After sleeping on this, I'm feeling pretty confident that I don't want to send this frame back into the wild even with a new fork. The damage is there, even if it's not failing right now, it's there and that bothers me. This bike is parts, that frame is scrap metal. The question remains ...what to do with the parts.
After seeing the recent 'flipped handlebars' thread and the one before it I've been tempted to make a path racer from one of my old free spirit frames I have laying around. If I can transfer the FFS system and the wheels that could spiffy this bike up quite a bit. The Free spirit's spokes are pretty rusty and I'm not set up for old cottered cranks yet. I have to get a cotter pin press before I can service this type on a regular basis.
I've also been considering switching my Puch over to a cruiser/northroad bars style bike because the frame is a bit too small for me but I feel an attachment to the bike. The bars could be worthy of that project.
Or I could swap the wheels out with this Fuji mixte that I'm planning on selling and keep the alloy wheels from that for a bike that I am riding. When I got the Fuji it looked like this:
But I pulled a seat and handlebars from an old 3-speed Ross and now it looks like this:
Given that the Fuji doesn't have a brooks, and the cranks are a chrome plated steel affair, I'm not feeling that I'll get very much for it. It seems the steel wheels wouldn't hurt this bike much as a townie, but I also have another set of steel wheels off a Miyata that I could swap too. I think the tires that are on the Fuji complement it better than blackwalls would.
Yikes. I'm all over the map with this, lots of possibilities.