My New Ride? Time Will Tell

I decided to take on a new project over the winter.  Last fall, a family acquaintance offered to give me an old Peugeot Course road bike that he had been pilfering parts from for his current project - a vintage Motobecane.  When I inspected what was left of the bike, I found it to be in surprisingly good condition.  In particular, the frame looked to be in decent shape, and I found the pearl-white color with the sandy brown lettering quite lovely.  I've been very happy with my current commuter bike - a 1972 Raleigh Record - and I wasn't really all that excited about taking on another big restoration project with the summer coming to an end.  But I just couldn't get past how good the frame looked, and since he was giving me the bike free of charge, the price was right.  When I got the bike back to my parents' house, where it lived for a couple of weeks before making its way up to Columbia, I snapped a picture of it with my cell phone:

Not much to look at, I know, but there seemed to be a lot of potential to turn this thing into a sweet little commuting machine.  I decided to take the entire winter to work on it and use the extra time to find good deals on the parts needed.  I've started ordering some of the more crucial parts, but I think I'll save this subject for a later post.  One of my primary concerns was that the bottom bracket might be French or Swiss threaded, and since I like to convert my bicycles to cartridge bottom brackets, I would have likely needed to pay a lot of money for a press-fit bottom bracket.  I dropped the extra cash to do this on my Raleigh and I've been quite happy with the results, but a bit despondent about putting such an expensive part into such a cheap bike.  My father and I did some research on this particular Peugeot, using the serial number as a guide, and found that it was likely manufactured in the early 80s and that it could possibly have an English-thread bottom bracket, depending on when and where exactly it was produced.  I took the frame in to my LBS and discovered that the bottom bracket is indeed English, which means I can screw in an inexpensive cartridge and worry about it no more.

Overall, I think this is going to be a fun project.  Depending on how it feels, how it looks, and how it rides when I'm done, it may end up taking the place of my old Raleigh Record, which is currently my daily ride.  If this is the case, the Raleigh will likely end up on the auction block.