I generally like the look of Peugeots, but I stayed away from them when doing my build for this exact reason. I have a Motobecane that is French and I generally want to throw it in the river. Professor Sheldon Brown has a nice page dedicated to French bikes. If you had the old Peugeot BB my recommendation would be to see if you could get the chainline right with different spindles, etc. However, since you don't I highly recommend putting it on craigslist and letting someone else deal with the headache of finding silly French parts.

I think the Bianchi is a little fugly, but that is up to you. From the picture is looks like it has cottered cranks. If that is the case, do NOT use this bike; it is a bottom of the barrell POS. Otherwise, read on. The Bianchi may or may not use an Italian Bottom Bracket theading, apparently in the late 70's they went from Italian to ISO. Here is more information on Sheldon's site.

If the Bianchi's BB is Italian and you needed needed a new one you could get this one: Shimano tapered square style axle Italian 70 mm width 36 mm x 24 TPI, model number UN54


As far as doing the cheapest build possible, you want to reuse as many parts as you can. I have found that the SS/Fixed bike shops in my area are far less interested in reusing parts; they want to sell you new ones.

So.. You really need a new set of wheels; I promise you those old ones are stupidly heavy. There are fairly reputable places on the web you can get wheelsets from for $160 USD, delivered (Mavic CXP22), and if you don't mind sun or weimann you can get them for $120 USD. Get 700 series wheels; if you go 27" you'll be very limited in the rubber you can get.

Then you need to try and reuse your BB, and crankset. If you can reuse these parts you can get your bike on the road for the cost of new wheels, rubber, chain, brake cable, and new front brake pads:

120 Cheap wheelset
20 Cheap tires
10 Cheap tubes
13 Chain
8 brake pads
8 brake cable

179 Total (USD)

Good luck...

PS: You can see my medium budget Fuji build at this thread.