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@rat-racer
Unbelievable. It's been another year since I last posted about this project and I've no excuses besides distractions at work. Funny that the top of this thread says the project might be a 'slow burn' but three years is, well, ridiculous...
We have good news now, though. The frame is home and with fresh paint – a blue close-ish to the original and without decals, so I can apply over the lacquer just as the frame was originally (those stickers were only ever 'functional' and for sponsors and rider name anyway). As I mentioned moons ago I'd have liked to have kept the original paint but it was too far gone and the frame needed some repair, hence the reluctant respray.
The forks are blue now too as the chrome had all but eaten itself, which is a shame. Worth mentioning that I'm tempted to think of this paint as semi-temporary anyway – I want this built up for lots of track time and I've a feeling a further frame restoration will be on the cards at some point, with chrome, once it bears the scars of good use again.
Those that have followed this ridiculously ageing thread from a few years back will also know that Jacques Suire (son of the French national champion that used to own this bike) has kindly sent me lots of NOS decals from his father's old workshop, which adds a nice air of originality (and plenty to repaint the frame 10 times over). These will be applied next, along with the original Peugeot decals used for the sponsor (on one side only, too – the side the crowd could see).
Also by way of recap, I have NOS Spidel hubs, Maillard pedals, NOS Wolber tubs, NOS Spidel track cranks (they took AGES to find) and some NOS Mavic GP4s on the way. The rest still needs buying, so I'll be rinsing the eBay account in the coming weeks. Keen to hear from any French bike fans that may have useful bits laying around.
Anyway, here's a pic of the frame I took roadside in a pub at Waterloo on the way home from Mario's last night – I'll get some 'proper' pics once it's unwrapped and I set about the decals. Note that the colour isn't well represented in the early evening light, ’tis closer to the original blue than it looks...