Originally Posted by John E

If you care about reliabiliity and durability, go with a more traditional wheel design, with 32 spokes per wheel in a 3X pattern on both wheels. As you may guess or may have read in my earlier posts, I am not at all sold on the concepts of paired spokes, reduced spoke counts, and radial spoking (which I tried briefly in the early 1970s).

If you don't care about indexed shifting, you can use your SunTour rear derailleur with a 9-speed cassette, if you like, and the frame can easily take a spread from 128 to 130mm, or even 126 to 130.