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@chris-aa
I bought this off Hilarystone a little while back, and after what I feel has been an age looking up and buying parts to put this thing together (more like 3 months) it almost looks like this thing's gonna be ready to ride pretty soon.
I guess no projects are without their problems. For some reason when I first picked this up I envisioned thomson stems and sram omniums. Would have looked pretty sickly, I only got as far as buying the stem. The second problem (other than taste) was that when I finally got around to getting the headset fitted at Brixton Cycles they found the frame which was advertised as being in "excellent condition" actually had an ovalised headtube, which had been cut down right to the top tube, making repair very difficult. Ryan at Oak Cycles provided some sort of sneaky solution using loctite and a punch, and it ended up looking like this:
Which to me looks pretty damn good right now, (even though I'm still a bit pissed off about being sold a damaged frame) and I reckon the ITM Eclypse complements the tig welds on the frame perfectly. The next problem now is doing the frame justice on the budget I had, which meant trawling ebay, classifieds on here, and retrobike pretty religiously for steals on the theme of "vaguely 90's-ish feel".
And I've ended up with this lot, plus a bit more, -minus the drops and pedals which should be on my doorstep soonish:
Since it's going to be my DO EVERYTHING bike, my sunday best beater every day work track bike, I guess I wanted a couple of handlebar options - the monkey-lites and the cheap MTB stem for working (I've never ridden any carbon before, so I'm hoping the combination of handlebars, forks and seapost + flite titanium gel will make London's roads feel like a baby oil massage) and the whole ITM front end for track/looking good.
I've bought a Campag Veloce 111mm BB - and I wanted to ask if anyone knows for sure if this actually works safely - ie no damage done - with dura ace cranks? I took a guess from searching around here as there was still no solid answer.
The last thing is the wheels - and the part I'm least happy with, as they're the old deep v's laced to ambrosio hubs that I've been abusing over the last year. Thanks to exedanni I've got a nice baby blue deep v in much better condition to rebuild the rear after stripping both rims down to silver, and hopefully that'll look okay. Also, I'm planning to start riding HH track once this is built (I bet everyone says that building a track bike) so would these rims with some decent clinchers be fine for starting out?
My checklist before this is complete is actually very short now, I'm pretty excited:
-Build rear wheel
-Stuff parts in their respective holes
-buy a couple of sprockets and a new chain
-think of the best way to fill grooves in a handlebar
And thats about it. I'm gonna go back to drinking and slobbing out in front of the TV, everyone have a great christmas :)