Saturday, February 12, 2011

Bike assembly completed, now making it do something!

Putting my new exercise bike together turned out to be a relatively easy job once I made one minor adjustment to the directions.  I had been warned by reviewers on Amazon.com that the bike was an excellent one once it had been assembled.  The assembly, however, they said almost to a reviewer, was very challenging due to small, ambiguous pictures in the small assembly instruction booklet.

Those reviewers weren't exaggerating, especially to an asssembly challenged individual like me.  The bike arrived right on schedule late Friday afternoon.  For a couple of hours Gator Wife and I worked on the project.  We didn't get very far, primarily because we had  hard time deciphering the extremely tiny print and very small pictures.  All the print did was identify a part and didn't explain how to put the part onto the bike.  That was the picture's duty.

We finally gave it up for the evening and I went to the manufacturer's website seeking better instructions.  I found the same manual but in .pdf format.  I downloaded it and printed it on regular 8x11 inch pages.  What had been difficult on the small manual pages became clear as a bell on the large pages.  It all made sense and the bike flowed together in a relatively short time Saturday morning.

And, son of a gun, the darn thing even works.

This is what my new stationary exercise bicycle looks like:

It does have some extensive electronics.  The bike measures just about all exercise functions like pulse, heartbeat, speed, distance, calories burned, and more.  It also has 17 fitness programs and a bunch of resistance levels from which to choose.  I have yet to tackle using those functions except to make sure the console mounted on the handle bars did, indeed, show those things.  That console appears to be working just fine. 

Now my construction weekend has changed from assembly to figuring out how to program it.  I did notice that the small user manual that came with the machine is also replicated in the larger .pdf format.  I think that'll be my first task, getting it so these almost 3/4 century eyes can read it.

The rest of this weekend here will be fun.  I hope yours is, also.

GiM

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Way to go Assembler Dave. I am proud of you. Good job...

FF

GiM said...

I truly appreciate that, FF.

GiM