I live here in So Cal and have wanted to start doing some 2 and 3 day rides up and down the coast. This will not be any heaving touring. Most of the time it will probably be "credit card" touring or a hybrid of CC and camping.

I've been looking at a Trek Domane AL 5. The cost and apparent functionality of this bike is well within my wheelhouse. It also has the capability to attach a rack so that I can ride with panniers. I will also accommodate wider tires etc. Here's the one thing that gives me pause... the rims are 24-hole. I weigh 182 and would probably be riding with no more than an additional 30 lbs. Is a 24-hole rim going to cut it? I know the Trek website says a max of 275 lbs including rider and gear but... I'm old school (70 y/o) and a 24-hole wheel just doesn't sound right for touring (even light touring).

Braze on equipped. Must be able to take some abuse.

Smooth toads ahead go for it. Beats up roads think about it,

as a longtime tourer and even cc touring, without camping gear etc, another thing to consider is a bikes gearing. If you have not ridden or toured with 20, 25, 30bs of stuff on a bike, lower gearing than a lot of standard road bikes or even racey gravel bikes really makes a big difference for enjoying the experience -- and of course, a huge difference for your 70 yr old knees and leg muscles.

I'm in my early 60s and even when I started touring 35 years ago, I soon figured out that lower gearing makes all the difference --- but what is sufficient low gearing--thats the 64K question.
If you are really interested, some of us, me included, can bore the hell out of you with touring gearing details and specifics, and recommendations from lots of experience, but I guess lets see what your interest is and go from there.

this summer, the son of a friend was planning a big touring trip, and I suggested lower gearing that what his bike had, and even as a young strong guy, he soon realized that he would have preferred lower gearing.

technically, its easy to use gearing charts to see exactly what a given bikes gearing is, with black and white numbers, ie what your lowest gear is, and is a much better way to assess and make some decisions about bikes or gearing setup than just being told by a store employee that doesn't have touring experience and or is 22 years old, telling you, "ya, sure this bike will be fine for touring"

a lot, lot of bikes are overgeared, and unless you are racing, it is extremely rare to be able to hold speeds anywhere near 40kph, or for you imperial guys, 25mph. For touring I'm totally fine with gearing that I spin out at about 50-55kph, 30-35mph, because in all my years touring (and even non touring) all the times I've happily gotten to 80-90kph, 50-55mph, its been on hills where I'm way past my top gearing anyway, but I have still been able to haul ass if the conditions, road surface and line of sight allows for it within my personal level of safety.

and yes, 24 spoke wheels are not really the best, so my take on it is to look at bikes with stronger wheelsets and lower gearing that will be more appropriate for you.

This made me laugh 😍

I agree with djb: strong wheels and low gearing 👍

24 spoke wheels aren't necessarily weak. Those rims are super stiff. But you can just buy a different wheelset, or trade the factory wheels in. Alloy rim wheels that are tough are not expensive.

1. the Domane isn’t a touring bike and with 42 cm chainstays I would not put 30lbs in panniers on the back even if they show it with panniers. Just because you can put a rack on something doesn’t mean that rack can carry panniers on any bike.. Likewise just because a bike can run fatter tires doesn’t mean it’s a load carrier. In other words a light “all road” bike isn’t necessarily a load carrier.

2. If I was set on that bike AND 30 lb load I’d spread it out between the front and rear AND get a 32 hole wheelset. Mostly because it’ll handle better than putting all that weight behind the rear axle. Trek always put minimal spoke count wheels for visual effect which with modern rims can be perfectly ok for a young 150 lb rider able to ride lightly over bumps but once you put that much dead weight on the bike, especially the rear wheel I would be surprised you won’t find the limits on that wheel even with comfy 35 mm tires.

3. Most of my touring was ultralight on steelroad bikes w a rear rack holding camp pad and medium stuff sack lengthwise and small handlebar bag holding about 4 lbs. Total about 12-15 lbs. Bike handled great. With all the different frame bags nowadays you can shift a lot of weight foward. Heavy rear loads are doable and people do them but it makes for awful handling on road bikes. Even road bikes with slack head angles and fatter tires.

I agree with McKane, smooth roads (or toads), ok. Rougher routing, I would not.

Consider a few such 2 or 3 day rides as test cases. If you decide later you would like to do more of this, buy a new rear wheel with at least 32 spokes.

Skinny high pressure tires would put more stress on the wheels than wider softer pressure tires. Do you know the tire width? If these are tubeless tires, then changing the tires to wider ones for the ride is more complicated with sealant, etc. But if the bike has inner tube tires, you could buy wider tires for the loaded riding and then go back to the narrow ones for unladen riding. Some people do quite well with heavy loads on 32mm tires, but the narrowest tires I have toured on were 37mm. But I almost always carry more than 30 pounds on my rear rack.

When you hit a bump, your body can absorb a lot of that shock pretty well, especially if you see it coming and raised your butt off the saddle, your ankles and knees absorb some of the shock. But static weight on the rear rack does not have any shock absorption, that puts more stress on the bike when you have impacts from potholes, etc. Try to cut your weight lower if you can.

Best to do this while your bike is under warranty.

https://www.trekbikes.com/us/en_US/b...-al-5/p/36145/

Doesn't seem well-suited for touring if carrying more than handlebar and seat bags, especially if you expect to ride hills.

Aluminum fork with no rack eyelets, not even mounts
for them small cargo/bottle cages.
24-spoke wheels, thru-axle.
34/50 chain rings.
31 pounds without racks.

$2000 will get you a nice suitable touring bike on ebay, or are you specifically looking for an E-bike?

What do you predict is going to happen if you put 30 lbs in panniers on this bike?

Thank you for the input.

If looking at Trek, you might instead consider a Checkpoint which is a gravel bike and a little more suited for touring than the Domane.

Though the Domane could be just fine, and you could put a more stout wheel on there for peace of mind.

I really appreciate all the input. My biggest and only concern was the wheels. I was just curious if there may have been some big jump in wheel building where a 28 hole rim would be suitable for very light touring. From the answers above I'm understanding that this is probably not a good idea.

My daughter has a Domane AL (3, I think). It's about 5 years old, and came with 24 spoke wheels. As a fellow oldster, I also thought 24 spoke wheels would be totally inadequate for touring. She has done three tours on that bike, including joining me last autumn for a tour of the Outer Hebrides of Scotland with a camping load. She also uses the bike for commuting, so those wheels have racked up a lot of hard km's. They are still in fine shape. She's a 6ft triathlete (unlike her dad!) and probably weighs at least as much as you.

He mentioned the Domane AL5 @ 22 lbs not the Domane + AL5 w 28 spoke wheels

I’m all out of predictions. No crystal ball.. My expectation is that a 24 spoke rear wheel with 30lbs DEAD weight will not last as long as one with more spokes. There is absolutely no benefit to low spoke count in the op’s application. Before that though the bikes geometry is suited for rider weight on seat, pedals and bars. Whether it’s 120lbs or 220 lbs. The bike could easily carry 30lbs on top of the riders 185lbs but distribute it so front/rear load balance isn’t changed significantly thereby retaining what I assume is enjoyable handling. Besides it’s always nice to have spare wheels to make tire changes easy.

You said the bike had 24 spokes, 28 would be better. The suitability of a particular wheel depends on the application as well as the wheel design. Yes modern rims are much more rigid than 40 yrs ago. If you like this bike get it and ride it. I wouldn’t pick a bike because of it’s spoke count , gear range or saddle. All those things can be changed. If it was me I’d get a spare set of wheels eventually. but if I was going to put a rack and 20lbs on there I’d see if the shop could either swap the 24 spoke rear wheel or offer a discounted spare w 32 spokes. Nothing fancy, no need, just trued right.

In spades.

Smooth toads & flat squirrels ahead!

That’s impressive.

that's impressive.
I reckon some factors come into play, how the roads are-- I've ridden a bit in the Hebrides and Scotland and overall the paved surfaces are pretty good, nothing like what I regularly ride on here in Montreal.
How wide tires and pressures you use
and then how you ride. Some riders are very good at "riding light", as mentioned by someone earlier, not riding fully seated over potholes and that sort of thing, unweighing the bike properly at just the right instant, but some riders are like a bull in a chinashop, going heavily seated over rough stuff at too high a speed.

a bunch of years ago, I met a couple of woman riding across Canada, and one of them had a Trek something or other,sort of bikepacking/adventure bike, with 28 spoked wheels, and she had no end of broken spoke stories throughout the trip. Kept breaking them until some good bike shop finally properly tensioned the wheels partway through the trip, so yes, how a specific wheelset is adjusted and properly tensioned can play a big part too.

I'd still be inclined to have a more robust bike, but only Mr takingmytime knows all the various factors and compromises he'd like to make, vs how much loaded up riding will actually happen in the life of this potential bike.

Sorry, I misunderstood that you had an issue with the bike in general rather than the wheels.

You aren’t terribly heavy but you aren’t a butterfly either. You might be able get away with the low spoke count wheels but you might not. If want to risk the headache of constant spoke replacement, that’s your call. But higher spoke count wheels are going to be less problematic and something you won’t have to think about. Not thinking about it is better. But it is your call.

I would suggest a different direction. Look at one of the Trek FX hybrids. They are longer than the Domane and more capable as touring machines. They have 32 spoke wheels (36 would be better) but. more importantly, they are touring bike masquerading as hybrids. Even the cheap versions would make very adequate long wheelbase touring bikes. As a bonus, they are dirt cheap even new. I used an older 7.3 FX as the platform for my daughter’s Denver/touring bike. I took something like this



And made it into this.



It has 36 hole wheels and wide range gearing for touring in mountains. I didn’t go looking for particularly lightweight parts (although the fork is a carbon fork which I wouldn’t have and issue touring on). Even with a very heavy Brooks B17 N, the bike comes in at 23 lbs which is only 2 lbs heavier than the Domane’s street weight. The final weight was rather surprising.

Doing a drop bar conversion on a more modern disc bike would be a bit more difficult, although not impossible.

24H rear is fine if triplet design... being 16/8 configuration w a quality butted spoke like S Lasers. Some of the older Bontrager designs also equalized rear spoke tension side side with hub spacing design.

From my view on the AL5.... look elsewhere. Not much for specifics shopping for it......... yet another "price point" bike... sans quality/

that's a pretty neat build you did there, and 23lbs isn't shabby at all.
The fork looks like what is on my Tricross, a specialized fork with the rubber insert thingee. I assume you built the wheels? Getting rid of the clunky triple for the much lighter XT triple would have saved a bunch of weight, and very nice with older XT rd , and even those Supreme tires are pretty light. I just was riding this evening on my 700 supreme shod bike, and they really are nice riding tires.
Did you go with cantis because of the shifters cable pull?

My wife tours on an older Trek hybrid with very low spoke count wheels but then she only weighs 115 lbs so it hasn't been an issue. At your weight, I wouldn't chance it and as mentioned before, unless you're guaranteed flat terrain, I wouldn't want that gearing.

+1 Those wheel would be fine for better roads and credit cards and also very nice to use at home. For touring, invest in a second set with 32 or 36 spokes, possibly a wider rim for bigger tires and get a wider cassette for it. And rear derailleur if needed for the bigger cog or chain take-up needs. That bigger derailleur will work just fine with the factory cassette of the stock wheels. So you have both a good day bike for rides from home or simply swap wheel and load up. And second wheel sets are always good. You walk into the garage for that ride you need and guess what. A flat! Swap a wheel and go., Deal with it later.

Those smooth toads are cute.