Day One - Cleaning Wheels and Frame. Insert bottom bracket here

If I had to guess I'd say these wheels had never been cleaned before... Sadly the tyres were pretty much bald, and the inners already patched multiple times, so I accepted they'd probably all need replacing.....

Nice shiny clean wheels! I also made an effort to de-sticker the frame as much as possible and cleaned a bunch of muck off that too.

While I was at it I thought I may as well try and get the bottom bracket in to the frame. This came out of my road bike a while back, and as I could remember shredding the splines on the cup a bit while taking it out, I was a little concerned at my ability to get it back into the new bike, but....

Ta da!

Without cranks or forks I was a bit stuck at this point, so I thought I'd take a quick win and stick the seatpost and saddle in. It also provides another handle to hold the frame by I spose.

Tune in next week for the next exciting episode of "building a bike through the power of ebay".

Day Two - Fix that derailleur

Not much to report... the derailleur donated by a mate had a missing jog wheel. I replaced it, and the other one for luck. I also checked that the forks that just arrived had enough steerer to go through the frame - the good news being they did. But more of that on day three!

Day Three - Headset, tyres, handlebars

So Day three... or rather evening three followed by day 3.
I've never put an aheadset together before, and I wasn't really aided by having an extra part in amongst the washers and bearings. Also, as soon as I popped the bearings from the cups, quite a few of them broke loose and rolled into the gaps between the floorboards in my kitchen.

Dang. Next morning the extra part turned out to be the crown race that had come off the forks of the original bike (of course! - thanks Steve). Which meant a trip to London Bike Kitchen to borrow a stand and some tools to knock the old one off. Once they'd explained how to put the stand up properly, this was pretty easy. I'd already visited two Halfords by this point to look for the appropriate bearings with not much luck. Fortunately I found them in Cyclelab just down the road, home to a nice bloke in the workshop who sorted me out. Obviously once I got home with the forks, which now snuggly fit into the correctly assembled aheadset I realised I needed another spacer to get the stem tight. I ended up popping over to Hub Velo in Clapton, giving me a total of five bike shop visits just to get to this point;

Still at least it was a nice sunny day.
Not to be deterred, I pushed on and pumped the tyres...

and got bars, grips and levers attached for good measure.

Day Four - Brakes and Cables

A lesson that the right tools are important - cutting brake cables and housing definitely needs cutters.
Otherwise not too tricky. And now it will stop. If not "go".

Day Five - Cranks, Derailleur... oh.

Back on firmer ground here, a job i've done quite a bit... or so I thought. I got the cranks on very easily... got the chainring on fine, cable and derailleur set up and chain wrapped.

Which meant.... test ride time! I was pretty happy to be riding a girls bike around the park at last...
Unfortunately with the chainring on the outside of the triple cranks' spider the chainline was pretty extreme to the lower gears and consequently the chain kept jumping off.

The solution seemed obvious - move the chainring to the middle position. Unfortunately, Shimano had seen fit to include a little lip on the inside of the spider to stop you moving an outer ring to the middle position. I still can't work out why they do this... but a bit of googling and a conversation with a mate confirmed that I would be probably be best off filing the lip off.... so... another day!

Day Six - Drastic Measures and a bash guard

I got home to discover that both my cheap diamond coated hobbyist files AND the bash guard my mate had volunteered to post to me had arrived.

Time to get to work on that spider. Being lazy I decided this would be perfectly ok to do without removing the cranks.

Surprisingly, this a) worked and b) didn't take too long.

Even more surprisingly the donated bash guard fitted perfectly. Nice.

A quick bump round the park, and bar the fact that I think the cassette will need replacing fairly soon, it is, in fact, a BIKE.