Nautilus E514 Elliptical Trainer
I ordered this product from Amazon last November. It's been an overall bad experience so far.
First of all, when the unit arrived at my house, the box looked like it had been dropped from an airplane. It was covered with black grime and there were several holes. I should have refused shipment at that time, but I was excited to start my exercise program and did not want to wait another 2 weeks. So I did a quick inspection and since most of the parts were metal I figured it was OK and accepted the box.
This turned out to be a bad decision as even though most of the parts were metal, there were some plastic parts and they had been damaged (strictly cosmetic). I figured I could easily call Nautilus and have them replaced, so I started assembling the machine. Unfortunately Nautilus refused to supply a replacement part and told me I should send the machine back to Amazon. Obviously this was not happening after I had already assembled the machine.
The assembly took about 2.5 hours (and I am fairly mechanically inclined.) Some of the parts did not go together easily.
The electronic display looks nice, but has some minor design flaws. The worst one of these in my opinion is the heart rate monitor. It takes about 20-30 seconds to get an accurate reading. The heart rate strap does not look very comfortable. The workouts are divided into 40 segments. For some reason the unit is unable to divide the time properly unless the workout is a multiple of 10 minutes. So you wind up getting extra intervals at the end of the workout. Also, the workout routinely tells you to increase or decrease your stride, which I find odd for a machine that has a fixed stride.
Overall the machine does not feel very solid, I am 280 lbs and the machine sometimes sways from side to side while I am working out, especially while drinking water or wiping sweat off my brow. The machine also makes a loud grinding noise while I'm using it. Maybe my expectations were too high for a product priced at $650, but I would be surprised if this product lasts until the warranty is up.
Update 2/4/10 - The plastic bushing that attaches the pedal to the drive shaft has broken, the machine is now in an unusable state and I am going to have to call Nautilus customer service tomorrow. Will report my experience here. Downgraded rating to one star pending speedy and successful resolution.
Update 4/20/10 - Nautilus was unable to replace the plastic bushing that came apart and had to ship me a whole new machine. I had to escalate to their consumer relations dept. to get them to actually send someone out to set up the new machine (they originally told me assembly and disposal would be my responsibility which I found completely unacceptable). The entire process took about six weeks, during which I was unable to use the machine. So far the new machine has been OK, with no mechanical issues. Upgraded rating to 3 stars since Nautilus eventually handled the problem to my satisfaction, although the amount of time it took and the overall inconvenience I was caused makes it unlikely that I will buy any exercise equipment from them again.
