WyndyMilla Saw Doctor review

I’ve wracked my brain and can’t think of another product (except possibly shoes) that can offer the same degree of personalisation as is possible with a bicycle.

I often hear custom bikes likened to bespoke suits, but while a tailor can produce a suit to fit your precise measurements and you get to select the fabrics, the result is still not truly 100% unique to you. After all, you’re limited to picking the fabric from a catalogue or swatch.

It’s the same with bespoke kitchens and bathrooms. You still have to pick your surface and door finishes from set options, so it’s not fully custom, is it?

You can, however, have a fully custom bicycle. It can be made millimetre-perfect to your fit dimensions; you can (with the right expertise and deep enough pockets) specify precisely how you want it to ride; and when all that’s done, you can choose whatever crazy colour scheme your mind can conjure.

That’s truly bespoke, and that’s what WyndyMilla has built its business on.

Dual nationality

WyndyMilla is a British bike brand based in Surrey, but its frames are all handmade near Venice, Italy, before winging their way back to the Surrey Hills to be painted and built.

The Saw Doctor is the company’s aero road frame, each one created from scratch, thereby enabling geometry and carbon fibre layup to be customised precisely to the rider’s needs and preferences. A bike fit is included in the price, as is first-tier custom paint.

I should point out immediately that this Saw Doctor wasn’t built specifically for me. It was built to the fit and requirements of company co-founder Henry Furniss, who, I think it’s fair to say, is a dyed-in-the-wool racer.

Luckily, anthropometrically at least, our bodies are a close match and I only had to move the seat up a tiny amount to achieve an almost perfect fit.

Had I had the luxury of specifying my own dimensions, the only thing I would have preferred was maybe an extra 10-15mm of front-end height (Henry’s clearly more flexible than I am), but it was well within my fit parameters to allow me to test this bike purposefully.

Before I get into the ride, though, I feel I must mention that this bike garnered more attention from friends and strangers – all of it positive – than any bike I’ve tested so far this year.

It might have traits similar to a large number of bikes out there at the moment – for example its truncated aerofoil tube shapes, the dropped seatstays and a one-piece cockpit – but unanimously people seemed to feel that WyndyMilla has delivered a real head-turner with the overall frame shape and paint scheme.

From my perspective, I wouldn’t disagree. It’s undeniably an attractive beast, and I particularly like the cockpit. The one-piece set-up with fully internal cabling is the neatest I’ve seen from any brand, and the paint scheme manages to be both funky and classy, but I need to focus on the bare bones beneath the glossy topcoat to forge my opinions out on the road.

Race not, want not

At 7.41kg this machine is pretty lean for an aero road bike, especially considering it has disc brakes, a Di2 groupset and 60mm deep wheel rims. At the core of that is a claimed frame weight of around 1kg (allowing some variance according to custom choices and paint).

Marrying low weight and stiffness always delivers something that’s hard not to like in a bike – an immediate sense of efficient power transfer resulting in delightfully fast acceleration. That’s certainly the case with the Saw Doctor.

It’s unwaveringly stiff laterally and it surges forward eagerly with every turn of the cranks. I found myself accelerating up to 40kmh with consummate ease, and the bike even sounds fast. There’s a swooshing on every pedal stroke as if a samurai is swinging a sword a few inches away from your ears.

Amplified by those big tube shapes and deep rims, the Saw Doctor goads you into accelerating harder. Its demeanour at speed is of resolute stability, yet the steering remains deftly responsive.

The bike feels oddly (but in a reassuring way) as if it’s steering from its centre of gravity, rather than the steering axis. Pitching into high-speed corners, there’s a real sense of solidarity about the frame, as if the whole bike tips in as one. There’s no perceptible flex and no question about it sticking to the chosen line.

Even if I didn’t know Henry, it would be easy to predict what type of rider he is. His influence is written clearly in this Saw Doctor’s DNA. It’s a crit racer’s dream.

But I don’t race anymore. And this is the point where Henry and I obviously have different priorities. I found the bike a touch too harsh to enjoy beyond a two and a half hour ride. I’d find myself having to shake out my hands as they physically ached from the continual pounding.

On balance it handles the high-frequency road buzz better than the big hits, the larger tube shapes offering a greater area through which to dissipate the vibrations, but comfort is not this particular bike’s strong suit.

I would presume there’s only so much comfort you can tailor into the layup of a full aero rig with beefy truncated tube profiles, so if a cushy ride is top of your wish list maybe one of WyndyMilla’s other models – such as the Massive Attack – might be a better place to start.

As an aside, though, the Saw Doctor does offer clearance for 30mm tyres (and I tested with only 25mm), which would be one way of pegging back some of the harshness.

Last month I tested Argon 18’s Nitrogen aero road bike and my summary of that bike was very similar to how I feel about the WyndyMilla. You have to want that speed and thrive on it to really enjoy the bike.

Expect bloodshot eyes, but also expect the hairs on the back of your neck to stand up, because the Saw Doctor is undeniably an exhilarating ride.

Spec

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