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So last year I bought this:
A deceptively smashing and very nice condition 1988 Mercian King of Mercia in pearlescent white and branded as Denton, of Newcastle bike shop fame. Denton had a lot of top frame builders like Donohue, Dave Yates, M.Steel, Joe Waugh supply frames for them, though the name itself isn't very well known, thankfully as this was a bit of a bargain as a result (it might have been the set up that helped though ; / )
Mostly shimano deore 7 speed group, campag c-record wheels, wrong sized seatpost and flat bars. Hmm. I switched the bars and seatpost/saddle immediately and tonked about on it for a while quite happily, but then I got my A-race bike written off by a car-smash and hurriedly shoved a 10 speed Campag Veloce group on it as it was going begging, which I was very happy with but after a hard winter in Sweden and another move I'm giving it some much needed TLC by stripping it and re-building so I'm thinking over what I want to do with it and whether I should take it back to old-school settings or keep with the modern...
I really want it to be as practical as possible in terms of using it for fast audax/club runs and lightish touring with front/rear racks and mudguards, but also not so precious I can't lock it up in town, which is of course always a problem when you want to invest some love in a build.
As it looks now:
After a day in the shed fettling and touching in paint chips and stripping/cleaning the cantis:
I tried a set of white Froggleg cantis on, but not only did the white ano look naff, I realised how shit they are compared to the robust shimano ones that are already on, with their nice plastic seals to keep the springs clean and easy toe-in adjustments. I did swap the pads to nice new Swiss-Stop Thin Stops though to try and boost their effectiveness a touch as the generic ones were a bit shifty and made my rims really grubby.
I've investigated putting the Deore back on but with a 10 speed wheelset and bar-ends, but this seems too much faff to make it work and it's all pretty lumpy kit anyway.
So, when the re-build begins in earnest I'm toying with either moving to bar-ends and a modern Shimano 10 speed pure-touring XT set-up for the retro-touring functionality with nice modern running gear, or just staying with the 10s Campag compact, or moving to C-Record 8 speed and a wider ratio rear cassette to help get up the hills with an extra 20kg attached (i'm still young enough!)