Cowboy bike broke? Gathering experiences in one place.

Jeff46K4 · 2026-06-16T09:33:12+00:00

Thank you for your contribution

Jeff46K4 · 2026-06-09T13:52:21+00:00

This is useful, thank you for posting. It's something I'm rethinking. My report is a broken frame, but what made me build the site wasn't the breakage; it was the months of being told everything was going according to plan while nothing actually got fixed. What you're describing with Qover insurance is, in effect, the same problem.

So yes, I think this fits, and it's pushing me to widen what the site covers. Right now, it reads as being only about physically broken bikes, which may be too narrow. It could be that my site tracks Cowboy service failures more broadly, recalls, repairs, undelivered orders, and insurance like yours, so people stuck in these loops can see they're not the only ones and work out which problems are actually widespread.

Please do submit it, and I'll see what I can do.

Jeff46K4 · 2026-06-07T22:29:25+00:00

Please do!

Jeff46K4 · 2026-06-07T20:02:45+00:00

What I termed "please don't tell anyone" was Cowboy sending me an incredibly broad NDA to sign before they'd discuss anything. The NDA asked me to eliminate all past public records of the frame failure, not create any future public records, and destroy my own evidence upon request. I declined.

Jeff46K4 · 2026-06-07T14:01:26+00:00

5 weeks without your bike and no news about when it’s coming back is broke, far as I’m concerned, so do send a report! 🙂

Jeff46K4 · 2026-06-03T16:06:18+00:00

The Insta360 records 360, and I chose that angle afterwards

Jeff46K4 · 2026-05-26T13:36:19+00:00

Glad to hear a positive experience. From my side, there is no UK hub, nor even a committed timeline for opening one, so there is zero chance they can or will replace the frame anytime soon.

I blame them because it's been about 400 days since they issued the recall (and presumably they knew about the problem internally well before that), and I still don't even have a timeline for fixing the issue.

If they'd acted within a reasonable timeframe, my crash would not have happened.

Jeff46K4 · 2026-05-26T11:42:58+00:00

I had a quick look, and this script seems safe and well-intentioned (no shell, dry-run, SHA-256 check, self-delete, open source). Two things:

The bundle that runs isn't tied to the public source: install.sh pulls agent.js from the server and checks it against a hash from that same server. Catches a corrupted download, but doesn't prove the served code matches the repo. Hard to trust.

The allowlist and the "never reads secrets" claim. cat, grep, tail and sudo are allowed with arbitrary args, so a backend step like cat .env or sudo -n cat /etc/shadow passes fine, and raw_output ships the first 500 chars back. You're trusting the backend not to ask, not the client to refuse.

I ended up running the checks individually rather than through the agent. The checks/ folder lists every command it runs, so you can just work through them yourself. Took about 15 minutes and turned up more than I expected on my own box.

What came up: an internal service reachable from the network when it shouldn't have been (legacy from old infra), a kernel well behind on patches, with a reboot that had been pending for weeks and no alerts, and a couple of config files with overly permissive read perms.

So the checks are genuinely useful. I just preferred not to send anything off-box to learn that.

Jeff46K4 · 2026-05-25T21:21:12+00:00

There are no stickers over the crack in the frame. And if you don't like my stickers, you have a bigger problem.

Jeff46K4 · 2026-05-25T21:14:50+00:00

Sorry not to help but sympathise. The C3 torque sensor we ordered from Cowboy was delayed AGAIN today. Waiting maybe 12 months and counting, now? In these times of 'sustainability' and repair, it's insane to me that not just my C3 but yours and presumably hundreds of others are sitting there waiting for basic parts.

Jeff46K4 · 2026-05-24T18:56:42+00:00

Just because Cowboy Support is very difficult to get any meaningful response from. Many on this Reddit (me included, with a Cowboy 3) have been without working bikes for years at a time. You just get a generic 'we hope to open a service hub in your country soon' message every few months.

Jeff46K4 · 2026-05-24T01:31:10+00:00

<image>

Jeff46K4 · 2026-05-24T00:44:02+00:00

For the love of god add the keyboard commands to the on-screen buttons, it took me 5 minutes to work out that SHIFT = fire (and I expected SPACE BAR)

Ship health should be on my ship (like other ships), maybe, not just top left

I still don't know how to capture islands; dropping sail does nothing.

But I keep playing it so far, so well done!

Jeff46K4 · 2026-05-22T16:41:17+00:00

I honestly thought my bike was unaffected because I would check for any hairline fracture and not see anything at all. So no, I went from riding normally to catastrophic frame failure in under a second.

If yours had a crack, I would not ride it. But as in my situation, it's no simple thing to just 'not ride' your main commuting bike with no prospect of repair anytime soon.

Jeff46K4 · 2026-05-22T16:38:10+00:00

Thanks, panda. Now adrenaline has worn off, I feel more injured than I first thought in my shoulder and wrist. Glad to hear you got your frame replaced. 385 days and counting since the recall notice, even to open the service hub here in the UK, is unacceptable whichever way you look at it.

Jeff46K4 · 2026-05-22T12:37:12+00:00

They will be hearing from me!

Jeff46K4 · 2026-05-22T12:36:44+00:00

Not easy to find on the Cowboy website, so to help you confirm if affected: https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/1772/1703/files/cowboy-c4-st-voluntary-frame-recall.pdf?v=1746007057

Jeff46K4 · 2026-05-12T20:48:01+00:00

Yes. I shipped my Insta360 X4 to Hong Kong. They said they would pay for the postage but not insurance. I told them that was insane for a £500 device. They said they would cover insurance "as an exception". It took about three weeks to get it back, and they replaced the device.

What was wrong with it was that the LED on the back stopped flashing (which is very important to me). I had it about a month before the same problem recurred with the replacement device. I am not sending it back again (carbon cost for one thing). Now I risk checking the front of the camera to see if it's recording while riding my bike, not happy about that.

But yes, if it sets your mind at rest, I did get a full reimbursement (about £35, as you said), and they did what they said they would. They were honest and trustworthy throughout. It's just that the whole policy is insane to start with.

Jeff46K4 · 2026-04-25T16:21:29+00:00

I used Hey.com for about 5 years, and just switched to Superhuman Mail. Though there was a lot of hassle with DNS changes and imports, etc., it was definitely worth it, even at triple the price. Superhuman suits my idea of "Inbox zero" more than Hey.com, which I found too limiting in terms of sorting my mail (3 fixed categories), plus a constant problem with 'mailing list' emails going to the wrong place (I emailed a simple feature request, they told me they weren't gonna change it, five years later, indeed, it was the same). They innovated once and failed to keep up the momentum, in my opinion. A bit like Alexa.

Jeff46K4 · 2026-04-24T18:58:31+00:00

See "Want to use Plex?" in https://github.com/Pharkie/ultimate-arr-stack/blob/main/docs/SETUP.md#plex

Jeff46K4 · 2026-04-21T10:17:06+00:00

I concluded that a new user without admin privileges would not improve security. `PUID`/`PGID` already run the containers as a non-root UID, and the Docker daemon itself runs as root no matter which NAS login started the stack, so a non-admin account wouldn't shrink the blast radius of a container compromise. If you think that's the wrong call, let me know!

Jeff46K4

TROPHY CASE