Being ‘fiscally challenged’ a lot of the time I love their stuff, they come in for some bad press, but I feel a lot of it is unfair.
Other manufacturers will deny anything goes wrong with their goods, ever and when it breaks they blame the consumer, blame their dealers, create an environment that dealers don’t want to deal with warranty issues or take weeks or months replacing if at all and their customers accept it, because it’s “posh” stuff.
SS on the other hand have been a couple of ‘known weaknesses’ with some of their stuff over the years, but they own up, replace them and you move on. I’ve used them for so long I can’t remember, must be coming up to 10 years since I first took a pocket full of their pads to Morzine with me. I’ve had to return a few brake pads because they fell apart a bit, which is terrible, but they owned up and fixed it and I cracked two freebodies which they replaced FOC, lastly with a revised version which doesn’t crack, no fuss, no argument, 3 days later (1 day post to them, 1 day to sort, 1 day post back) – Hope on the other hand wanted a full on drains-up investigation with I cracked a hub body even though they were known to do that for a while, Fulcrum just ignored me, told me to speak to the dealer, and ignored them. Avid accused me of using my Code DH brakes in a manner unsuitable for them – I’m not sure what level of abuse you have to give a set of DH brakes to break them through “unsuitable use” but I know I’m not Gnar enough to do it.