radaddio wrote:
I think you might have to have the rear dropouts bent out to accept a long axle length, but I could be mistaken.
Frames for 5-speed freewheels generally had 120mm spacing between the dropouts. Frames made for 6-speed and 7-speed freewheels generally used 126mm spacing. With 8-speed and the popularization of freehubs, that went to 130mm. It's usually possible to shove a 130mm wheel into a 126mm frame, but there are reasons to avoid doing this:
1-It's annoying when taking the wheel on and off.
2-By passively having tension in the rear triangle, the frame will be under more stress in use.
3-If the dropouts are aligned for 126mm, they'll be misaligned when the rear triangle is spread to 130mm. This will make for an inferior connection between hub and dropout, and it will also put weird angular stresses on the hub faces and axle that they weren't necessarily designed to deal with.
The ideal solution is to permanently cold-set (bend) the frameset to use the wider spacing. The process involves bending the stays apart to the new spacing, and then using a dropout alignment tool to re-align the dropouts. This is usually no problem for steel frames, but probably should not be attempted with aluminum frames, and would be totally impossible for carbon.
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Another potential issue is brake mounting. I'm not sure of the exact year range when the switch happened, but older bikes use a different mounting scheme for caliper brakes. On the old stuff, the brakes use a nutted axle that goes all the way through the fork crown or the rear brake bridge.
Here you can see the axle and nut on the back of the fork crown, and on the front of the rear brake bridge, opposite the respective brakes:
Modern brakes use a different scheme where the nut is recessed in the fork or brake bridge.
If you want to mount modern brakes on an older-style frame, you'll generally have to widen the drilling on side of the mount that the recessed nut goes into. Lots of people have done this with steel frames. Alternately, if you're happy with how the original brakes feel with your modern brake levers, you could just not worry about it.
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While 1 1/8" threadless stems are conveniently ubiquitous, most of them will look really chunky when paired with a skinny vintage headtube. If I was going for a classy and svelte-looking build, I'd probably check to see if there are any suitable quill stems that would look appropriate on the build. There are a few options out there with removable faceplates and 31.8mm clamps, too.
