Elliptical

So I’ve been meaning to get an elliptical for awhile and when I saw that Costco had one on sale this month, I jumped. It was only available online and I had recalled receiving a letter stating that my Executive Membership which gives me an extra 2% back doesn’t apply to online orders. I decided to email Costco customer service to find out if that was the case. It turns out I was wrong:

Thank you for your e-mail to Costco Wholesale.

Yes online purchases do count toward the 2% the same way they do in the store. If there is anything further please let us know.

Thank you,

Joel
Costco Wholesale Corporation

Awesome. After reading that email, I pretty much jumped and made my purchase. The one I got is: NordicTrack CX 938 Elliptical, which is still on sale for $400.

Fast forward till last Friday when I decided to work from home. I get a phone call asking me if I’ll be available on Monday between the hours of 11am and 2pm for delivery from UPS freight. I said that should be fine.

The UPS gave me a call around 1pm today asking me for more specific directions to my place, since I live in a complex. Turns out he went into the wrong complex. But he got here in the next 10 minutes or so. Turns out UPS freight won’t take things up the stairs and he insisted that he dump the package in my garage which is on the 1st floor. I didn’t blame him. The package was huge and heavy and he was by himself. I thought to myself, I could probably bring it up part by part later. I had to get into work now.

When I get home tonight, I start unpacking the thing, and part by part, I started to bring it up to my living room. However, I was left with a very “big” problem. There was 1 gigantic part, which I would say weighed about 80lbs or so. That’s what sucks about living alone. I don’t have someone that could lift the other end of heavy things. Otherwise, I’m perfectly fine.

So I tried dragging it, and for the most part it worked. The stairs were a bit tricky, but I guess the recent exercises did strengthen me up. When I went back downstairs to the garage to check to see if I had anything left, that’s when I noticed some broken plastic. I was like *!@*!*!@#*@!#*!@$*!@#*@!#!@. It looked like it was part of some electrical connector. I went back up stairs to check it out and found the broken piece. Thankfully none of the wires were damaged, just the plastic encasing for the connector head.

So step by step, I started building the elliptical. When instructions asked to have one person lift up X, that person turned out to be a cardboard box. Things were fine until it got to the point of attaching the handles. First I needed to apply grease and being inexperienced with grease, I of course overdid it and ended with big chunks coming out afterwards. Then there was the stupid thing they called the push nut which came with a push nut tool, which was basically keep hammering at it till it held the handles in snuggly. That took a lot of work as it wasn’t easy hammering something with a hole smaller than what it’s trying to get into.

Don’t you hate it when you forget to put a washer between your screw and what you’re screwing into? Yah, that happened to me a few times and I had to unscrew it and screw it back again.

It turns out this elliptical doesn’t use AC power, but instead is powered by 4 “D” batteries. Thankfully I have all sets of common batteries which I’ve purchased from Costco (AAA, AA, C, and D). After plugging in the console unit, I did a test to see if the wiring was fine, since I did damaged its “spine” earlier. It turned out okay as I was able to control the resistance (located in the back) without any problems. What I found hilarious is the the fact it even has a little fan in the center of the console with multiple speeds. I wonder how long that’ll last with “D” batteries.

My elliptical was finally complete and it’s huge! Not exactly what I was expecting. Now I needed to squeeze it into somewhere where I would actually use it, which meant it had to be in front of the TV. Unlike my exercise bike, this thing was probably going to be stationary. Being 6ft long also meant it would barely fit between the couch and the TV.

So I moved my couches around and stuck both the elliptical and exercise bike in between and ended up with:

living room setupliving room setupliving room setupliving room setupliving room setup

Don’t worry about the wire going across the floor. Since I had moved my speakers, that was just part of the process to recalibrate them.

Afterwards, I noticed that my left toe had a painful feeling, like thousands of little pins poking at it. Not exactly sure what happened and it doesn’t look injured. Hopefully I didn’t hurt any other part of my body either.

I’ll probably give it a try either tomorrow or the day afterward. Building this thing used up quite an amount of energy.

4 Replies to “Elliptical”

  1. It is my belief that ellipticals are powered by you using them; the batteries just provide the extra few seconds when you slow down and it isn’t sure if you want to stop or not.

  2. Haha! I must’ve forgotten to fix the categories when I completed this entry. It originally contained the “Spanakopita” details, but I decided to split that off into a new entry, but forgot to remove the “food” category from this entry.

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