With steel from Birmingham, aluminium from Nottingham and put together in deepest Derbyshire, the Stanton Switch9er FS is a Brit bike par excellence.

Stanton Switch9er need to know

• 140mm rear travel
• Up to 160mm fork travel
• 29in wheels
• Reynolds 631 steel front triangle
• Alloy swingarm
• Virtual/floating pivot point twin-linkage suspension design
• Coil or large volume air can shocks
• 63.75° head angle
• 76° seat angle
• 470mm reach on Medium/19in
• SRP £2,500 inc. Öhlins TTX 22 M coil shock (pre-order as of now)

Stanton: “The Switch9er FS is Stanton Bikes newest frame to the market. This 29 inch wheel Enduro suspension frame made from Reynolds 631 Steel (Extruded in Birmingham) with a T6 aluminium (Extruded in Nottingham) back end, brought together with our own cnc’d dual link system. This will be manufactured entirely in our unit Based in Matlock, with 75% of the process done in house, including, design, manufacture, welding, painting and decalling. The other 25% is outsourced to other UK firms.”

We first saw Insta-inklings of this bike at about this time last year. Check out our New wave of steel frame full suspension bikes story from March 2017.

Even if your boat is more floated by carbon fibre bikes, there’s no denying the thought and price gone into the Stanton Switch9er. And it looks flipping well cool to us as well, which doesn’t hurt.

The cable routing is all external (UK innit). The pivot axles are mostly 15mm thru-axles (the upper seat tube pivot is 12mm thru-axle). The bearing arrangement behind the BB is pleasingly wide-stanced and chunky.

Stanton are also refreshingly transparent and clear in their suspension concept and design. The rear wheel extends by 7mm during compression, which will engender some chain kickback but the trade-off being a back-and-up axle path for better bump soaking.

The bike is going to be extremely supple around the sag point ie. the first 30mm of rear wheel travel; the rear wheel will move upwards 2.25mm for every 1mm of rear shock travel. Once deeper into the stroke the shock path is described as progressive. The bike won’t work so well with small air can shocks. It’s coil shock or large volume air cans only.

Anything else? 445mm chainstays. Reach numbers are 440mm (on 17in) , 470mm (on 19in) and 500mm (on 21in). Titanium hardware in the upper linkage. Boost back end.  Threaded BB. 10mm BB drop. Maybe there’s a potential for custom reach geometry too?