As of last Friday, the guys at bikesdirect.com seemed to be on top of the warranty replacement for the Moto frame. The warranty does not, however, cover labor, shipping or handling. So to get the new frame, I have to strip the old frame, box it up, ship it to Texas for inspection and pay for shipping of the new frame back to me. Not great, but better than buying a new frame ... so I thought.
I went to the bike shop and got an old bike box. That saved me $45 for the knuckleheads at the shipping joint from building a box for me. With the lightweight bike frame, I was expecting a few bucks, but anything over $50 was too much for this FatGuy, especially because I had to pay shipping both ways. It seems, however, that shipping now charges by both weight and another new, communist measure called dimensional weight. This is a way for the shippers to charge crazy prices for large boxes, regardless of what is in them
From wikipedia: Dimensional weight is a calculation of a theoretical weight of a
package. This theoretical weight is the weight of the package at a
minimum density chosen by the freight carrier. If the package is below
this minimum density, then the actual weight is irrelevant as the
freight carrier will charge for the volume of the package as if it were
of the chosen density (what the package would weigh at the minimum
density). Furthermore, the volume used to calculate the Dimensional
Weight may not be absolutely representative of the true volume of the
package. The freight carrier will measure the longest dimension in each
of the three axis (X,Y,Z) and use these measurements to determine the
package volume.
In other words, to ship a big box of feathers now costs the same as shipping a big box of bricks, so long as the bricks weigh less than this theoretical 'chosen density' specified by the shipper. If teh 'chosen density' is lower than my bricks,. then they can use the actual weight, which is even more profitable.
This applied to my bike as it weighed only 22 pounds in the box with packaging, but due to the size of the box, the dimensional weight was north of 90 pounds. $130 in shipping, one way. Actually, no fu&*ing way was I shipping this frame back. $260 is shipping to get a 'free' replacement bike?
Email has been sent to bikesdirect.com for an alternative. Stay tuned.
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