Woe! Twice woe! My lovely Condor Tempo is no more.
I was washing it last week and trying to work out if I could go a bit longer without adjusting the chain tension and changing the back tyre when I noticed a tiny crack in the paint around the seat-tube cluster. Alarmingly, there was another - even smaller - one on the other side.
Hoping it was just a paint blemish, I took it into Condor this afternoon -- only to have the sad news confirmed. Mine appears to be one of a small batch of steel frames with a manufacturing fault which leads to cracked seat tubes.
To their credit, Condor seem to be handling it well. There are no Tempo frames of the right size in stock at the moment, so they'll rebuild my parts onto a Pista frame (more track oriented, no mudguard clearance) and I can ride that until the next shipment arrives sometime in December. Then I get a new bike.
The new Tempos are dark blue, apparently, instead of the tasteful Saronni-red that mine came in -- but I think I can live with that.
I'll miss it though -- it was a great all-round, all-weather bike which was increasingly becoming my bike of choice for all kinds of riding, not just urban commuting.
And a reminder of how important it is to wash and check your bike frequently. It's the second time I've discovered a cracked frame like that -- far better than finding it on a downhill.
2 comments:
I've just had exactly the same (ie a crack on the seat post collar) thing happen to me on a Fratello (which is the same frame with vertical dropouts). They said they'd never seen it...but will replace it anyway. I can't fault Condor's service. I've never had a quibble from them about any return.
Agreed. They've been very helpful, although getting the frames from the factory in Italy seems to be a rather long process. It's odd they said they'd never seen the crack before -- when I took mine in they said they'd had a whole batch of steel Pista's with similar problems, though mine was the first Tempo. Something to do with internal shims being in the wrong place.
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