Schwinn Roadster 12″ Tricycle review

By egress123 • Kids • 28 Jul 2011

I just received Schwinn Roadster 12″ Tricycle from Amazon.com.  The quality was pretty bad.  It had several problems that I needed to fix in order to assemble.  I’ll describe the problems below.

 

  Amazon.com sent the tricycle without any additional package to protect it.  It is not an unusual practice for such a heavy item, but in this particular case, the item package was damaged.  More Photos shown below.

   

As you see in the post above, it made a hole on the side of the box.  Luckily nothing seemed to be broken.

Items were neatly arranged, although I did not see any significant packaging protection inside the box.

There weren’t many parts to assemble.  So I thought the assembly would not take more than 30 minutes.  I was wrong..

The first step in the assembly instruction was to attach the body to the rear tire part.

Unfortunately, due to the poor manufacturing process, it had the excess metal part that prevented me to fully connect the body to the rear tire part.

Using Dremel, I was able to ground off the excess metal and thought the problem was solved.  I was wrong again.

   After attaching the body, I’ve noticed it is way off the center!  Entire frame was tilted toward right!

My solution was to cut the card board box into small strips and pad them in the connector area so that the body will straighten out.  Well, it did not quite work well neither.  So I ended up using a mullet hitting the body to straighten it up.  It somewhat worked but still it was not straight.

Another interesting note.  the body had “Schwinn Quality” sticker attached off-center.  I thought it was a fine example of being oxymoron.

The next step was to attach the seat.  You can adjust the seat so that it will sit closer to the handle bar or farther from the handle bar.  The picture shows the closest position since it was for my smaller-than-normal 2-year old daughter.

The next step was to insert the front wheel.  Nothing complicated here.

The final step was to attach the handle bar and tighten the connector.  That was it! More shots of the completed tricycle are shown below.

 

One thing to note here is that all the tires were missing the valve cap.  It was not listed in the manual and I could not find them in the package.  I thought it was odd that a tricycle at this price range would skip on the valve caps to save money.

Finally, a picture of my smaller-than-normal 2-year old on the trike.  She needed a small pillow behind her back to reach the pedals.  But once she reached them, she was able to pedal the trike with some efforts.

Verdict

 The completed trike looked very nice.  I wish Schwinn went through the product quality check more throughly.  The problems I’ve faced were pretty significant so that if the user did not have right tools, it could not be fixed.  The trike had several blemishes on the finish which could also be caught with better quality control.  The part that connects the main body to the rear end of the trike was very flimsy and did not look like it would hold for a long time.  Only time will tell how durable the connector is.  If it breaks, I’ll update my post to let you know.

Schwinn Roadster 12″ Tricycle gets 3 and a half Papayas!

[INSERT 3.5 PAPAYA LOGO HERE]

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