Chalo, I'm sorry, but your friend did not have a set of my wheels, I've never had a wheelset fail EVER, never had any come back, and if he had actually bought them from me he would have known that I back up my work 100%.. I can't imagine anybody paying what I charge for wheels, and then not telling me about any problems encountered, sounds a bit fishy to me......
I'll try to fill in some of your blanks, so you can assess the veracity for yourself.
This was in probably 2003 or 2004; my buddy and I lived in Seattle then. The wheels were mountain bike wheels, with red powdercoated deep rims on disc hubs. I was not familiar at that time with the rim brand, so it was surely not Velocity. They might have been Vuelta. The rims were superficially like the Velocity Deep-V ATB that had been available up to then. I don't remember what color the hubs were, but the spokes were silver. My buddy (I'll call him T.O., which are his actual initials) mounted the wheels on a dual suspension mountain bike which he rode mostly on the street.
The rims had been drilled out to receive the larger 9ga and 10ga nipples, and lacing tension had slightly puckered the holes.
When I saw his super-strong new wheels, I reckoned they might loosen when ridden. The puckering around the spoke holes was a strong clue that the spokes needed more tension than the rim could physically provide.
T.O. was generally happy with his wheels, but they did loosen continuously, and he had to tighten them back up more and more frequently. They didn't ever fail structurally- there was no noteworthy bending, flat-spotting, or collapse- and it seemed the only reason they went out of true was from spoke loosening. I don't remember T.O. ever being as unhappy with his wheels as I would have been, and I think he stopped using them only because he didn't want to spend the time to keep them tight anymore.
To me, such a gross mismatch of spoke gauge to rim weight constitutes a failure of design, not procedural skill in wheelbuilding. It betrays a poor understanding of the physical principles at work in a wire-spoked wheel. The most skillful and consistent wheelbuilding can't make up for such an elementary mistake.
I encourage anyone who is interested to read up on "tensegrity" structures, because a wire wheel is basically one of those:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tensegrity
In tensegrity terms, the rim is a circular "strut" and the spokes are "tendons". If the spokes are too thick and inelastic to react to forces applied to the wheel, then they can lose all tension under load and the wheel becomes unstable.
Chalo