WOW! I didn’t expect this much of a response. Thanks all for the warm welcome. I can clarify a little. The bike currently has a set of v brakes. I mistakenly ID’ed it as an early 90’s model whereas I believe it to be from about 2004ish. It’s a pretty good setup for touring. Rigid fork, long chainstay, steel frame, four eyelets. Another plus is that it is new enough to have a 1 1/8 head tube. The wheels were gone when I salvage it fromthe curb, though I had a good pair of 36 spoke araya wheels that I had hanging on the wall. The rear hub is a seven speed freewheel, I have boxes of derailleurs and freewheels and shifters etc etc around.
Of course I have been trying to get my wife to ride with me for some time and she used to ride road bikes years ago. I took her on a few twenty something mile rides on an old Schwinn crisscross that I built for her and she doesn’t dig ridding upright. She didn’t like the trekking bars and asked if I could build her a bike with drop bars. I had two good frames around that I could have used, the Giant and a Trek 930 with the seatpost frozen in the frame (Pain in the rear to get out so I went with the giant)
So this is all my wifes doing, plus it doesn’t bother me much since I like to rescue and old bike and mess with it a while. I think I will stick with the v brakes for this bike though I prefer cantis on my own bikes. The reason being is that they are easier to adjust and make it easier for her to get the wheels off to change a tire. I figured I would go with a set of long pull road levers to solve that.
I also have a couple of stem risers and adjustable stems laying around and I suspect that I should be able to find a magic spot somewhere with all that adjustment.
As for shifters I had always assumed that any friction shifter would work with any derailleur as long as the cable pull is long enough? I’m thinking about using a megarange freewheel I have so having some extra travel might be oK? I know that the newer cassettes with more gears are more compact with tighter spacing, though there probably not much difference in the actual distance of the width of the cassette versus the freewheel? Even if there was a significant difference I would guess that the newer cassettes would have more cable pull so they should work with and older freewheel?
So I see my two options as either a stem friction (cheaper) or a bar end friction shifter (probably better setup). It all comes down to what I want to spend I suppose. I guess it’s time to watch ebay for some comparison shopping.