Daym!
I love building and tinkering with bikes as much as I love riding them, but the SL8 is so good as is that I’ve been struggling to improve it in any way and now I’m having withdrawals.
Yesterday I stupidly test fitted the 45 deep carbon front wheel off my SL6 onto my old 80’s steel Paino road bike and BAM! Hot daym it looks fucking amazing! I ended up spending hours trawling eBay and FB Marketplace for parts to do a Neo Retro build on the Paino and man, there’s a LOT out there for cheaps so no doubt at all it would be a fun project.
There would be a lot of problem solving to do too and a lot of different directions I could take the build, and possibly a fair bit of trial and error as well. The Paino is 6 speed Campy and if I wanted a 45 deep rear wheel I’d have to give that up and look into a cassette for an 11-speed Shimano hub (or run an 8/9/10 speed cassette with spacers). I could keep the friction shifters to work with whatever cassette, or I could upgrade to modern brake lever shifters or even an electronic groupset.
100% I’d have a lot of fun on a Neo Retro project, but I’ve worked so hard at restoring the bike to how it was when new that I feel it would be disrespectful to modernise it. I have no doubt that the bike would ride better with modern parts on it, but there’s no doubt it’ll still feel like heavy, flexy and unresponsive in comparison to my SL8.
First world problems!