary measure.
The moral of this sorry tale is: we should always insure to the full value of parcels for postage.

[Danneaux]

In mid September, the French post admitted that the parcel was missing and sent €40 to console me. More comforting was the insurance company, who paid out €280, although this scarcely covered the £858 cost of replacing the hubs.

  Yikes!  A sad lesson, and surely expensive.  I'm sorry for your loss and thank you for sharing it.  In the past, I found to my sad dismay that parcels can be traced or investigated for loss within a country's borders, but once they go international, that's pretty well it.  By any chance, did you send the entire wheels, or just the hubs?  The reason I ask is I have had better luck when packages don't advertise their contents by shape or size.  A little earlier this year, I lost a Wenger Patagonian Swiss Army Knife dispatched to me by Campmor, a familiar American supplier.  The package was shipped by private carrier (United Parcel Service -- UPS -- here in the States) and apparently was intercepted at their Chicago sorting facility.  The package was opened and three metal slugs of approximately the same size and mass were substituted before resealing.  Campmor said the tipoff for them was the use of brown cellophane packing tape on the outside of the box; they never use it.  Apparently, mine was not an isolated loss, and they told me they were investigating with the help of UPS.  The person I spoke with at Campmor said they were considering a change to plain, unprinted boxes and a simple street address for the return.  Sadly, I also found my last order for some Alex Adventurer rims ordered from another firm had been deliberately opened (knife marks on box), but it still came through.  A postal-inspector friend tells me a lot of packages stolen after delivery end up on eBay, and a friend at UPS cautioned me to either be home for deliveries or make arrangements with a neighbor for immediate pickup.  Apparently, thieves now follow the UPS trucks and remove items left on porches as soon as they are delivered, well before the recipient arrives home from work.  UPS was also the final carrier (of three) for my Sherpa, and the driver indicated he might have left it on the porch had I not been home (!).  Oh, I hope not...

we should always insure to the full value of parcels for postage.

Man, I'll say.  Expensive, but less so than the alternative, as your sad experience shows.

The trainer sounds terrific.  Off to  SJS Cycles' site for a closer look; thanks for the recommendation.

Best,

Dan.

[Schornsteinfeger]

Hi Dan,
The lost package contained only the hubs, I had dismantled the wheels to reduce weight and package size; however, I fear that jittery security personnel may have observed the sophisticated Rohloff technology throught their metal detector and concluded that it was a bomb.
(Reisen und rasieren, um nicht von Radlerinnen verlassen zu werden)

[Danneaux]

...and [perhaps] concluded that it was a bomb

<nods>  All jesting aside...yes, sadly this can actually happen!  It surely happened to me when I flew home from Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport.  On landfall here in the States, someone in the TSA concluded my packed bicycle might be a weapon of mass destruction and so set about destroying it, by the most inefficient means possible.  Mostly, that meant failing to even cast a glance at the photo of it properly packed that I had taped to the top-inside flap of the box.  There were parts scattered everywhere, and the lot came through with the pedals rammed through the spokes (I mean through the spokes, necessitating a complete wheel rebuild with new spokes and rims).  The Brooks saddle was badly scarred and the rails twisted a bit and there was a lot of paint missing.  The box was held shut only by the inspection sticker, and then I was flagged for a Customs Review to make sure I wasn't bringing a new bike into the country (not much chance of that on seeing it, but it still took some convincing.  I would have thought the mud and dirt from touring across The Netherlands and rainy Belgium would have helped, but no...).

Rohloff, threat to civilization...not!   

Best,

Dan.