At the end of March 2022 I bought an M5 CHR here. Bought on sight without test driving, something I do quite often. No time to waste, keep emailing back and forth is not for me. It made it so I could barely reach the pedals. Shortening the bottom bracket caused me to hit the front wheel with my 170 pedals. Fortunately, a colleague/friend Dennis had another crankset lying around which he helped to assemble. However, the biggest problem was the seat, which was not M5. It was barely adjustable, and the support at the back was glued. Normally it is fixed with a screw that you can easily unscrew.
The previous owner had also mounted wooden blocks between the seat and the support, to sit even straighter. The steering wheel isn't standard m5 either, it points a lot higher. Bram Moens helped me (a good month later, no time earlier) to make the seat of the lowracer fit on the highracer and to fit the bike with a tailbag. The unfortunate thing about this is that the tailbag was far from great mounted. Normally the point at the back runs parallel with the rear wheel, it was really crooked. On top of that the medium seat does not fit nicely on the tailbag at all. This requires a large seat with the lower support at the back of the frame. These are things I would have preferred to know from the beginning.
Bram himself, who was bothered by the adjustments of the previous owner (rightly or wrongly), does not finish the bike properly. As an end consumer, you expect a finished product, right? Just to say, I got some adhesive strips to take home to keep the tailbag in place! Because I am not at all handy and barely able to change a tire, I had previously cleaned the chain of the bike for several days, the bike itself I had also cleaned. What filth came out of the chain tube, sprockets and cassette you don't want to know. Bram had no time for mounting the chain, nor for adjusting the gears. I managed to fit a chain at home, but it's the principle that counts. I hate to say it, but when I read people talking about Sven Kröl's service here, the service seems to be on a completely different level.
Jan Bens, a nice guy who I met through the internet, helped me to fix the tailbag and gear problems. Removing the high support would be a day's demolition work according to Bram. That support for instance, can't you grind it off? I really don't understand how you can spend a full day doing that. With a grinder you can grind that thing off within a minute anyway it seems to me, possibly sand off excess particles manually. And then mount the low support on it. It just seems unlikely that you have a day's work, to be honest.
All in all, I haven't driven it yet outside of a small test drive. However, the seating position does feel a bit odd, I'm sitting quite upright. I'll wait for some better weather and take a first longer ride. A picture will follow shortly, but
@MarDet yours truly looks wonderful.
