27" wheeled canti touring bike: wheel size prevent you from buying?
 

Wondering how many of you would buy a nice vintage 27" wheeled tourer with cantis, would wheel size alone be a deal breaker? 27" tires are still available but sizes are limited(Panracer Paselas for example). Cantis most likely won't be able to accommodate 700 wheels, although I believe they will work in a very few instances. What are your thoughts?

regards, Brian

I'd be more concerned with the rims than the size. If the rims are chromed steel, you won't be able to stop the bike when they're wet. (Insert mealy mouthed disclaimer here.) 27" tires aren't as common as 622, but they're still around.

If you like the bike and it is a reasonable price don't be afraid to experiment.

A 27" wheel has only an 8mm diameter diifference as compared to 700c (630mm vs 622mm). The existing brakes might be able to accomodate this. If not, I think you can use a 'cantilever brake extender' to lower the brake posts about 16mm each. Detailed photos of the bike would help.


And, there are some decent 27" tires available if the rims are worth keeping.

I bought a 1984 Trek 620 recently - all original - bought new 27" Panaracers for it - rides nice. Original box rims were worth re-using. However, I will probably convert to 700c eventually so I can install a modern drive train.

I suppose I am an outlier, but I prefer 27" wheelsets. I like the ride of the bigger wheelset, (a la 29er MTBs vs 26,27.5).. Between Conti, Panracer and Vittoria there are some decent tire choices. As said above, if it doesn't have more modern hooked rims I'd re-lace to some new SunRingles.

If you were talking racer, I'd want 700 wheels, but I don't see what you gain by changing a tourer to euro wheels.

Without knowing which cantis are on the bike I might hesitate until I could inspect it, but every canti bike I have seen of the 27" tire vintage had enough adjustment in the cantis brake arms to fit 700C. I bought a new bike 3 years ago as my old vintage bike with a great wheelset was in 27" with non-hooked rims was getting hard to find nice tires and then the selection of sizes was very narrow - typically heavy Kendas that could not take pressure and would blow off. The non-hooked rims limited it to wired beads versus foldable, so carrying a spare tire was a challenge, but I did find a Panaracer foldable that worked in an emergency, even though not recommended. I also have an old (1973) Peugeot that has 27" wheels and ran it for a while with tubulars (700C). No problems with adjusting the Mafac centerpulls to fit whichever wheelset was being used..

If you are interested, I would just take a front wheel in 700C ant ask to try it. Just eyeball the brakes to see if they allow enough adjustment. Most canti brakes allow more adjustment than regular caliper brakes.

Not my experience at all. The adjustability in cantis was not meant to accommodate switches between 27" and 700C - just so the same brakes could be used on frames with slightly different dimensions. Frames were never intentionally made to be easily swapped between wheel sizes.

That being said, it is certainly possible that there are some cantis that have the required adjustability, but if the brake pads are close to the bottom of the slot in the brake with 27", you're either going to need to find different brakes or just stick with the 27" wheels. In fact, the tires I prefer above all others, Panaracer Paselas, are available in 27".

I have done numerous 27" -> 700c conversions, but all with caliper brakes. I have seen a few canti-equipped bikes that I thought would make good candidates for the switch, but the existing canti brakes always lacked the required adjustability.

I have to disagree. Back in the day, Miyata, for example, didn't make a bike frame for the 27" market in the US and the 700C market in the rest of the world. Nor did Diacompe, for example, make brakes for the 27" market and the 700C market for the rest of the world. When 27" bikes were the "US bike" there was never a brake for one or the other. There were just brakes.

I do not believe this is accurate. In the 1970s, most trekking or touring bikes had 27", in Europe as well as USA, while most competition or 'racing' bikes had 700C. I just looked up some international catalogues from the era to confirm this...

https://labibleduvelocatalogueskogam...yata-1979.html

This one is in Dutch or something and the spec sheet at the back has 27" wheels and tires listed for some bikes.

The other problem with swapping wheel sizes without changing anything else is that, even if they can be made to fit, the build with smaller diameter wheels will have significantly stronger brakes for a given force at the lever than the one with larger wheels (for cantis - the opposite would be true of caliper brakes).

I had a very early 80's Apollo (Kawahara) touring bike with canti's that originally had 27" wheels and the original cantilever brakes adjusted for 700c rims without issues.

go linear pull?
https://www.paulcomp.com/shop/components/motolite/
- I would swap 27in & 700c wheels on an old touring Cannondale. I was never sure if the poor brake performance was due to the wheel size changing - or my inability to correctly adjust canti-brakes. I'm about 95% sure it was my skill level.
i just love me them linear pull brakes - it's like canti-brakes for dummies....

ciao.

I changed our the cantilevers on my Surly Crosscheck for some Tektro mini v-brakes. These shorter v-brakes where originally used on BMX bikes but a lot of cross riders started using them as you get more power than many cantilevers. I found them to be a big improvement over the Shimano cantis on my bike. They work with road brake levers, and although they may not be as nice as the Paul Components they are way less money, like under $20 a set.

I am familiar with the differnce between Miyta and Koga-Miyata. I was just looking for an example of non-USA-spec 27" wheels.
I could only find Miyata catalogues for the US market and in Japanese, so was not able to see if Japanese versions had different wheels than US versions. It semed that only their touring models had 27", but all racing-style bikes were specced with 700c, even in the late 70s.

Concur. We do it at the coop all the time.

The 27" wheels are worth $25 a piece, and a 27" bike won't hardly sell, so we harvest the 27" wheels and put 700s on it.