You are reading a single comment by @themidge and its replies.
Click here to read the full conversation.
London Fixed Gear and Single-Speed is a community of predominantly fixed gear and single-speed cyclists in and around London, UK.
This site is supported almost exclusively by donations. Please consider donating a small amount regularly.
@themidge
Vintage bike number 1 - two Vitus 979s in one.
I've always loved vintage road bikes, they're just great. My first road bike when I was like 10 was an old Peugeot with suicide levers and a singular downtube shifter. It came from the Bike Station in Edinburgh, and went back there when I grew out of it, I hope someone else is out riding it now.
So despite having a perfectly functional modern road bike, I spent all my pennies on this crazy nice (it was a bargain ngl) 'Benotto' branded Vitus 979 with a strange mixture of Campagnolo, Modolo, dia compe, 3ttt parts. It has missmatched tubular wheels, the front being Mavic GL330 with what is apparently a decently rare Omas Big Sliding hub.
I absolutely adored this bike, it rode so well, just a glorious experience. So obviously it was quite inconvenient that I grew out of it. Problem solved first by a longer seatpost, but eventually I got really lucky and found another white Vitus 979 frame, this time branded as Andre Bertin and size 56.
Unfortunately, immediate spanner in the works: the fork that this new frame came with had mangled threads, so I was stuck. It sat semi-built like this for about a year :(
However, renewed efforts (and solved unforeseen BB problems) got it rolling last year!
The headset is still super dodgy, it really just needs a new fork, so the big Vitus is kind of languishing in almost-rideable limbo at the moment. It's far too nice to take to uni, but too emotionally significant to sell, so hopefully one day I'll get it working for the odd sunny ride.