I’m going to start this post by saying that I want to like Surly so bad, and when it comes to their bike lineup, Surly is hard to beat. They have a wide range of bike options that are a bit more affordable than many of the competitors that sell similar products.
Obligatory glamor shots of my bike.
Before I Frankensteined the front fork.
This being said, I am officially calling into question their customer service and general reasoning skills surrounding the fork I just received in the mail.
As mentioned in an earlier post, I was a bit, um… peeved. Yes, peeved when I found out that my Surly Krampus had two front fork options, an off-road touring option with braze-ons and eyelets, and a more generic fork without the eyelets/braze-ons. Both have the exact same geometry, mind you, just different purposes. However, to get the off-road touring option, you have to buy it in addition to the generic fork. So now I have two forks with the exact same geometrical features, since Surly offers the option but doesn’t really offer the option. Great.
This situation frustrates me, but I was willing to let bygones be bygones, whatever that means, and forget my previous anger at dropping an additional $80 for the fork, but then… BUT THEN! Surly went and did something that just doesn’t make logical sense.
Surly’s Krampus comes in two colors: a moonlit swamp gloss finish for the Krampus and then a flat back matte finish for the Krampus Ops. So you’d think that when I ordered the Krampus fork with eyelets and braze-ons and what have you and I ask what color it is and they say black, it would have the same finish as the Krampus Ops; a non-glossy, matte finish.
Nope. The Krampus fork comes in a black gloss finish, which clashes nicely with the matte finish the rest of the bike has.
Behold, it lives! It lives! Frankenstein’s monster in bike form. The sun is almost blinding off that gloss finish.
A closer look.
Now I’m not a stickler when it comes to color, and of course I can live with the strange combination of blacks on my bike, but the big picture question for Surly is Why??? Why would you make a fork for the Krampus that doesn’t match any of the color schemes of the Krampus?
As stated previously, I love the bike; I get excited every time I set my feet on the pedals and take off down the road less traveled, but seriously, what is Surly thinking?