>>1941180Look for this lil nigga. It was ubiquitous on high-spec classic bikes.
600 tricolor is the platonic ideal of a vintage groupset (although to boomers, it was one of the first modern groupsets, and is not vintage).
It easily allows you to address the two major problems with vintage road bikes
>narrow gearing>poor braking And you can buy decent parts off the shelf for it, cheaply.
Tricolor came in the late 80s. You have this tech trickling down through 105, exage 500 and exage 300 until the late 90s.
Basically you want a cassette rear wheel and indexed downtube shifters. Bonus for dual pivot brakes.
Many decent club level cromo bikes specced exage or 105 and those are also often very good buys.
The major thing to avoid, when you start out, is STI shifters, or campagolo ergopower. Even 10 year old sets of those can have issues. It can be possible to bring them back to life, but IME, your chances of success are around 50%, lower if they don't work at all, and higher if they do and you just want an improvement.
Going for a bike which is old enough to still have downtube shifters is important if you don't know what you're doing.
I would say the same thing for vintage mountain bikes if you want to keep them stock, thumbies are far superior to STI on old XT groupsets.
