Top critical review
3.0 out of 5 starsInitial review: WOW! What a workout!!!....and that's just to get the thing assembled.
Reviewed in the United States on May 3, 2021
UPDATE 5/5/2021: 99% assembled and I'm waiting on a wrench to finish.
The hooks to hold the shoulder bar are bent too far down and you can't put the bar up there while the cables are connected.
The center bolts which are the last to attach, require two nuts and they don't thread in AT ALL without double wrenches. Yet Bowflex felt no inclination to just include a single wrench to try and help you out.
As a workout, I have no problem with it, the resistance is fine, especially on the legs.
But the couple/decouple mechanic gets annoying real fast. It's flexible, but again there was an easier way to accomplish the same. You spend minutes just switching out the couplers to go to a different type of workout, versus other machines.
ORIGINAL REVIEW:
This is my third Bowflex in my lifetime.
Listen...this is NOT hard to assemble. At all. Anyone should be able to do it solo (but getting the box into the room where you want it - yeah, you need a dolly if you don't have two strong people because boxed this thing is HEAVY).
It's tedious to assemble. There's a difference between "hard" and tedious. Tedious is when the designer added unnecessary complexity and/or steps to what should otherwise be a simple, straightforward thing.
That's what this is. Tedious.
Because for whatever reason, they have compartmentalized way too much on this one vs. the older ones I'm used to. Situations where you've got four separate parts and it could have just been one part pre-machined as a single. Having things machined as separate works best when (A) the combined part is too big or (B) there's a plan to reassemble or disassemble other than just moving, for example, the pull bar.
Take the base. There's never a situation where you're going to disassemble the base because it holds up the entire frame of the unit. Yet this is FOUR separate pieces, one of them heavier than anything else in the box. Why are these separate like this? When assembled flat, it fits the exact length of the box it's in, meaning they could easily have just machined this as one (admittedly heavy) part and saved the purchaser at least 20 minutes/ 10 steps of assembly. OR, don't have it machined that way, but pre-assemble it that way.
Then there's the actual bow manifold. You're required to screw this to the frame. Why? Why can't you just have a simple interlock (that's what my old one was in 2011...you put it in and the holder "Locked" over top of it, securing it in place)? Because as-is,. if you ever wanted to replace (defect) or upgrade this, you have to flip the WHOLE unit over (did I mention it's heavy?) to get access to the bottom to unscrew it. Why did this make any damn sense whatsoever?
So I'll revisit this after I've actually used it for a workout beyond the workout I got from assembling it, and I'll update based on that at some point in the future.
