O/T (again!) In response to Anonymous Coward

Dear Anonymous Coward,

Thanks for your thoughtful, well argued, and compelling comment on my previous post on the failures of my Halfords bike (Apollo XC26s).

Having raised the bar for debate to a level unseen since Cicero, I thought better of responding on the thread itself, and decided I'd dedicate a whole post to my rebuttal and the poor quality of my Halfords bike.*

Much as your hastily tagged on apology was obviously heartfelt, please don't take this personally.

Now, as tempted as I am to call you are a mud-dwelling spineless cretin with a predilection for comsuming excrement from the rotten bowels of your employer, I'm not going to.

Because that wouldn't be nice, and I don't have any evidence, despite the strong hints from your four word missive.

The key word there was evidence.

Now go grab one of your special crayons, and write it down (take you time with the letters though so you keep it neat) because you'll need that later.

Lets get started then.

Firstly, normally I would put poor spelling down to typos etc. (a condition I suffer from myself) and not make light of it, however, in your case I'm willing to say it's from ignorance. After a considerable amount of experimenting with my keyboard I am still unable to recreate the spelling of overeaxaggerated you used.

Secondly, 'biased' usually refers to a judgement influenced by a prejudiced perspective (still with me knubnuts?) so I can only assume you're suggesting the experience of riding a bike could cloud the judgement of it's performance - and I can see why you would.

I purposefully waited three months before reviewing it so I could reflect more honestly on its performance, having 'lived with it' for a while. This, if anything, was favorable to Halfords as it meant the horrific experience of buying the bike in the first place would be less likely to cloud my judgement.

Sadly, this also gave enough time for the weaknesses of the bike to show through. My experience has found it to be made of cheap crap, and all the bits listed before (except the front disk brake which I said I rated) have failed on at least one occasion - all while riding through traffic which is pretty scary.

As I'm typing this I've still got grease on my hands (despite two showers since) from having to reattach the rear derailleur last night as the fixings it came with are disintegrating.

If I were biased I'd actually be working for another bike company or be pushing for something in return. Neither of these are the case and, as I said, I've already turned down the offer of money from Halfords customer services (Google 'integrity' for more info).

I know working for Halfords must be disheartening - all the returns and complaints - but if you're going to offer bikes as good value, they shouldn't need money thrown at them repeatedly to keep them on the road.

But then, I suppose that would mean you weren't making any money on repairs...

If people don't believe me, fine. They're free to have a look in bike forums for other independent reviews.

I'm sure there are even some people who bought this bike and have got along with it nicely. Good for them.

I also know Halfords do actually sell some good bikes - Boardmans, some Carrera's and even Kona's. If anything that makes it worse as it raises the expectation on the lower models - expectations I don't think they can meet.

I don't profess to be an expert at anything - which I think helps - so I probably am wrong on occasion.

But if you're just going to play hit and run in the comments section as part of a PR strategy for Halfords, at least have the decency to add some evidence to your argument or I'm going to have to waste even more time writing bad things about you...

* Thus help pushing criticism further up search rankings - good work fellah!