Building a SS Mountain Bike

Just found a picture of my old Dialled. What a great cross country bike that was.

Thats pure porn right there.
I want your bike history. But all at once. Shite sometimes its almost as frustrating as listening to Haj's latest skip finds ;)

how do paragon drop outs work? do they have a sliding section where you slide part of the dropout along rather than sliding the axle along the dropout?

The whole drop-out, including the disc caliper mount slides. So the position of the disc brake caliper is always the same relative to the disc.