Saturday, March 12, 2011

The Incredible Lightness of Inflateness

If you've been following along at home, you, the reader, know that my trusty Topeak mini pump failed on me a while back.
I liked the Topeak Mini-Morph, it was light, small, and had a hose on it that made putting air in my tires easy.
Unfortunately, it did not want to flex some tire pump muscles and trying to pump up my road bike tires proved too much for it.
So The Flat Tire Division of all Things Bicycleness, Department of Acquisitions, Office of Air Inflation, initiated the Quest for Pumps.
After a long and lengthy search, the FTDOATB(DOA,OAI) sent this on over:



The Lezyne Pressure Drive, size medium.
The Pressure Drive comes in three sizes and three flavors, though I'm not sure if all the colors are available in the US.
I was just going to get another Topeak for the hose really does the job, but I also read a lot of good things about Lezyne and wanted to try some of their products.
It was also blue.
Okay, I got it because it was blue.
It's a little smaller than the Mini-Morph, I measured 9 1/8"(23cm) tip to tip, and it also weights a bit less, 160gms to 101gms for the Pressure Drive(medium):



Sure it's light Mr. Flat Tire, the other pump has a hose!
Great eyeballs!
Having a hose on the pump relieves you from doing the Wheel Wrestle when trying to pump up your tires by the side of the road.
It also helps to prevent you from ripping the valve stem off of the tube.
The Lezyne also has a hose:



The hose is stored in handle part of the pump, screwed in and covered by a secured rubber cap.
The hose by itself is 6 3/8" long, one side labeled presta, the other, you guessed it! schrader.
The business end of the pump is threaded to receive the hose and depending on what kind of valve you have, you attach the hose to the other end:



Now there is a price to pay for lightness and smallness.
With the Topeak, all you had to do was clip the head on to the valve, flip the thingy and go.
With the Lezyne, it's a bit more time consuming.
First you have to thread the hose onto the presta valve. I suppose you could do it with the hose attached to the pump, but that seemed cumbersome.
After that, you attach the hose to the pump.
The pump does get a bit warm when you start to do your thing, even hot, but not much different from the Topeak.
The Topeak though, did have a fold out handle which made it fit better in the hand and gave a bit more leverage. It also had a fold out foot thingy, but I never used that anyways.
Construction of the Lezyne is great, no seams or anything and everything secures together nicely.
A couple of little details though.
First, you have to pay attention when putting the hose back into the handle. The male side of the hose is steel and the housing is aluminum, cross threading that thing seemed too easy.
Also, the handle does not secure to the main body. If you turn the hose upside down, it could just open up. The frame bracket it comes with is meant to hold the handle part to the body, but the fit is sort of loose.
If you are mounting handle side up, I guess it isn't a big deal, though it could rattle around.
I dislike rattles very much.
I was going to test it out and see how many pumps it took to get to the chocolate center of a Tootsie Pop, but I was lazy and all my tires are filled and to empty one for a test seemed like a waste of good air.
Lezyne also makes an Alloy Drive, which is basically the same thing except a bit fatter and a couple of grams heavier and is made to deliver high volume.
Also available in blue.
So there you go, Lezyne Pressure Drive, size medium, blue.
Flat Tire Approved.

2 comments:

Steve A said...

Wouldn't a CO2 pump be much easier AND lighter?

limom said...

The CO2s are of course, in the seat bag.
I must have my back up systems.