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Acliff
coffeekeyboard
Prologue
Like many others, I have become an enthusiast cyclist in the year 2020. I used to cycle purely for daily commuting to and from work, which involved a completely flat and boring journey of 10km, handled by my trusty Steamroller. Lockdown / working from home led me to start cycling for fun, and being a Steamroller means I can pretty much throw anything at it. I put on a 20t cog and started doing some gravel rides in Epping, followed by a set of bullhorns to ride some painful (and many failed) attempts at hill climb, plus the subsequent not so fun descending on fixed.
The shame of having to walk my bike up a hill, together with the frantic spinning to get down led me to my 2nd bike, a Paul Donohue 853 roadie. It came with an old 8sp 105 DT shifters and tubular wheels. Upon my first puncture I switched to a set of colour matching mavic helium. I also eventually upgraded to 10sp STI, naively believing that DT shifters and gears were the limiting factors for my strava PRs. To my shock (and everyone's expectation) my performance in the battles against my arch-enemy aka canonbie road in London SE ranked like this: Steamroller > 8sp DT > 10sp STI.
(picture was done before all the upgrades)
Anyway the process of maintaining and upgrading my 2 bikes eventually built up my confidence for a complete bike build. Both the steamroller and PD being lugless (not to mention PD having a not so elegant OS tubing) means I am constantly drooling over many 531 frames I see on the forum. Thankfully (to my wallet) being the tiny 5"4 person I am, most frames are not my size (otherwise this could have been my 17th build). I was very close to pulling the trigger on @Acliff argos (sorry!) when @luccas put up this beauty for sale. I could not resist and today I picked it up from him.
end of prologue
For now I'm to clean off the surface rust on the chainstay while I decide on the build. I'm choosing between:
P.S. a little nervous making this post, seeing this will be listed among all the great threads I have been following and sourcing inspiration from. A year ago the best I could do was to change a tube. I feel I have gained much from this forum and its friendly members, and I hope my project thread could provide the same inspiration for someone starting off their 1st build. Thanks for reading!