GamJams Reviews: Floor Pumps - Hurricane Max

Floor pumps? Really now? C'mon Mike, we have better things to talk about!

Jokes buddy. No sweat.

Name a peice of equipment and I'll review it. However, a floor pump doesn't matter to me. Air is air, and luckily it's free, so no matter what little costly mechanism puts air in my tires, I'll get to ride my bike.

A floor pump won't win - or even lose - a race. It won't even make you faster, or even more confident, as long as it works. Even if it doesn't work, I've never met a cyclist that was so stubborn they wouldn't let you borrow some air from their pump.

Personally, I have a pump in the back of my car that I often lend to even my competitors. I've had it for at least 3-4 years and never think much about it as long as it's there.

On the tube shaft it says "Hurricane Max" and after a bit of googling, it comes up as either a really big storm that wrecked the Eastern Pacific, or a Performance Bike product. (Sorry Terry and all you other Performance haters, but I would rather spend money on equipment that matters, and back in the day I was pretty thrifty and ignorant.) On MTBR, it's a 1.8 on a scale of 1 to 5. That doesn't look good.

But the pump is a pump. I don't know what criteria you'd use to rate these things. There's nothing good about it, to be honest. Yet I will reneg and also share that it's never failed me and it's lasted this long without a problem - knock on wood. I got it because I needed Presta and Schrader valves, and this one has both without any unscrewing or flipping necessary. Not bad.

There are two other pumps in the stash of Catherine's equipment that I use often too. Well, one, I don't use so much because the valve clip lever snaps back so fast after you disengage is that it has smashed my fingernails one too many times before rides. Not cool. That pump is a Wrench Force.

The other one's a Serfas TCGP. It's a bit better, but like my Hurricane pump, it takes some tweaking of the valve lever thingie to seal it on the tube's valve. Both the Serfas and Wrench Force only have one valve, so if you had Schrader valves on your mountain bike's tubes it would take some messin' with.

So, all of these pumps, and they all work. They all put air in the tires. I guess I hate one because it's a vicious finger-smasher, but even that one still fills a tube. So, on a level of performance, they are all equals. Therefore, my final conclusion is this: since I don't know how much any of them cost, at least two of the three are overpriced.