A nice note from Kevin…

Hey, I received this nice note from our good buddy Kevin a few minutes ago…

Joe!

First off, I was reading through the BARF thread you linked in the blog. Nice work dealing with them. I’m glad they haven’t managed to get under your skin.  I love my TT250 and am very happy with my purchase and the service I’ve gotten from you fine folks. 

On a more entertaining note, I thought I would send you the link to some of my pictures of adventures on my TT! I use imgur to host my pictures since I don’t like bothering with resizing the photos and I can conveniently share to lots of fora.

I’m not very good at riding in the dirt just yet, but I’m really enjoying the learning process. My first big dirt ride was up the mountain near my house to some radio towers, overlooking Utah Lake. I got into some rather more advanced terrain than I could handle, but the bike came through without major damage, just a broken brake lever mount. Replacing the reservoir/mount worked out very well for me, since it took the mediocre-at-best front brake performance and immediately brought it up to standard. For future reference, it may be worth flushing the brakes just so the bikes have a better braking profile. It’s definitely on the labor- and materials-intensive side, so I understand if it’s not practical. However, my front brakes could barely make the front end dive and were utterly insufficient to hold my bike at a stop when heading down a seriously steep road. It wasn’t that the wheel was sliding, the brakes just didn’t grab enough to stop the wheel from spinning with the lever all the way to the grip. Here’s the link to the gallery from that trip.

Anyway, I replaced that and have been riding around, performing various bits of maintenance as I go, and having a great time! The second gallery is from a quick trip on my way home from work up a little canyon to an overlook from which you can see the Salt Lake Valley and down into the Bingham Canyon Mine, which is one of, if not the biggest open-pit mines in the world. It’s pretty impressive, and the TT250 handled the road up really well! Here’s the link to that gallery.

Anyway, I’m looking forward to many miles (km) of riding, and I hope to make it to a Baja ride one of these days. 

Feel free to use any words or images from this email or those two galleries. Keep up the great business! Let the naysayers do their thing, because I love the value and service I’ve received from CSC.

Kevin

Kevin, thanks for taking the time to write to us, and we are glad you are enjoying your new TT250.  The guys over on BARF are not an issue; it is entertaining for us to read what they have to say and they are actually giving us a lot of free publicity.  The pattern of comments from the naysayers follows a fairly predictable trajectory, and it’s easy to let them run their course.  One thing I’ve noticed lately is that there are far fewer people bashing the bike simply because it is Chinese.   What’s almost always present is that more than a few of the bashers are employed by one or more of our competitors (that’s very predictable), and they never reveal that until someone else exposes them (they always hide behind screen names).  It happened again just this morning on that BARF board.  Ah, well, it’s all in a day’s work, I guess.  It’s fun.

Regarding the front brake on your bike, I’ll talk to Gerry and make sure we’re checking them on all bikes.  Thanks for the feedback.