jontu

While certainly small, light, inexpensive and reasonably well-built, this is definitely not the pump you want to have if you blow out a tube on your road bike. While rated to 115 PSI, unless you have the wheel held in a vise and are built like Arnold circa 1977, it is physically impossible to inflate a tire anywhere remotely near that pressure with this pump. 10 minutes of dedicated effort got a 700x23 road tire to about 70 PSI for me. By this point I was putting so much pressure on the pump that I was terrified of ripping the valve right off the tube and could barely actuate the pump without losing my grip, and I am not a small dude.

Getting the tire to about 40 PSI was a snap and went quite quickly, so CX folks and mountain bikers may find this pump to be a very light and cost-effective solution, but roadies should look elsewhere.

These things have about the same nutritional value as your typical gel, making them really nice to add some variety to your quick on-the-bike eats. The new tube-like packaging (with the blocks arranged in a line) is a huge improvement, eliminating the fishing around with one hand procedure the old bag-style package required. My one gripe with these is that they're really chewy and require water to eat without choking. This gets worse as they got older, and over the course a few months they slowly transition from chewy to inedible, so don't try to buy a season's worth in one go.

I like this guy, it has pretty much every tool needed for run-of-the-mill roadside repairs (assuming you don't have flathead screws anywhere), plus a 3mm hex that I've never used (maybe mountain bikes use 3mm bolts somewhere? Or some brands of cleats? All I know is there is nary a 3mm bolt on any of my bikes). It's light but has a large enough frame to give you good leverage, and the tools are all of reasonable enough length to actually be useful and are nicely forged (i.e. they actually fit the bolts they are supposed to). I wish it were stainless or chromed, because after about a year of being sweated and rained on, there is some surface corrosion on the tools. Nothing steel wool won't fix, though. Swap that useless 3mm hex for a spoke wrench and smack some chrome on it and this would get five stars. It's still my go-to road tool, though.

These are the best gloves I've had in ages. The padding on these gloves is reasonably sparse, giving you very good grip and feel, but still very effective. The positioning of the padding is just to my liking and is definitely designed around road drop bars, with good padding at the base of the thumb for riding the hoods, which many gloves lack. A nice, open back and velcro closure makes them easy to take off (and makes for weird tan lines) and a rubberized pull tab on the wrist is sizable enough to get with your teeth so you can get 'em on one-handed. The construction is soft, supple leather, with some synthetic mesh panels between the fingers, which makes them surprisingly cozy on hot days. Washing them takes some effort but mine are still very adequately Euro-pro white (I use a bit of dish soap and cool water, then let the gloves dry on my hands for a while to maintain shape, and this has worked well). Fit is obviously a very personal thing, so definitely go try them on somewhere before dropping this sort of cash, but I couldn't be happier in this department. For the price I'm expecting some serious milage out of these, but I've definitely put enough milage on them already to have killed lesser gloves and they seem no worse for the wear, so the future looks bright. These seem to be a nice example of a high-end piece of kit that actually gives you some return on the investment not just in terms of style, but also in function and longevity.

These tires are very puncture resistant and the cornering grip and road feel is superb. That is a super-rare combination, as usually tires hard enough to keep debris from penetrating are too hard to grip corners effectively. Big ups to Continental for that. I've been running these in the 700x23 size for three seasons now and my milage has varied by a lot. I had one tire go for over 4,000 miles (I rotate them every 1k miles or so), another one I trashed in under 1k miles due to cuts in the rubber caused by road debris. Wear indicators are molded into the tire, which is a nice plus. These are as good as anything I've run in the rain, but they really shine on dry asphalt. I'd say the optimal situation is swapping these out for something tougher in the winter and early spring, as this is a very expensive tire to trash in the sand and salt. But for summer, they are pretty much unbeatable, which is what you'd expect out of a $60 clincher.

These guys get the job done, but they're really nothing special as tire levers go. A little chunky but not bad at all, and reasonably tough but not exceptionally so. In the course of last season I broke two of these. The shape is nice, though the hooked side is prone to breaking, especially on particularly tight rims or tight new tires. My old Continental levers (which were just a flat piece of plastic) lasted much longer and took up less space in the pocket, and I have yet to find levers shaped as usefully as my old Specialized Pry Babies. But hey, for $2.50, these get the job done just fine, won't dent your rims, and help you not be that guy who rides without the means to change his own tire. And being that guy sucks.