Originally Posted by kf9yr

I live in AZ. We have lots of plants that have wicked thorns and cacti that have needles.

The edges of the road have lots of broken glass and LOTS of tire shards. I don't think you can ride a mile in the summer without seeing tire carcass on the shoulder. These are because we don't get much rain and no snow. People will drive on their tires until the wire belts are showing. The extreme temps also cause a lot of blowouts when they drive with low air pressure, then the tires overheat and explode like a carbon frame (just kidding but couldn't resist). The tire bits get run over by other motorists and get broken into small pieces.

The wire in the belting is small in diameter and sharp. I get flats from these small pieces of wire all the time. It's sometimes hard to pick them out of the tire and they will give you a nasty poke in the fingertip as well.

I do have one of those Lezyne pumps I had mounted on my last bike. The adapter tube used to rattle like crazy so I needed to make a "damper" with a small piece of inner tube (had plenty of old ones). After that I noticed the handle still rattled a little bit so I wrapped a small pice of inner tube around the pump body where the black handle overlapped.

It would still rattle when I hit a large bump and I don't like my bike to sound like a rattletrap so in the bike drawer for the Lezyne pump. If I'm going for a solo century I will stick it in my jersey pocket though.