IRONAX XHG HomeGym

Extremely smooth and very versatile. Gets all the muscle groups that I need. Great Job IronAx, would recommend it to anyone on the fence.

Once the machine is assembled, and 'tuned' it's a great piece of equipment. However, there are challenges.

Firstly, the instructions provided are terrible, and tip off where this machine is actually made. It is definitely of Chinese origin... but hey, what's not nowadays? I have a mechanical/engineering background, and have rebuilt car engines and many other highly complex things, so this machine was in my wheelhouse for difficulty.

I ran into a few problems. Firstly, the cable routing diagram is terrible. I have assembled a similar machine in the past and understood that pulleys, and grommets/carabiners/cable ends etc.... need to be removed to route the cables, but there is little to no information on this in the instructions. Someone with no understanding of this, is not likely going to be very frustrated and unable to figure this out. Also, There are also bolt alignment issues in certain areas where I had to use ratchet straps to put enough force/leverage on things to achieve alignment. There's also no mention of how to adjust/tweak the cable length by adjusting the nuts on the weight stack/stationary pulley so you don't have a gap on the top plate leading to pin selector misalignment.

The machine I got also had a few serious scrapes and paint defects, but thy weren't bad enough that I wanted them replaced. It's a piece of gym equipment in my basement I plan to heavily use, not a sculpture. After what I thought was final assembly, it was making a really bad scraping noise, and once I isolated it, it turned out 2 of the pulley cages were bent and the wheels were scraping against the side of the cage. I had to remove the pulleys and cables to to bend the cages into alignment and re-route the cables and re-install the wheels. This added 1.5 hours to the assembly time. Once everything was put together, tweaked and bolted up the machine is smooth, quiet, and very functional.

Lastly, the tools provided do not suffice to assemble this and tighten it properly. A proper set of sockets, allen bits that fit on a cordless ratchet/cordless impact and open ended wrenches are required, and a very good understanding of what's too tight or too loose when it comes to the wheels/pulleys is a must. With mechanics tools, and a good personal built in skill-set skill, final assembly/adjusting and futzing around it took me 5.5 hours to get a satisfactory end result. With all that being said, I HIGHLY recommend you budget for delivery and assembly by these guys as I'd estimate more than half the people that try to put it together themselves have issues with the machine or are living with deficiencies that would be solvable if you had mechanical/engineering experience.

The end product is a 5/5 but to get it to that point, it's gonna take some work and patience, hence knocking a star off.