Originally Posted by
gaucho777
Keep in mind that your Mercian likely has French-threading and requires French-sized seat post and stem. Most modern stems, seat posts and BB cups will not work on that frame and, replacement French sized/threaded parts can be expensive, so there's a good rationale for keeping as many of those original parts as you can preserve.
Yeah that was something I considered early on. I was going to use Velo Orange parts on it for that reason, BUT, it does not have French threading. It uses the French measurements (22 mm steerer instead of 22,2, etc.) but everything is British threading. Custom order as far as I can tell. Since the only real issue then is the stem, I figured I'd just sand down a 22,2 quill that I like. Removing 0,1 mm from aluminium is very easy.
Do you know of a reliable place to find those older parts (since my are destroyed)? Since I've now put a month of work into removing all rust and sanding and priming and sanding and painting and then deciding it wasn't perfect enough and stripping it all off again and priming and now painting again, I'd like to avoid putting second hand parts that are covered in gouges and scrapes on it. Kind of defeats the purpose of the perfectionist paint job.