Bent chainstay - trashed bike- uncommon?

For what it's worth, he did say he'd had a few other condor pistas in to fix and didn't rate the taiwan quality too highly.

People shouldnt just diss Taiwan like that. They have the best bicycle manufacturing expertise/output in the world.

The only reason that some frames dont meet expectations is that they are extremely good at working to a pricepoint, if the European/American brand gives a maximum budget (usually very low) they will build working bikes for that price. In most cases the companies get greedy and stress price over quality too much.