So after adding all the road wheels and modifying the brakes, I bought some 9 speed road shifters and a road drop bar. Apparently they didn't work very well with the Shimano XT rear derailleur. It seems that once I had the indexing set on the smaller cassette rings it would skip a gear towards the larger ones. Setting the indexing on the larger rings had the opposite effect of skipping towards the smaller ones. After doing some research I found that the cable pull on the Shimano was different than that of a Campagnolo. So a new 9 speed Campy RD was bought. Once installed, everything shifted smoothly but when I took it out I ran into a couple of issues with the front derailleur. It seems that the jump between the middle and small chainring was so large that almost every time I shifted, the chain would pop off. After a few times, the chain was sucked in and it was impossible to take off unless I either broke the chain or removed the chainring. A few more rides revealed the same constant issue. As of now, my solution is to not use the small chainring up front. A new front derailleur might solve the problem.
I also replaced the fork. I found a nice matching carbon fiber road fork on ebay which did not sell for much since there were a flood of them on there. After that I purchased a set of road brakes for the front fork. Unfortunately the rear of the frame did not allow for retrofitting a road brake so I had to stick to the modified setup of the Vbrake. So this is the only visible clue that it is an MTB frame.
Road bar and road shifter/brake combo installed with painted white caps.
Front view of road setup.
Right side - fork / drop bar
Full road setup with new seat and carbon fork.
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