It’s alive! It’s alive!
I had a pair of brifters in my partsbin, so I spent the hour(ish) needed to finish building this thing up as a functional bicycle. The fun thing about mtb geometry is that the frames are longer than an equivalently sized road bike, so this 18" (~46cm) machine has the effective top tube of a much larger machine.
And the 700c fork I’m using is about an inch shorter than the fork the thing was shipped with, so the slack 70.5° HTA stiffens up to a much more roadish 72.{something}°. Time to fit fenders and a rack to this thing and consider whether I should risk taking it out on a brevet.