Originally Posted by
base2
It's hard to tell from the picture, but a few things come to mind:
Downtube cable stop adaptors allow for converting a downtube shifter boss to be a standard cable stop.
The bike already has downtube cable stops. It has stem shifters, not downtube.
This will open up a world of shifter/brake options if you find the vintage gear range to be insufficient. Modern brake/shifters (brifters) like Shimano Sora/105/Ultegra or SRAM Apex/Red etc... & the like can allow for much lower gears than their vintage counterparts.
The shifters have little to do with it, since they're friction and can work with all kinds of setups. The big questions are the derailleurs and the cogs.
Long-cage derailleurs circa 1980 usually have fairly reasonable capabilities anyway. For instance, long-cage SunTour road derailleurs from that era can usually clear a ~34T cog and wrap ~36 teeth of chain.
If significantly more capability is desired, one cheap approach that works great is to bolt a basic Shimano MTB derailleur to the bike.
A brass bushing 1 inch inside diameter by either 1&1/8 or 1&1/4 outside diameter will allow for a conventional front derailleur to fit on the vintage small diameter seat tube. Fashioning a bushing is as easy.
If it's 28.6mm, FD clamp mounts are still readily available.
On many vintage bikes the derailleur itself often had a cable stop integrated into the clamp. Modern ones do not. Drilling a hole in the center of the bottom bracket and tapping for an M5 bolt for a cable guide is a simple task if you are so inclined & your bike needs.
The Fuji most likely has bare cable all the way from the downtube cable stop to the FD, and is unlikely to require a stop at the bottom bracket.
I think modern derailleurs are worth the effort.
Modern FDs make sense if you're trying to use indexed front shifting on a matched (i.e. FD+crank+shifter) setup. Otherwise, I wouldn't bother buying a new FD unless I'd tried the old one and it didn't work well.
As far as brakes, center-pull brakes, I've always found to be weak & spongy.
Some of them were made with fairly low mechanical advantage, and of course they're susceptible to the same steerer shudder that can affect centerpull cantis, but the ones I've tried haven't felt especially spongy. Even the cheap Weinmanns with dried-out 40-year-old pads on chromed steel rims had a surprisingly confident bite...
The OP's bike doesn't have centerpulls, though, it has single-pivot calipers. These nearly always
are both weak and spongy.
If the OP wants to change brakes, one challenge would be that the old frame doesn't use recessed-nut brake mounting.
If a switch is made to 700c, the brake pads will need to be lowered by 4mm in order to reach the new rims. This is most likely doable, and it's easy to check whether or not it can be done.