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@mutsj
I had been swooning over eddy merckx frames on ebay for a long, long time. Patiently watching and waiting for the right frame..... I have, what you might call, an affection for lugs and that... which meant I would only settle for a frame with a flat fork crown. To my delight, this time last year, my patience paid off. A lovely man called David was selling his frame and after the wild emotional rollercoaster that is the final minute of an ebay auction, I was delighted to find out I had won!
After arranging to meet David halfway between our homes, off I went to Talgarth on the edge of the Brecon Beacons to collect the frame. Turns out David had owned the frame for a long time and he kindly explained the story of how he came to own the bike. I should have written down the details at the time as I can't recall all the specifics any more, but to the best of my memory it went as follows:
David was living and working in London, when, as he described it, he was sort of forced to buy the bike. A tradesman who was sorting something out where David worked, had come to own the bike and wanted to sell it on. Apparently he had been working a job where he first had to clear a garage or similar. The owner of the space gave the guy license to take anything he fancied and dispose of the rest before getting on with whatever the job was. So the lucky guy found himself the owner of a fine eddy merckx bicycle. Upon meeting David, he was apparently very insistent, for reasons that weren't specified, that David was going to buy the bike. Over the coming days he persisted in telling David he was going to buy the bike, until finally he bought the bike. David then happily used the bike for many years, commuting around London. Wind forward many years and he eventually moved to Wales. By the time I met David most of the bike had been re-purposed elsewhere so the frame was just sat in his garage. He figured it was time to sell it on and let someone else enjoy using it as much as he had.
An eventful year has gone by. Moving house combined with the sack of dicks that is coronavirus has meant Eddy was sat in storage for about a year. Over the next month or so i'm hoping to get Eddy built up and back on the road. I plan on keeping a record of the build here. Hopefully it will prove interesting, any thoughts and advice are greatly appreciated.