Originally Posted by
Maelochs
...
Sorry to preach---but your sermon seemed to have hit one of my nerves.
When I said 126mm dropouts prevented this from being a great touring bike, maybe I should have used upper case letters for the word great. It certainly could be a good touring bike, but I think not great.
And, if you looked at the rest of my post you will see that I encouraged him to try touring on that bike. Most other commenters above did not suggest trying touring on the bike like I did.
I tried to spread a frame this past summer, 120mm frame that I wanted to spread to 126mm. I gave up trying, it felt like I was trying to bend a leaf spring on a car. Maybe the Columbus tubing on my frame was more springy, but it certainly did not want to take a change of shape.