I recently built these up for Iohan Gueorguiev, he plans on riding the Dalton Hwy in Alaska, the Great Divide Mountain Bike Route, and then continue south from there!  It should be a pretty amazing adventure that will really put some stress on wheels.  For his trip I set him up with XT/Rhyno Lite for the rear and a Supernova hub dynamo and Rhyno Lite combo for the front so he can charge his toys on his trip.  They are all tied together with DT Alpine III spokes and should make for a very solid and reasonably priced set of wheels.

You can follow his adventures here!  BikeWanderer

So I was talking with Nancy from Family on Bikes, the family who among other big adventures has toured from Alaska to Argentina, about why do touring cyclists let themselves get into very unsafe situations simply from letting maintenance issues go for far too long.  The most recent I read in a touring journal was yet another person stranded because their brake pads have worn through their rims (remember, with rim brakes rims are a wear item) to the point the sidewall split.  Failure like this takes so long to happen that it honestly blows my mind it happens so frequent so we were trying to figure it out.  She asked me to write an article for her blog about how to catch small problems before they grow into much larger ones and this is what I came up with.

For what it is worth, you should spend some time on their site if you are a fan of touring, Nancy has also wrote a few great books about bike touring, some of them family oriented, some were before they had kids.  My personal favorite is, "What Were We Thinking" and is worth the read.

Here is a link to the article I wrote.

Bicycle Maintenance While on Tour

I recently built a set of fat bike wheels for a customer who just picked up a really sweet REEB Redonkadonk and today I get an email with pictures of his first ride!  I love it when customers send pics of my wheels in action.

The build was:
Black Turnagain FR80 rims
Pewter Salsa Conversion hubs
DB Wheelsmith Spokes