Style 02 Magnetic PRO I bought this machine eighteen months ago to replace a Sunny Health and Fittness that I was disenamoured of. I have used it an hour a day (three x 20-min sets) pretty much daily since then. I consider it a good value for money. It can be somewhat delicate, and there are definite quality control issues, but customer support is excellent. The seat mounts on a little truck that moves on nylon rollers. The rollers give a smooth ride, but are very sensitive to dust and debris. I have dry skin, and if I flake onto the bar, I can tell it immediately I start rowing -- it feels like a washboard road. So I keep a towel next to the machine and wipe down the bar before and after each session. I also found the first four feet of tape tends to rub against the frame if I'm not careful, and this leads to shredding of the tape body. Someday it will wear through. There were two major quality control issues. First, their paint department left a sharp, four-inch long ridge of paint along the top. This chewed up one of the soft nylon rollers, and made the ride extremely uncomfortable. I contacted the company through Amazon and they sent a replacement roller set right away. It was but the work of a day and a half to tear down the roller box and replace the rollers that had been damaged. I suppose I could have sent back the bar and gotten a new one, but I didn't want the hassle, so I trimmed the paint with a razor blade and buffed it more or less smooth. Second, one of the holes for the bolts that hold the foot rests was drilled about 15 degrees off from horizontal. It would still take a bolt, but it was canted compared to the others. This had limited impact on use of the footrest, and since the only possible fix would be to return the whole 32kg rig to China and wait for a replacement, I decided to live with it. The only drawback is that the bolt is stressed unnaturally and has a tendency to break after eight or nine months -- I'm on my second replacement. Note: The bolts are Metric Grade 8.8, a medium quality carbon steel. I'm going to try the tougher, and more expensive, 12.9 grade and see how that works out. Both bolts broke with about an inch sticking out of the hole. I used an $18 DeWill Broken Bolt Remover (from Amazon) and they came right out. Having listed my major issues with the rower, let me go on to minor ones. The seat is a little hard, and gets uncomfortable after a while -- the fact that I weigh just over 230lb may have something to do with it. I bought a 2K Fit Rowing Machine Seat Cushion (Model 2), originally for the Concept 2 rower. It straps onto the existing seat, and is much more comfortable. The data display seems to be the low-end industry standard. It's the same as that on the Sunny. It doesn't have the bells and whistles of the higher end models, but it does give you the three basics: time (in minutes, rolling over at 100), strokes, and distance (in miles, not meters). It also gives you less helpful things like calories (useless, since it doesn't know how much I weigh or how old I am), and total strokes (of everyone who has used the machine, with no way to differentiate). As with the Sunny version, the labels on the frame don't match the actual order on the screen. Despite all of the above, I really like this rower. It sits out of the way against the family room wall, just in front of the TV. All I have to do is swing the end out, turn on a 26min anime episode, and I'm ready to row. It's quiet, and it has a good range of pull settings. In the last nine months I've put around 300,000 strokes on it, call it a thousand strokes per day. UPDATE: Amazon lumps both the magnetic and the water versions under this ID. Water version dimensions are quite different from the magnetic, and some of the information in the blurb is magnetic only. For example, the magnetic version DOES NOT work with the Kinomap bluetooth app, only the water version does. Be sure you are reading the right review.
