What’s the best pumps to get ?
The best
on-bike pump I know is the Topeak Peak DX, the first full-size series, about 250mm/10in long, which I carry in its supplied clip under the water bottle. This was one of the gifts in the big box of "welcome to the family" tools and spares and accessories that came with one of my German bikes. These Germans are obsessives, who have everything tested by professional destroyers, who also certified the Topeak Peak DX. I don't know if you can still get it or if, like everything else, its successors have been cheapened, but mine worked fast enough the half dozen times I've used it. It's a pain to hold on the valve though, and if I were choosing for myself, I'd select something with a flexible tube so that the operator has more choice in his stance.
I think it is a shame that a peg for a full-size frame pump is no longer automatically fitted to quality frames. The best
hand pump short of the SKS Rennkompressor I ever owned (and may still -- the trick is to find it...) was a Zefal HP, light enough, reliable as the day is long, rebuildable, a pleasure to use, available in four lengths to suit any bike with a peg in the right place. On a touring or utility bike you can still mount one with Bodge <tm> fasteners under the top tube or rack if you choose the length right, and the shortest HP fits a large bag or perhaps even a very large jersey pocket. Extra trivia point: There are also those, even in this thread, who believe the original Silica frame pump was as good as the Zefal HP.
The best
garage (floor) pump I know is the SKS Rennkompressor which looks like a leftover from the Bauhaus -- because it is. It is also very easy and convenient to use and infinitely rebuildable because SKS keeps all the parts in stock; of the many heads optionally available, I like the modern one with the Presta and Schrader fitting in the same head: you push it on, you flip the lever, and you pump away. If you see an orange pump on the TdF that looks like the mechanic inherited it from his grandfather, he may well have, or the team manager may have ordered a dozen new ones last week to equip all the vans because the fancy modern trash the sponsors wanted him to use broke too often. The SKS Rennkompressor is the standard pump for decades already of serious racers whose livelihood depends on it. Lesser pumps come and go but an SKS Rennkompressor lasts forever. We have two with enough spares to keep them going half a century or so. When people I suspect of being careless with or entirely negligent of their bike preparation come to ride with me, even though I carry the Topeak Peak DX in its clip under my water bottle, I shove the Big Orange in the pannier basket for pumping up their inevitable flat tyres; it is usually faster to pump their tubes every few miles to the nearest LBS than to wait while amateurs try to patch a tyre and inevitably fail. (On those occasions I'm sometimes envious of the fellow who announced on another forum, "We give the guy with the flat two minutes to fix it, then we're gone." But the express policy of my rides into the maze of lanes is, "Everyone who leaves with us returns with us." A regular who has few flats as I, but even less patience, was once heard to mutter when I mentioned the policy to a blow-in who wanted to speed ahead, "Maybe you should change it to the policy of the US Marines: we bring all the
bodies home.")
Because it is hard for me to bend over the bike for long, I also have an electric pump (Lipo, intended for car boots) but I cannot recommend it: heavy (battery included!), loud enough to hurt your ears and for the neighbours to wonder if roadworks have started outside, and slow, and with an inaccurate dial plus a cutout which makes me deeply uneasy; I use the Rennkompressor instead and gain a glow of virtue for a craftsman job. For the same money as the electric pump you can get a lovely HP, including carriage.
There's an iPhone on my bike to fix the few flats I get. I find it far less stressful to call for transport than trying to fix a flat in the rain. Mmmm, actually, punctures in Ireland are always accompanied by a hailstorm -- the rain follows only to keep you miserable when you're already sore from the hail. Since I switched over exclusively to Schwalbe's banded tyres in the Marathon family (Plus and Big Apple are both Marathons!), I've had no more than a flat every seven years or so, and in every instance traceable to something I did that I shouldn't've, like ride at 50kph through a pothole, or take a shortcut through a building site when it started raining.
