Goodbye Flip/Flop, Hello Love/Hate

The trials and tribulations of my botched spoke length calculation for the second “budget” wheelset got me thinking about something that I’d noticed about the flip-flop wheel I’d bought from the STW classifieds. If I’d continued my wheel build with the short spokes then the finished article would have had a couple of turns of thread protruding from the nipples, which would be unsightly and may weaken the finished wheel as each soft brass nipple would not be “full” of spoke. Most if not all of the spokes on the flip/flop wheel are showing exactly this, a little bit of thread protruding from each of the nipples. It’s a symptom of the shoddy work of someone who didn’t have the correct size, either because an erring punter ordered the wrong ones (like me) or maybe because a shop didn’t have the correct size in stock. This, combined with the rather slack spoke tension that I’d spotted previously, calls into question the quality of the builder’s workmanship. Both of these “faults” suggest that Condor Cycles may have built the wheel to a deadline rather than to an exacting standard.

Notwithstanding these issues, I had been planning to return the flip/flop wheel to the configuration it had when I bought it, namely a doublespeed. It’s now doubtful that I’ll ever get around to doing this because I’ve got a new project in mind, centred upon replacing my unloved On-One Inbred singlespeed frame. While it has some good points (cheap, fairly strong, easy to re-sell) there are lots of reasons why I don’t like the Inbred that much: crap paint that falls off if you so much as look at it oddly; previous poor experience with On-One which has left me with “brand antipathy” rather than the more usual loyalty; and no rear disc mount. Also I’ve grown to dislike with a vengeance the horizontal “track” dropouts along with chain tugs, disc brake incompatibility and general faffing about when removing a wheel. As a means of tensioning a singlespeed chain track dropouts can’t be beaten for outright simplicity, but they are far from being the most elegant solution. The slightest adjustment to chain tension inevitably involves messing with chain tugs to toe-in the wheel and then having to re-align the brakes, both fiddly jobs that I loathe. What I want is a frame with normal vertical drop outs that can be used with a normal quick-release skewer (without tugs!) and that will simply drop out, as it were, when the skewer is undone.

How then to tension the chain? When using a frame with vertical drop-outs the traditional bodge is to use a chain tensioner, something akin to a simplified rear mech (in some cases it IS a rear mech!), but while convenient this is also inelegant and spoils the lines and purity of the bike. Over the past two or three years the likes of Orange (P7), Kona (Unit & Explosif), Voodoo and others have used sliding drop-outs that incorporate normal vertical drop-outs but that can slide fore and aft on the frame and are secured with bolts. Sliding drop-outs are crude and do the same job as a track drop-out while enabling the use of a quick-release skewer. However although using a disc brake does become easier they do nothing to solve the brake alignment problem unless the brake mount is also part of the sliding dropout, something that I think has only been done on the Whyte 19. So sliding drop-outs are still too fiddly and I’m not a fan. No, what I want is something simpler still yet more elegant and that “something” is an eccentric bottom bracket.

An EBB is where the bottom bracket itself is fitted off-centre into a larger cylindrical sleeve that itself sits in an enlarged bottom bracket shell in the frame. To tension the chain, simply rotate the EBB until the chain becomes sufficiently taught, nip up the bolts and off you go! It’s a difficult thing to perfect, because the bottom bracket is a point on a bike where all the stresses and strains meet. Huge torsional forces are applied simultaneously by the rider via the bars, saddle and especially the cranks, and it’s also the place where both front and rear tyres like to deposit mud. Yet what an EBB is effectively doing is adding another moving part to the mix right at this sensitive point. The only budget frame that I know of with an EBB is Dialled Bikes’ £265 Love/Hate. Other budget manufacturers have dabbled with the EBB and ended up producing nothing but a bunch of creaking, groaning bedsteads. Is the Love/Hate any different and if so, why?

It’s been around for about 9 months now and rider feedback says that, yes, it is different. The Love/Hate uses a Phil Wood EBB, which has an excellent reputation as both a simple to use and silent component. I love the concept and the bike looks absolutely stunning in its bright orange colour scheme dressed up with all black components. It will definitely be my next purchase, the only drawback being that I’ll also have to replace my Pace RC31 “shorty” forks because the Love/Hate ideally needs the longer 440mm variety.

Back to the doublespeed concept, and it has occurred to me that with a bit of imagination I could set up my “utility” rear wheel as a single-sided disc-compatible doublespeed if I so wished. This can be done by using two splined cassette cogs and a suitable arrangement of spacers and would consequently render the Flip/Flop wheel redundant, the reasons being threefold: by their very nature, flip/flop hubs are not disc compatible and one of the reasons for buying a Love/Hate is so that I can use a rear disc brake; to use a regular cassette hub would eradicate the need to remove the wheel and flip it over every time I want to change ratios; I don’t think I’ll ever ride a fixie again, if I can help it! Even a single-sided threaded singlespeed hub can be set up as a doublespeed using a double freewheel, available at stupendous cost from White Industries, purveyors of pimpy top-shelf singlespeed finery from the US of A. So my brief dalliance with the Goldtec wheel will almost certainly end with it being sold on when the Love/Hate arrives. For a profit, of course!

Whyte 19

I’ve admired the Whyte 19 since it was first released in 2005 and many is the time when I’ve longingly looked over the demo model in On Your Bike underneath London Bridge Station, despite the dent under its down tube. Rather then building just another hardtail Marin suspension guru Jon Whyte created something that can be used with 100-130mm forks, as a geared bike or singlespeed, dressed up for all eventualities or stripped down for racing. It’s a compelling mix of UK-designed simplicity and Taiwan-made aluminium bling, with straight lines where there should be straight lines and hydroformed curves and bumps only where they make sense – none of the overindulgent nonsense you find on most big-name aluminium hardtails. Then there are the drop-outs, one of which includes a gear hanger and the other the disc brake mount which therefore remains stationary relative to the wheel hub. These can be adjusted back and forth +/- 20mm to alter the effective chainstay length and/or tension a singlespeed chain without the need to constantly fettle the brake calliper.

All clever stuff, but this comes at a price for there are and have always been two major drawbacks to the 19. The clever but pointless Maverick SC32 “upside down” fork does away with the traditional brace and with it all semblance of lateral stiffness and requires a unique hub, and therefore new front wheel, which is 100% incompatible with any other fork out there… except, that is, for the even dafter DUC32. And then there’s the price which, at £1,000 for the frame + silly fork or £2,000 for an XT-level full build, is utterly ludicrous and there’s no way I’d ever pay it. Even £700 for frame + fork as currently offered by Leisure Lakes is pushing the bounds of credibility because I doubt that I could sell that fork for much more than £250 – and anyone weighing more than 11st dripping wet would have to get shot of it or be forever tormented by the thing fluttering away beneath them, to say nothing of its reputation for unreliability. A net £500 or thereabouts for a hardtail frame is almost into “budget” titanium territory.

Were I ever to buy a 19 it would replace my much loved DMR Switchback frame as the heart of my hardnut hardtail. The Switchback was the very first of the now ubiquitous UK-designed long travel steel hardtail genre, since cloned cheaply by Dialled Bikes (Prince Albert) and On-One (Inbred 456) and expensively by Dialled again (PA 853) and Cotic (Soul). However it never gained the cliquey acceptance of these other three, chiefly as a result of several well-photographed frame failures a few inches behind the head tube. It’s easy to jump to the conclusion that the Switchback is an innovative but flawed design that showed the way for the benefit of others, as did the Comet airliner, but I think that might be both unfair and wrong. After all, over the course of two years I’ve ridden mine harder than I’ve ridden any other bike and it’s still standing unbowed, in spite of my 15st mass bearing down on it. There are rumours, unsubstantiated from what I can tell, that DMR’s initial 2003 batch were victims of some kind of design or manufacturing fault and that on future versions like mine, a 2004 model, although visually identical the problem was cured. It’s plausible, but I don’t think it’s the only explanation because if you look closely at many of the photos of broken Switchbacks you’ll find that they failed while sporting heavy-hitting forks such as Marzocchi DJs, Z1s or 66s. Now, DMR have a hard-earned reputation for building unbreakable CroMo dirt jump and street bikes, yet the Switchback is very much an XC machine, albeit a burly one – and how many XC bikes do you know that can take the abuse dished out by a rider who needs forks like that? None, I’d wager. I reckon many Switchbacks were bought by riders thinking, foolishly, that they were buying a frame light enough for XC but able to withstand the abuse of a traditional DMR, which is just woolly thinking. Admittedly DMR didn’t help in this regard by having the Switchback built with ISCG chain guide mounts! No, I think it’s possible that the poor old Switchback might be a victim of its badge’s hardcore reputation, not of a design weakness.

I’d tweaked and refined the set-up of my Switchback so that it rode beautifully and while a bike like that never steers with pin-point accuracy the natural flex in the frame and 120mm MX Pro fork forgave errant line choices and allowed me to give the bike its head on all but the rockiest descents. Its weight, combined with mine, meant that it crashed through obstacles rather than skittering over them and it really was enormous fun. The last big ride I did on my Switchback was at Thetford Forest where the swoopy singletrack sections might have been designed for it and where it felt perfectly balanced – a kind of cycling nirvana that is often talked about but rarely experienced in actuality.

All in all it sounds like I’d be mad to get rid of it, but times move on, other opportunities arise, there’s always the possibility that the Switchback’s reputation might turn out to be deserved after all and if it is I don’t really want to be around to find that out, to be honest! But the main reason for getting rid of it is that I’ve just bought a Whyte 19. It’s a second hand complete bike in excellent condition, with the original frame from 2005, custom-built at On Your Bike to a high specification and without the dubious Maverick fork. I paid a little short of £900 for the bike, which includes a Pace RC40 XCFR fork, Hope XC/Mavic XC717 wheels, Hope brakes, SRAM X7/9 drivetrain, various high-end pimpery from Race Face, Ritchey & Bontrager and a little too much blue anodising for my tastes. The whole lot must have cost upwards of £2k to put together and I reckon that I can sell the components – excluding the frame, which is the only part I want – for about half that, making the deal entirely self-financing.

The previous owner had the bike set up as a twitchy lightweight XC bike weighing in at about 24lbs with 1.9” tyres on those lightweight wheels and the carbon fork, bars and seatpost. Even though this isn’t my intention for this bike I’m half tempted to keep some of the components and blend them with the best bits from my Switchback. But I’m more interested to see how the frames themselves contrast, so for starters I’ll swap pretty much all of the components straight onto the Whyte, which I’ve already completely dismantled. That was a process infused with melancholy. A lot of love and thought, not to mention time and money, goes into custom building a bike from scratch, and I know it well. And yet two moderate evenings of work can have the whole thing stripped, cleaned, individually photographed and ready for sale! I dare say that the previous owner might be moved to tears at the fate of his creation, but it’s about to be reborn as perhaps the ultimate hardnut hardtail.