A couple of years ago I decided I needed a second mountain bike, you know, to have in the shed just in case my main bike is put out of action. I wanted to avoid a repeat of my first summer in Portugal, when a trashed wheel and a slow bike mechanic made me miss nearly a month of the best MTB riding weather.

I wanted something in steel, something from the early nineties, and something a bit different. Luckily for me, Haro Extreme Comp frame came up for sale, in great condition and at a fair price, and I couldn’t resist buying what was, at that time, my 4th MTB frame.

This frame has elevated chain stays, a fad from the early nineties which eliminated chain-slap, and also allowed for a shorter wheelbase. This last point, the shorter wheelbase, made for a more responsive ride, and aided rear wheel traction when climbing by placing the rider’s mass more in line with the tire’s contact patch.

However, the fact that this kind of design fell out of fashion by the second half of the nineties speaks volumes about its cost to benefit ratio. Perhaps more importantly, I think elevated chain stays look really awesome!

Other curios features of this frame are curved top tube (similar to Raleigh’s Dynacurve), brake bosses for a u-brake on the chain stays, an extraordinarily short head tube for a frame this large, and funky bottle cage bosses.

Until my build is complete, I’ll have to resort to showing pages from the Haro MTB catalogue of the same year. I have the black frame, on the right hand side of this page:

But sadly, I don’t have the cool looking Tange fork. The page below explains the reasoning behind the unusual frame geometry.

Below we get to see the Haro Extreme Comp from a different angle, and side by side with a classic diamond frame from elsewhere in Haro’s 1991 line up.