feejer

This turned into way more of a project than I thought getting everything to work together, but I really like how it turned out. Made a lot of rookie mistakes, but got it figured out. It took the Problem Solver Travel Agents for the V Brakes, and a Shiftmate 7 cable adapter for the front derailleur, which works like a champ. I ended up keeping the same crankset and FD, but with a new BB, RD, chain and cassette, tires and tubes, inline brakes. It has MicroShift R8 brake shifters, which even came with a full set of cable and housing. Nice! The bar is a Velo Orange Nouveau Randonneur with an underwrap of old innertube, and I used an adjustable Ritchie stem on it that is shorter than the original flat bar stem. There is a lot of bar positioning room with this stem, but the comfort factor is spot on even just guessing the starting bar positioning. The brakes are going to need some tweaking and most likely new pads yet, and my bar wrapping skills definitely suck. I've been wanting a drop bar on this bike for a long time, and it was totally worth doing. It was also good practice for when my 920 frameset gets here this winter/spring. Fun stuff. A few pics...






Before:

mack_turtle

good work! I gotta say, that shift housing looks awfully short. if the housing is so short that the gear shift when you steer, I'd replace that housing with something that is the correct length.

feejer

I think that’s just camera angles, there’s plenty of extra even with the bar full sideways.

HillRider

Good work. Several years ago I converted a '92 Trek 7000 rigid fork/hardtail MTB to drop bars and, as you discovered, it requires more new parts than one would think. They do make good commuter/grocery getter/bad weather bikes though.