700c's on older Montagues?
 

I have a 3-year old Montague DX with 26" wheels. Can I/has anyone put 700c wheels on them? I can see that there may be enough clearance in both front and rear. Don't know if it will mean changing the brakes too along with the wheels.

If it has disc brakes, you should be able to do the swap easily enough. I can't speak for the montagues specifically, but generally 26" wheeled mountain bikes can be fitted with tires of at least 700x32, and sometimes up to 700x42 or even 45 depending on the positioning of the seatstay and chainstay bridges.

If you don't have disc brakes, you have a problem. The brake posts are positioned for use with 26" wheels. 700c wheels have 31.5mm greater radius, and most V brakes can't be adjusted that far up -- and even if they could, they wouldn't work properly because the leverage ratio would be wrong for use with normal mountain bike levers.

In front, the brake issue can be solved by switching to a disc brake and a disc-compatible fork and front wheel, if the ones you have aren't already disc-compatible. In back, it's trickier (at least if your frame isn't disc compatible ... not sure, but I don't think yours is). I think there may be some "brake extenders" that reposition your brake posts up higher, but from what I've heard they tend to be extremely limited in terms of clearing decent sized tires.

There is one other way, and it's what I did when I converted a 26" bike to 700c. I got a special V-brake from Paul Components called the MotoBMX. At $140-ish it is insanely expensive, but FWIW it is probably the best rim brake on the market. More importantly for people like you and me, it is capable of positioning its brake pads high enough to hit a 700c rim, when mounted on a bike intended for 26" wheels. Now for your brake lever to work properly, you'll still have to switch from one intended for V-brakes (high cable pull, low leverage) to one intended for road or cantilever brakes (low cable pull, high leverage). In my case that was easy, since I was converting it to drop handlebars anyway. But still easy if you have flat/mountain bike handlebars, because for not much money you can also get levers for those that are designed for cantilever brakes.

just get some nicer 26" tires for road riding.. say, 1.5" slicks,

@Glowboy, thanks for your input. I'm out of luck. It doesn't have disc brakes. It has V brakes that I think will not support 700c's. It'll be expensive to convert to 700's. I think I'll go with the option of exchanging the tires to as narrow as 26x1.25, which a LBS said would work. I just like the looks of having larger wheels on my Montague, to make it look like the current road/hybrid models which come with 700c's.

If you miss reaching a 700c rim by 16mm or less, you might look at V-Brake Post Extenders.. there are also inexpensive V-Brake pad extenders.. might be worth taking some measurements..

In defense of 700c ... if you really want pure road slicks you can probably get 26" tires that come close in performance. But if, like me, you prefer riding on cyclocross semislicks, the 26" options are extremely limited. There are sooooo many times more choices if you go 700c.