Originally Posted by
elmo449
... I've also been reading good things about wheels like the Ryde Andra, designed for heavily loaded rim braking, and I'm honestly curious to try them (and other rim related products) and see if the reputation is deserved, or just good marketing. I'm not really worried about wearing out rims, but maybe that's a lesson I need to learn the hard way
Usually when you read good things about the Ryde Andra 30 rims, you are reading about the CSS version of the rims. That has an extra hard braking surface that wears forever. I have those rims on my heavy duty touring bike, and the braking surface is as good as new on a nine year old bike.
Now the bad news. Ryde stopped making the CSS version of the rims several years ago. I learned that when I wanted to buy another pair of rims with CSS braking surface. There was not much demand for them with everybody switching to disc brakes, so they stopped making them. Any remaining CSS rims are extremely hard to find.
There are plenty of other very strong rims that in my opinion are as good as an Andra non-CSS rim to choose from. I used Velocity Dyad rims on my light touring bike that I built up five years ago. That is a good 700c rim for touring. Velocity has a good chart for which rims are best based on your desired tire width.
https://www.velocityusa.com/tech/rims/
But, if you are going to buy rims, you should first decide if you want to run tubeless tires or not so you get the type of rim you want for your tires.