The backstory

The project started almost unintentionally. I went to Oxford Cycle Workshop down Cowley because a spoke nipple on my racer somehow got trapped inside the rim and I couldn't figure out how to get it out.

But while there I found myself looking at some of the resprayed frames hanging up, which led to going into a back room to have a look at some others, which led to chatting to one of the blokes there who told me about a frame he had just brought in after keeping in his attic for a few months. "It was built on Great Eastern Street".

And under a cardboard box, there it was in all its scruffy gleaming glory. The Vindec Speedwing. From the moment I saw it I knew it was going to be a long and complicated relationship.

I've fiddled round with bikes before, usually doing cack-handed things like accidentally draining disc brake fluid or spraying degreaser where it definitely doesn't want to go, but I've never built one up before. It'll be challenging, to say the least. And I've ridden a fixie, but only once, for about an hour, on the Velodrome in Herne Hill. But I like the pared-down simplicity of the fixed gear, the solidity and understated style of old racing bikes, and the 'cradle to cradle' circularity of building a new bike out of old stuff. So it had to be done.

£30 changed hands plus a tenner for the bottom bracket, then it was frame over the shoulder for a precarious ride home, and the beginning of The Vindec Project.