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.