It’s Tour Down Under time again!  Above is the TDU village last weekend– I’d imagine it’s a little busier by now.

Like last year, the Lance Armstrong Twitter Ride (and fund raiser for the Queensland floods) started in Glenelg. The ride began a little after 10:00AM Saturday (Adelaide time) and did a loop north up the coast. It was about 25C (77F) and sunny, and the weather for the week of the TDU should be dry with highs in the low 20s to 30s (70-90F).

I rode the Trek on this ride, which doesn’t have a computer, so I can only guess the ride was a little over an hour long and about 30km. Anyway, I didn’t get any good photos, but here’s what the start/finish looked like:

I haven’t had very good luck with small/mini/micro pumps.  I’ve had some that worked marginally, and the rest have been literally useless.  I also have some CO2 cartridges and valve, which work, but are wasteful, expensive, and rattle around in my jersey pockets.

Below is a Park Tool PMP-5, an adjustable frame pump that fits a range of frame sizes with and without a frame pump mounting pegs.  In addition to freeing-up my jersey pockets, this pump actually works.  The only change I made was to cover the silver and blue aluminum barrel in black vinyl– the silver and blue didn’t look so great with the ’90s Trek ‘Ice Violet’.

Overall, this is an inexpensive pump that fits a lot of different frames and can inflate a road tire to a reasonable pressure in a reasonable amount of time. This may not sound like much, but it’s more than can be said for most pumps.

The PMP-5 fits securely on my 52cm steel Gunnar Crosshairs, without pump mounting peg, and with a very short head tube:

And, here it is on the 56cm lugged carbon Trek 2120, with pump mounting peg, which previously used a Zefal HPX-4 :

This is a used saddle I recently purchased for the 29er.  It was in pretty bad shape.  The leather had shrunk and the glue holding the leather to the saddle had failed.

I re-glued the leather, but it had shrunk enough that I couldn’t wrap in around the base of the saddle.  The new glue was held up on a few rides, but the edge of the leather was fraying and was probably not going to stay attached too long.

Pictured above is the solution.  This is a ~2″ length of 1.9″ mountain inner tube pulled over the nose of the saddle covering the exposed edges of the leather.

Trashed Flite Ti: $30 AUD

Glue: $4 AUD

Tube: Free