Bike came pretty quick, packaged well. I built it up over the winter and have been riding a few months now ~100mi / wk on good mix of XC and trail in New England. Feels solid still and I ask a lot of it doing sprints @ 6'1" 200lbs. No creaks, the frame feels relatively solid considering its weight. The frame came well assembled and properly torqued from LC who have been fast to respond to communications thus far the couple of times I had questions.
It took me a while to adapt coming from a Specialized Epic FS I retired last Fall. My times were at first roughly equal to what I was doing on the Epic but are much improved now. I went with the Shimano 10-51T groupset with a 34T up front. You cannot put a 36T up front — it won't fit and will dig into the chainstay without a spacer that'll mess up shifting. This is my biggest gripe since I prefer a 36T up front. The 51T rear gear is useless with the front 34 and almost never used so I'd rather have better gear range the other end. I plan to go with the cassette that doesn't have the 51T cog when I replace it.
Suspension is off a Spark, Fox 32 100mm up front. I, too, have the problem of needing to remove the bottom bolt of the rear suspension Fox Nude 100mm to fully access the Schrader valve on it. The problem is that the notch on the frame's side for pump access is only on one half of one side, and it's the wrong side. You cannot just spin the Nude 180 degrees to fix this because then the valve is facing the rear of the bike — only the front half is cut for it. You cannot flip it 180 degrees vertically without losing rear lockout — a deal breaker for me.
Overall a good bike, happy with it so far.
