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I'd be dubious about it having been a team bike: it has a pump peg on the back of the head tube and no race number tag.
H Lloyd have a replica decal that looks the same as yours, which they date to between 1982 and 1989. Looking at the shape of the forks, that seems about right.
You can also date them from the head tube badge, but a quick Duckle suggests the site I used to refer to is defunct. Finding out when TI bought Reynolds will tell you the oldest it could be.
531 Professional was one of the fancier 531 tubesets and the seat stay cluster isn't bog-standard, but the lugs haven't seen much love. What does the seat stay bridge look like? Who made the dropouts and fork ends?
The headset is the last component to be replaced (and usually left in place, even if a bike is stripped down), so it's likely original and the bike was equipped with a 105 groupset. 105 seems about right for the frame: a little nicer than average, but nothing to get excited about.
The headset looks like it's from the 105 1050 group. That ran from '87-'89, which ties-in with the Reynolds decal.
Scilly.Suffolk-
The team bike story was probably told to my friend by whoever sold it originally as part of the sales pitch and it's been passe down the chain. The H Lloyd decal is exactly the same as the one on the downtube, which helps. I'll give the frame a second cleaning and see if I can find any identifying marks on the dropouts, and get a pic of the seat stay bridge. The headset does look like the 1050 from your link, and the brake levers match too, but the brakes are 105 dual-pivots. When did 105 go dual-pivot?
Thanks for the info, much appreciated.
MarkSouth
Hi Everyone,
I haven't posted here for a loooong time but I'm coming out of the lurker shadows because I have some questions.
Background: a guy I know was leaving the country and so he wanted to get rid of all his bikes. I took on a few of them, and now I'm working my way through them to see if any of them are worth fixing up or just should be dumped. Among them was a very (and I mean VERY) grime-encrusted Peugot.
He told me that this bike had been an actual team road racer back in the day. Normally I'd dismiss that as sales BS, but since he was giving me the bikes for nothing I assume that he heard that from the guy he got it from (I'm the n-th owner where n is a large number).
It appears to be 531, and the frame has a Made in France sticker on the left chainstay.
The frame had a mix of components fitted. It has a 105 headset, Shimano BB, had a 105 crankset (with the tightest left crank I've ever removed) and 105 brakes and levers. The mechs were both Campag, the rear wheel is a Mavic MA-2 on a Campag hub with a 6-speed Campag cluster (I'm still trying to de-grime it enough to disassemble it and see what it is) and Campag downtube shifters.
The rear mech took several hours soaking in cleaning alcohol before it began resembling a mech more than a huge clump of grime.
Can anyone tell me anything about this frame and the bits? Is it worth rebuilding. Specifically, is the frame any good, and when does it date from? Since the frame has some rust spotting and the paint is badly chipped in many places (and the color scheme is fugly anyway) it would need a complete spa treatment before doing anything with it. Or should I just turn it into a beater single speed?
So many questions. TL;DR What should I do with this frame/bike?