1930's raleigh build

I'll start off with the outline of my build here i suppose. Some thoughtful person recently decided to relieve me of the hassle of having a bike and it didn't happen at the best time for me financially so I'm left to hoke around in my shed and see what i can come up with on a pretty small budget. I like the combination of polished steel/brass/wood which i'm going to try and incorporate into the bike

The raleigh came to me from someone on here in this condition, I stripped it all back, polished the frame, changed up the tyres to some cream schwalbe delta cruisers and used it for maybe 6 months like that.

Sadly the lacquer that i'd used on the frame had been scounged for free of a paint supplier we deal with in my work and it wasn't really up to the abuse of a winter bike so it pretty quickly started to chip off and the frame started to rust. I ended up using a different bike when summer came around and put the raleigh in the shed where i 'borrowed' bits from it now and again untill it was just the frame looking sad in the corner. Then my regular use bike was stolen and I was snookered.

So here we are now. I've long since got over the novelty of walking everywhere so the plan is to be back on the road again in a week or so.

Roughly put together with the parts I had just to check that the frame will run the 700's I've got for it.

My plan was to set it up running on these sturmey archer 5 speed hub brakes and use the original stainless 26" as they are an absolute deathtrap with regular brakes if there is any sign of moisture at all. I got ahead of myself and went and bought this wheelset without checking that the rim holes and hub holes all worked together, which they didn't.
So the new plan is to run it on this 700 wheelset with some nice gumwall tyres that all being well I'll pick up tomorrow.

The headlight came from ebay ages ago but I'd never got round to using it for anything after I restored it. I'll convert it to battery powered in the next few days. It's sitting a bit low at the moment and I'm not sure it will clear the tyres once they're on so I'll be extending the mounting bracket.
before

after

When I'm an old man I'll be one of those people they find living in the only empty room buried alive in a mountain of old newspapers, I'm a definite hoarder when it comes to bike bits and anything mechanical/scraps of wood/little bits of metal that might be needed at some time in years to come which is why i keep things like this:

It's the seat base from a 1950's coventry eagle ladies bike, I cut an inch or so from either side and welded it back up to give a slightly better shape. I'm still not convinced about it though, I don't really like the shape of the side support so I'm going to have a play around with that and see if i can morph it into something a bit nicer. I'll make up a new leather top for it and probably polish up the other visible metal, I quite like the hammered look of the front piece but I can see that being too comfortable if it's left exposed.

As far as painting is concerned I'm going for a grey of some kind with the chrome masked on the bottom 1/3rd of the forks, I'll have a snoop around in the paint cupboard at work and see if anything catches my eye.

I've been playing around with making wooden grips for a while now and I think this would be a good project to try them out on

not a fantastic photo of my progress so far with them but I'm sure you can get the idea. I'm using sapele, solely because i like the grain/colour, its fairly easy to work with, and i had some already. The idea is to have it as 10 or so 8mm sections mitred together to go round the bottom curve of the bar and then a straight section for the end, I've got high hopes for it looking nice but I've never tried it before so it may end up being pretty uncomfortable. we shall see.

I'll update this thread as I go and hopefully there should be a bit of progress every day untill i'm done.