Well........, the much awaited 52cm Vitus Carbone Plus 7 bike was delivered to me today and it's pretty much in the condition I expected it to be for a close to 30 year old bike. It's ridable as-is, with some adjustments to the seat post height, but I figure that the unmolested frame really desrves a full ground-up restoration. The frame looks to be in very good condition as bikes of this vintage goes and it looks like it was used enough but no sign of abuse at all I checked the lug joints for ny sign of separation and/or corrosion, and did not find any. After testing with some "Never-Dull" polishing wool at the seat lug clamp area, The lugs look to be easy to strip of tarnish and stains The decals are about 99 percent there, with just a very few nicks that can be touched up with a little spots of model paint. The seatpost (weird 43mm dia. size..what do you expect, it's a French frame!) look OK and should clean up nicely with some some touch up of the black paint on the flutes and clamp head and some good scrubbing with "Never-Dull" wool. I got it stripped down of it's components, except for the crank and the stem....which, of course is seized on to the fork steering tube....dang it!!...so the frame is now upsidown in my garage with a good amount of LPS penetrant in it's steering tube, hopefully getting into that corrosion. no amount of tapping with the rubber mallet and also careful well placed taps with a steel headed hammer can loosen it up, so far.........DAMITOL!!
The rest of the components,(mostly 7400 series Dura Ace) came off easily, except for the steel(?) front brake cable casing ferrule end which also welded itself on to the brake cable adjusting barrel and ripped apart when I tried to wrench it out sith some long nose plier...DAMITOLLL!!. Nothing that a few hours of dremeling could not fix, I guess. Crank look very good with very close to perfect finish and real good, silky bearing feel. Dura Ace RD and FD also looks very good without any sign of crash rash, but the RD does have some very minor rash that seems to have been from leaning it against walls or a minor garage drop to it's side at one time. The front brake levers also looks a bit beat up from leaning on hard crusty walls when parked (those have to be replaced for wure, non-DA pedals which looks a bit like it could be for ATB/Cyclocross looks hardly used and is going to my bikie nephew. Wheels are rideable but are trash because of the very corroded what looks to be galvanized spokes on them. I'm really surprised the PO did not use stainless steel spokes to build them up!
I already have the wheels for the bike, the now cleaned up GL330 tubulars I found sleeping at the back of a bike shop a bout a week ago. The Vittoria Rallies are even dry mounted on them already, stretching out nicely for glueing that I'm tackling this weekend.
Now with the recalcitrant stem (ITM with "Vitus" engraving) and the less than pristine condition of some of the components, I'm wondering whether to keep the bike in Shimano DA equipped or go ahead and build up that Mavic SSC equipped bike I was dreaming of all these years. A full Shimano DA restoration will take quite a bit of money to complete, but a Mavic SSC gruppo that I will have to harvest from zero components might cost much more, cause I'll be going NOS as much as possible to come up with the dream bike. I could also go with a Spidel/Stronglight build up, because I do have an NOS Mafac/Spidel LS-1 brakeset to start with, but a hunt for a proper Stronglight 107 crank/BB and Super LJ 6600 DR and matching FR will not be that easy....... Looks like a DA resto is still what makes sense with the very respectable and mint condition crank on the bike already........What did I get myself into!! This will take a long time to get together, plus quite a bit of money too!!.......I guess winter just started, so this new winter project is still on schedule...
I'll update you guys as I go through this Carbone adventure and hopefully post some pics of the bike and parts as I go.
Wish me luck, I'm going for it!! Now I hope that stem does not turn into a disaster on me!

Chombi
84 Peugeot PSV
(85?) Vitus Carbone Plus 7