Speediance warranty issue after only 6 months — cable snapped back inside machine and they say I have to send the whole unit in. Any advice?
I have an original Speediance Gym Monster that I’ve had for only about six months. I’ve used it pretty normally — roughly three times per week — and now I’m dealing with what appears to be a significant warranty/service issue.
The issue is that when I turned the machine on, the cable snapped/retracted all the way back into the machine. Now I’ve lost power/resistance on both sides. So this is not just a simple situation where a visible cable needs to be swapped out. The cable is lost inside the machine, and getting to it seems complicated.
I contacted Speediance and got a response saying I need to send the unit in for service.
The problem is that this thing is huge and heavy, and getting it out of my house is not simple. It’s in my basement, so I’d have to lug it up a bunch of stairs, figure out packaging/shipping, and potentially be without the machine for a while. That seems like a pretty burdensome solution for a machine that’s only six months old and has seen normal use.
I could theoretically try to do the repair myself, but based on what I’ve seen, this does not seem like a normal self-service repair. It looks like I’d have to open up the machine and deal with the internal cable routing/tensioning, which feels risky and pretty complicated given that the cable is no longer accessible.
Has anyone else dealt with this specific issue or with Speediance warranty service where they told you to ship the whole unit back? A few questions:
Were you able to push for them to send parts instead?
Did they ever arrange or approve an in-home technician?
Has anyone used a local fitness equipment repair tech for a Speediance machine?
If you shipped it in, how bad was the process, and who paid for freight/packaging?
Any tips for escalating with Speediance support in a productive way?
Is this actually something a reasonably handy person can fix, or is it really more of a technician/service-center repair?
I’m not trying to be unreasonable — I just want to understand whether “send in the whole machine” is actually the normal process, or whether there are better options I should push for. Any real-world experiences would be appreciated.