wheel set up grade
 

I have a 1990 raliegh road bike that has 500LX components, the wheel sets are 32 spoke and seem to be in good shape. I weigh right at 200 lbs and was thinking of up grading the wheels. It has 7 cogs in the rear and I did upgrade to brake shifters way back when. My question is can I upgrade to the modern 9 or 10 speed wheel set? Will the wheel even fit the rear dropouts or are they wider now? any help would be great, Jim:D

If you're running 7 speeds, your dropouts should be 126mm, vs 130mm for an 8-10 speed wheel. Since its only a 4 mm difference, the wheel should fit if you squeeze it a bit, or you could have the frame spread. Since the 7 speed and 8-10 speed cassettes are a different width, you might be able to get the old cassette to work on a new wheel with a spacer, although I'm not sure if the groove patterns on the hubs are the same.

The Shimano freehub body splines are the same.

How do you know this. He may have a pre-hyperglide cassette body in which case the splines would not be the same.

500LX was Hyperglide. It was common on the entry-level city and mountain Bridgestones in the early 90's: http://sheldonbrown.com/bridgestone/...neXO3flyer.pdf