ExtranceIT

@Akassin regarding the customer service I got to experience how it works. I got the Alfa Romeo back in January, then accidentally broke one 15-long flip-flop beam (and I want to remark how I broke it, and to be honest I was an idiot, I stressed the piece so much cause I did a mistake and didn't want to disassemble a huge portion of the model, thus tried to fix it by bending pieces). I used their customer service, I had to attach a picture of my order (didn't matter where I bought it, simply a proof that I actually had the set) and the replacement part arrived in about a week from when I asked for a replacement. Inside the envelope (in cardboard) the piece came in a nice plastic bag with their logo on it (see flickr image, sorry for the dust, but it stayed on a shelf for about a month since I got it). So for me at least their customer service was really good, considering also that their brand is much less famous than lego (thus many less sets are sold).

To be honest I never had that much trouble following CaDa instructions. Theirs are a bit more messy than TLG ones, but I also feel like the latter are sometimes too "dumb-proof", which is not a bad thing, but I wouldn't ask to CaDa (or any other third party brand) the same level of detail

Yup, i believe I did. In the first comment I didn’t know and included just one picture, now I believe after the edit it is now correct, hosted on flickr. Correct me if I did another oopsie

Hello I'm new in this forum, but I wanted to share my latest effort, hoping somebody will refine what I did or will give a different take ;) Following the discussion about the Suzuki Katana, I too was not satisfied with two aspects of the model: it had the shifting mechanism on the wrong side of the bike, and it included a V4 engine, when the original bike features an inline-4. For the shifting mechanism: I managed easily to mirror the steps of the instructions and ended up with the pedal on the correct side. It required me to modify a couple of things in the paneling, but very few extra pieces were needed, close to none. The only real problem is with the kickstand, which touches the newly added pieces. I didn't want to spend too much time on this mod, so I ended up filing a bit of the end of the kickstand, since it is a fairly common piece, but I feel like there's definitely room for improvements. Maybe with more extra pieces the kickstand as a whole can be changed to end up with a better solution. In the end the paneling needed close to no modification, only moving the technic-panel on the bottom left. Both the brick built panel as well as the technic built panel required no rework. Regarding the engine: in this pic is not so clear, but I managed to fit a mini-scale engine, using the freed space, and connected it to the gearbox through a couple of gears and rubber bands. I had to slightly modify how a couple of bodywork panels are attached to the bike, but the position didn't change. Not fully happy with this solution, but I feel it's an improvement over the original model, being much more faithful to the original bike.