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touring bikes at some point had 36 rear and 32 front
It was 32f/40r in the olden days, but the great unsung technological advance of the past few decades is spokes which have amazing fatigue life compared with those times. Today we design wheels for stiffness, and the strength looks after itself even down to 16f/20r on solo bikes with shallow and narrow rims. My trackdem has 36/36, and it probably has more load on it than a lot of touring rigs :-) It is going to depend on how much dish the rear has, mine is symmetrical but some race bikes use 130mm/10-speed solo hubs which make more demands on the stiffness side of the equation. Nonetheless, some people are happy to use 16/16 old school Shamals and WH-7700s for racing, both of which get past the stiffness hurdle with good bracing angles, the former by using >40mm deep rims and the latter by lateral crossing the spokes. In other words, there's a lot more to wheel design than just spoke count, but if your wheels are stiff enough they are almost certainly strong enough too with modern stainless steel spokes.
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gbj_tester
Wheelset question:
The same way touring bikes at some point had 36 rear and 32 front, would it be acceptable for a tandem (Not likely to ever be madly loaded, even if there may be a front rack) to have 40 rear and 36 front?