mutant pump

 

Splice in the hose.

When Jimmy Bruno was still alive and running his shop in Allentown, I bought this pump from him:

Get a load of that beauty. The pump was tall enough so that I could fill a 700x28 tire in nineteen strokes, the gauge was up where I could see it, and the hose was long enough that it would reach both tires on a bike that I had hanging from the garage ceiling. (I'd have to arrange the upper tire so that the valve was near the bottom, but still -- with my bad back, it was better than bending over.)

The careful reader will have noticed the usage of the past tense in that sentence. Alas, the pump gave up the ghost; the valve that kept the air from filling back into the pump after each stroke, died. I tried opening the pump to see if I could fix it, but the sealed module stymied my efforts.

Now, glasses will fix the visibility of the gauge, and a few extra strokes are no big thing, but that fill-the-tire-while-the-bike-is-still-hanging-up thing is a real loss. So I decided to see what I could do.

I cut the long hose, with the head attached, from that pump, and looked for a cheap pump to try to mate it with. Harbor Freight, of the cheap-and-questionable tools, has a pump for about $20. The head will only fit Schrader valves, but I'm gonna cut that off, anyway.

So I get that pump, and cut both hoses. Each has an inner diameter of about 1/8", jammed onto a fitting of about 1/4". So I figure I'll get a 1/4" barb fitting to fit the two hoses together.

Now, if you want the fitting, it's available online, for between $2-5. Shipping adds about another $20. What? One of the ways to cut the shipping cost is to buy in bulk, but what are you going to do with a hundred of em? So you go to the Home Depot site, and you see they have one that they will deliver to your local store in South Brunswick.

The item gets lost in shipping, and then you get a message a week later that it's in the store, but hasn't been set in the deliver locker. Three days later, you go to the store with the printout, and the friendly clerk tells you that their system says it's still in transit. And two days later, you get a message that the item is really no longer in stock, and they're refunding the charge.

So you contact Lowes, which has 'em in the East Brunswick store, and you get it the next day. 

 You get the item home, and you realize that, while the pieces from the old pump were about 1/4" wide, the barbed fitting you wanted should have been the 1/8" variety. So with a judicious application of heat and profanity, you get the hose ends far enough onto the fitting to work, and hold 'em on with some worm clamps. Go see the top picture.

Does it work? Well enough. The cheap pump doesn't like pressures over about 80psi, so it takes some force to get it up to the 90psi I like to ride on. But it does inflate the tire that's hanging from above. And its long enough that I don't have to move the valve to the bottom.

And it looks marvellously dumb.

It's good enough for now.

(I think I'm going to have to face the fact that, even among bike enthusiasts, I'm a bit of an eccentric.)