1984 Trek 500 upgrade project, phase 1

I bought this bike new in 1984; this photo is of it this afternoon, after what I'll call the "completion" of the phase 1 upgrade. More photos appear in this Flickr set.
This photo shows the bike in the original Trek brochure from 1984, and this one gives the original specification, along with the other Trek Sport models of 1984.
I rode the bike a bit, but not a huge amount, through about 1988, when for various reasons it got put away. It came back out a couple of years ago, a result of watching (and enjoying) the Tour de France on Versus, and pondering the nice bike I had and never rode. It needed tires and tubes, and went back out on the road.
Over the next couple of years, I replaced the original Avocet saddle with a Brooks, and the original SR pedals and Lapize toe clips with a set of Shimano SPD pedals.
However, I was still not really clued in about a lot of things about the bike. So this winter I decided to learn about maintenance, which had been very much neglected. Fortunately, I found Bicycle Tutor, which was an enormous help in figuring things out. But it didn't cover everything, there was a lot of research involved. Ok, not too much research involved in replacing the handlebar tape with new cork tape, but there were other research tasks.
The real joker in the deck was when I figured out about the Atom Helicomatic hubs basically being a time bomb. It's well covered on the Sheldon Brown pages, a resource I hope sticks around: http://www.sheldonbrown.com/velos.html#helicomatic. Trek used these on lots of their bikes of the period, and likely the only reason mine were still intact was because the bike just sat for so long. Having figured this out, the next step was to figure out what to do about it. Being a mid-80s six speed, the rear fork spacing is 126mm, and to use modern hubs, I'd have to cold set (spread) the rear frame to 130mm, a procedure which often (but not always) works. I concluded I like this bike too much to take any risk like that, so no cold-set for me. I spent a bit of time on EBay, and came up with a good used pair of Campy Record hubs of the correct size but with no skewers, but the skewers were easy enough to find as well. I also found on EBay a NOS Suntour Ultra-7 freewheel, a type that was briefly produced that fit 7 cogs in the space of a traditional 6 speed freewheel.
So I took the Campy hubs to The Downtube, a local Albany NY area bike shop to get some wheels built. This was where I discovered a flaw in my research. I had picked up 36 hole hubs, and as it happens, 36 spoke wheels are another thing that is passing away. Available rims are limited, 32 or 28 hole hubs would have been much better. The folks at the Downtube did convince me to convert from 27" wheels to 700C wheels, as there are more available options in 700C rims, but even so, the 36 spoke rims were backordered and it seemed like it was going to take forever. Then the owner of the store remembered he had some NOS 36 hole Rigida rims "out back" that had been sitting for years. Problem solved, now i have nice replacement wheels on the bike, with a nice NOS freewheel, and things are 100% better.
This is the end of phase 1, the bike is working very well, the new freewheel is much quieter and shifts much more smoothly than the old one.
Phase 2 is probably going to involve Shimano bar end shifters and a Stronglight A9 headset. I'll write about that someday.