If the Raleigh was a build article, this is not so much. It's more about shopping.
The Raleigh was a labour of love to realise a childhood dream and a learning curve of building a particular bike. I'd serviced and fettled my own bikes over the years, but the Raleigh was the first time I'd had a complete bike in parts that actually needed assembling. Also, it was a fusion of semi-classic with new parts, so it documents the pratfalls and expense of doing it when you're not a full time bike mechanic/person who knows stiff through experience and could have seen it coming.
I leant on people who know their stuff. Cymech and The Cycle Clinic in particular and because it was about recreating a period 'look', much of the bits were actually quite cheap. There is an expensive period parts market, but I don't have a coiffured beard, will never ride an Eroica and there's a damn good reason virtually all of those parts aren't made anymore - Modern parts are much better. For the parts that are required to complete the period look, Nitto have it covered.
This article deals with assembling purely modern bits but more so why I chose the bits I did. Even if you started from the position I did, you might very well head in a completely different direction and I would not argue with that. When you actually build bikes, it becomes a very personal thing, an expression of what cycling means for you and what you want a bike to do. Either way, as long as your aren't a complete numpty it's basically Lego.
This might be controversial, but if your dream is a completely off-the-peg bike, then not only will you never realise your dream, but you'll also never understand what your dream really is. Only when a bike is distilled to its constituent parts, do you examine what each part is, why it is and what you want it to do. Adding/changing bits of a production model bike is not the same thing as building a bike. It's fumbling around the edges. Changing bar or stem is not the same thing as having a bare frame built or chosen to your specification and then considering how and what components will integrate. Basically, you're following what your production bike prescribed and paying for parts you will dump.
Regardless of whether you're in the fettling rather than building camp, everything will definitely fit because it is all of its all contemporary. That said, when all you've ever had is mechanical bikes and one electronic shifting, hydraulic brake bike that you religiously turned over to a qualified soul to service, then there is still a learning curve because if you want to do it yourself, you're also going to buy tools you don't have and learn how to use them. Google and YouTube will become your friends because you're not doing anything that hasn't already been done. You will be standing on the shoulders of giants, to borrow a phrase. I did, heavily.
So here we are in 2020; the year the world hit the pause button. I'm lucky in-so-far as I kept my job unlike many of my colleagues. Lucky that I remained on full pay, although one day off in four months not to mention both of my staff being furloughed left me wondering if I couldn't have managed just a bit of that 80% paid holiday action.
Here in the UK, cycling was actively encouraged under lockdown with sufficiently fuzzy exercise guidelines meaning you could go out for durations "appropriate to your fitness levels". Good job, because one of the warmest driest springs on record, coupled with empty roads created a cycling paradise of 1970s emptiness. Even more so out here in the rural sticks and my 'fitness' can do 60-70 miles on a whim with a hangover. Indeed, I've found it to be one of the best hangover cures available, even if starting in that state isn't exactly performance enhancing!
The thing was, even once you went somewhere, there was nothing to spend money on. Coffee and cake could be found, but there was nothing else to do. Heck, there was nothing to do (that cost money) even if you didn't go somewhere. You stayed in, ate, drank, worked from home, cycled, repeat.
The result was that the 'toys' pot (money not spent during the course of the month) was filling itself far faster than normal and within a couple of months I was in touching distance of a Ti frame. Having recently bought a house in France (it sounds grand, but cost less than a good static caravan on a good pitch on the Norfolk coast) I probably should have put the money toward that. CV-19 had prevented going there though and at that time (June 2020) there was no sign that we could go there any time soon. As alluded to, 2020 plans seemed to be on pause and thus I decided plans for the house would be held over to 2021.
If you're up for it, get a cup of tea (or if you're American, a cup of what-you-call-coffee because I have tried American 'tea') and settle down for a read. I'm writing this because I miss my journo days...