Alex’s Totally Affordable Vintage Road Bike Restoration Project. Part 1 – Finding something to restore

So Hi, I’m Alex and this is the start of a series of blog posts documenting the restoration of a vintage road bike, interspersed with pictures of my cat,she’s called CATFACE, this is her. (yes grumpy is her default expression)

Well first of all for this restoration project to get started I’m going to need a frame to restore. So “To eBay” I thought, where I sifted through countless frame and fork sets in various states of decay. Until eventually I came across this lovely little vintage frame covered in what looks like multiple layers of bad paint jobs. It was listed at £20 plus £10 p&p, which unlike a lot of the listings I looked at was p&p reflecting the actual cost of posting a frame! If you’re buying one yourself then really £15 is the absolute upper limit of what it should cost to send (assuming this is in the U.K.) this frame’s £10 p&p was reasonable . After a bit of back and forth negotiating we eventually agreed on £18 and he’ll throw in a seat post.

Below you can see the pictures from the listing. As you can probably tell it looks like it has a bit of a bent drop out, though nothing the awesome power of gas pliers can’t deal with! The forks also may or may not be a bit bent out of shape.