Buying a complete bike is the practical thing to do. Carleton is a practical dude. He gives practical advice.

Why did this thread not end at post #3?

Cue RenzSouljohnson's bboy stance.

The advice to get a complete bike is much more apt if the original poster doesn't currently have a fixed gear bike and even more so if they don't have a bike at all. It wouldn't make much sense to be spending a lot of time and money thinking about how to build a bike for months only to discover that at the end of the project they aren't that into it.

The original poster didn't provide any sort of information which makes it look like they don't currently have a bike, but that might not actually be the case.

I bought a complete bike from bikesdirect, and then later built one from scratch. Building the second one from scratch was nearly 3x as expensive as the complete. Seriously, unless you have vast knowledge and money, buy complete. Plus the varying degrees of component measurements make building a bike from scratch foolish unless you know EXACTLY what you are looking for.

as a rather new person to this forum. i would like to say i've appreciated all of the knowledge people have dropped on me.