I understand that, but it seems that there are a lot of folks that, say, race for a team or ride with a club that's somehow associated with a manufacturer or something.

My viewpoint is very biased since the folks I know in Taiwan are there specifically to work with manufacturers. So I have a 100% hit rate of people I know in Taiwan and people I know in Taiwan who have industry contacts.

Not sure on the spokes. If you have MS Excel, there's an excellent spoke length calculator available online. You just have to remember to change the spoke count from 32 to 16 to calculate the right and left side lengths.

http://www.sheldonbrown.com/rinard/spocalc.htm

I used that to fiddle with the idea of lacing up a 24H Zipp 440 (old rim) onto various 32H hubs. I ended up building it as a front.

cdr