I consider myself average to below average when assembling things but I had the Sprint Rower together in under 15 minutes. The row machine basically comes completely assembled and all that I needed to do was attach the display panel. The display is nice because it gives you all of the basic features and the numbers are fairly large. I like to row without my glasses so this helps.

This is the first piece of exercise equipment that I have bought thru Amazon and I was very satisfied with the process. It was easy to do and the product arrived without any glitches.

I love my new row machine and would recommend this product to anyone.

I just received mine yesterday and was pleased to see it was all heavy steel with no plastic that I could see, even the casing is metal. The directions were hard to make heads or tails of which turned out to be okay given that a slow witted monkey could put this thing together in under a half hour, given that I am at least a few IQ points ahead of a slow witted monkey I was able to assemble it in about 15 minutes. Once the machine is all together feels really solid with only a slight, negligible wobble to the seat but that is not unexpected given that I’m a 6 foot 215 former bodybuilder and most things wobble or yell “hey don’t sit on me” when I sit on them.

Once on the machine I was pleased with the motion and resistance as it felt pretty even and the seat glides smoothly. I know your thinking,”he seems to really like this machine why did he only give it a 4 star rating”, here’s why. It’s all about the hydraulic pistons, if you do not have a decent amount of muscle (mostly children, hippies and very petite women such as my lovely girlfriend) you might find the resistance even at level one to be a bit much. I came to this conclusion as my afore mentioned lovely girlfriend tried it and had trouble pulling the arms or oars if you prefer, this resulted in an angry look which may have been related to my laughter. For me and other manly men or manly women, I’m not one to judge, this will not be a problem. Where everyone regardless of levels of manliness will have a problem is when they attempt to change the resistance levels which at some point you will want to do. When changing levels (which is done by a knob on each piston) even when you put them on the same setting getting the resistance even or relatively even becomes a needlessly long and tiring process (like watching The English Patient), you will eventually get it right but risk losing the motivation to work out in the process. I fortunately did not lose motivation and did two runs of 20 minutes, one last night and one this morning, and all was well with the world except the hand grips made my hands smell like the south end of a north bound horse and the pistons get really, really hot to the touch. The hot to the touch part can be solved by not touching the pistons, figured that out myself.

Lastly the computer, whoa is the computer. Honestly it would have been more useful if it was one of those old DOS based Tandy units with nothing but Oregon Trail on it. I’d suggest finding other means of counting your strides…rows, whatever since this thing cannot count. I did 100 strides as a test while I was mentally counting and it said I had done 276, and for the record I have the utmost confidence in my ability to count to 100. On a positive note the timer appears to work ok but takes several minutes to figure out and the directions are about as useful as that other guy from George Michael’s old band Wham.

In closing this is a good buy and currently at about half the price of those shady Germans at Kettler. I will update my review after I put some wear and tear on the machine. Until then happy rowing.

3/13/09 – I have made this machine suffer daily abuse (minus one or two days where I had a cold I affectionately nicknamed “the creeping death”) for around the last month. After several weeks of having my heavy rear end seated on this machine while I angrily and vigorously yank at the handles the machine is still performing beautifully. Given my well documented destructive powers a few weeks with me translates to about a year of wear and tear under normal circumstances. The computer is still useless but that is a minor annoyance, the only negative change I have seen in the machine with a bit of wear is the cushion hand grips are always sliding during my workout. Unfortunately I am not clever enough to fix this but am open to suggestions.