There's No Place Like Home

So, I've had this frame for a while. No idea about the tubing, no idea about the build quality, could blow up at any point, original forks are cut too short, but I've still held onto it because it means just a little bit to me.

So, because I'm apparently going to be a historian, deal with it, here's a little bit of history of the frame and what it means to me.

I started working in a bike shop in Manchester about four/five years ago now, just about knew how to change an inner tube, but the owner Trevor gave me a job, god knows why, and now I'm on here. So.... he's the one to blame.

But joking aside, Trevor and the shop have probably been one of the biggest influences on my teen life, they led me to getting into cycling, bikes, doing LEJOG, coast to coast fixed on a lo pro (terrible idea), alleycats, critical mass and meeting some of the finest people I've had the fortune to meet.

I found this frame in the basement, realising it pretty much fitted me perfectly, asked about it, and apparently it was the first frame Trev built. I knew we had a framebuilding jig in the basement and he'd dabbled, but he said I could have it. Didn't mean too much at the time, but had it powdercoated racing green, and pretty much forgot about it in a haze of alloy lo pro and silly fixies and roadies. Trev sold the shop, still worked in it for the new owner, but Trevor remained the bugger who got me into all of this silliness.

But, now that I'm about to bugger off to uni (everything going to plan), coming down to London, leaving the shop and Manchester, I thought it was just about time to give it what it deserves and build it up, in the spirit of the man who taught me, really, a hell of a lot and led to me being here.

So, it's going to take a while, it's not going to be a huge budget, but I'm going to build it up, no nonsense, nothing super expensive because he'd have fucking hated that and probably a fair bit of bodging. But that's the way this is going to be done, and then I'm going to ride the fucker and think of home.

So, here's some more details of the frame and the plan for the near future.

First job is to strip the stickers off, and then line the lugs in black in a paint pen, then add these decals which I found in a drawer at the shop. Then clear coat the whole frame. Then, face the BB/tap all of the threads/ream seattube, (not sure if it's 27/27.2), basically sort it out for building.

These are basically decals of the shop when it was called Biking Cycles and Trev still owned it.

I picked up this rear rack from the shop, hidden at the back. Needs a bit of work, but could look rather nice polished up.

Need to find a groupset for it now, downtube shifters, preferably shimano, as that was pretty much the benchmark in our place, not much time for campag. Considering I want it to be fairly easily serviceable/able to be kept going easily, what in people's experiences is easier? 6/7/8 speed cassette or screw on block? Happy using either, just how easy are they to find now in people's experiences?

Good project.

Those decals may be the correct ones but they're horrid.