YES! Got it finally!
The RST arrived two days ago. Thanks again to everyone for great advice, my new thorn is just amazing.
First impressions:
The looks - beautiful finishing, high quality as you would expect. The bike looks classy, old school quality, not pretentious. I was a bit worried when I unpacked it and saw the number of spacers (probably some 15 cm), but I have installed the handlebar a bit lower, and now it looks just fine. All I need now is to cut the part of the fork which is sticking out, no big deal.
The feel - very comfortable. This is the first time I own such a high-quality bike, but I was still surprised. My previous bike has an aluminum frame with suspension fork, but i find the thorn more comfortable (except when I hit a bump on the road, although this does not feel too bad either).
It is surprisingly agile, and it's true that you need to be more careful because it does not ride like on rails, but it is excellent for commuting.
The handlebars are wider than I am used to, but I will keep them for the time being and see if I will get used to them.
Rohloff - I have read in other posts that the first impressions of the hub are usually "surprisingly silent". I knew that it will not be my case - I really like the silence of a derailer, and I remember having tested a rohloff bicycle a year ago or so, and found the gears quite loud. It was around midnight when I finished assembling the RST, so when I took it for a ride, it was very quite outside. And my first impression surprisingly was "surprisingly silent". I started switching from gear one up to seven, and could barely hear a thing. At first I thought that I had installed something wrong, because I knew that gears 8-14 were the silent ones. But then I switched to gear 8 and up, and found complete silence. Gear 7, is loudest, and has a grinding feel to it, which I don;t mind at all. I am therefore really pleasantly surprised, knowing that it will only get better and smoother.
Brakes, however, are not silent. I went for LX with grizzly carbide rims, and the brakes are squeeking quite a lot. Will this stop soon, as the brakepads get worned out a little bit, or do I have to do something about this?
One small drawback is that the bicycle arrived slightly damaged.
SJSC put it in a small cardboard box (bicycle was dissasembled so that it costs less to ship overseas), and when it arrived it looked as if it had been thrown off a cliff. The seat tube was nicked a little bit, and parts of paint were chipped off. One crank arm was also scraped, and more worryingly crank ring was damaged. I wrote to SJSC, and they quickly replied that they will send me a new crank ring, but htey were silent on the damaged frame. I suppose I will have to retouch it myself with the paint that comes with the bike - anyone can recommend how to do this, with a regular brush, or with something special?
By the way, the bike was really carefully wrapped up in foam, it was really the fault of DHL for the damage. However, the box was not marked "fragile", and noone could tell that it was a bicycle, so SJSC perhaps you can do this in future shipments...
Photos coming up soon, for anyone who is interested
