Quill Stem Question
 

I started riding my "vintage" 1980 Schwinn Super Le Tour recently. Yesterday I went out for a 50 mile ride partly to see if I solved my loose front cone problem and I did. And mostly to enjoy a ride. Which I did!
As I was riding I think I may need to change my stem and shorten things up a bit. My question .Should I consider using a adapter to be able to use "modern" stems? There seems to be a larger selection of sizes more readily available.

Double check your stem size, as a lot of the older Schwinns had smaller, BMX sized, stems. Not sure about the SLT.

As far as shorter quill stems, there is an endless supply of them out there. Now if you have a Schwinn BMX sized stem, that will cut the selection down quite a bit. I tend to keep any of the small diameter stems I come across, as some of the Japanese bikes from the 1970s also used them (Nishiki did for example).

Personally, I think threadless converters look odd on 32 year old bikes, but they certainly function fine.

I think the threadless stems just look odd, period. I don't have any bikes recent enough to have one of them, though.

I've used the convertor to threadless stems and I've converted longer 1" quill stems to shorter 1" quill stems. Both systems work, but, if you can find the quill stem you want (search on ebay) this is the better way to go. The quill allows you to change the height of the stem, the conversion to threadless is not as flexible. After converting two bikes using the threadless convertor, my last two stem changes were quill to quill.

By using a conversion plug, you will have simplified the search for different
length stems, as there is more of a challenge finding lots of lengths..

Plus if you change your mind, swapping an open face plate , threadless stem
is not needing taking off tape and levers , and threading the bars thru the stem.