Quality Never Goes Out of Style
Sturdy, stylish and reliable...the Super Prestige is a damn nice pump.
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WHAT: Pedro’s Super Prestige Floor Pump HOW MUCH: $54.99 WHERE: www.pedros.com
Floor pumps seem to come in two basic flavors these days: simple and complicated. Or, if we’re going to resort to marketing-speak, here: refined and fully-featured. The complicated, fully-featured models often include digital gauges, warning chimes (which alert you to the fact that you’ve exceeded some pre-programmed air pressure level) and Ducati-esque styling. They are sexy in that special late `70s Buck Rogers fashion. The simple models, by contrast, are…uh…simple: analog gauges, retro styling…nothing to write home about on the design school front.
I, however, am a fan of the simple, Plain Jane floor pump. Anything that beeps at me or has a digital gauge gives me the wrong kind of shivers. Sure, technology is great. I’d love to create my own part-monkey-part-man friend. He’d pay my taxes, whip me up banana daiquiris at a moment’s notice and blow off his hairy mate on weekends so that I’d have a consistent riding buddy to squander my Saturdays with.
Monkey-Men-Riding-Buddies? That’s the good kind of technology. Complicated floor pumps that require batteries and promptly fall apart under my brutal stewardship? That’s the bad kind.
The Pedro’s Super Prestige is a new-age version of the simple floor pump of yesteryear. Simple, all metal construction. Hell, it could pass for a Silca track pump (the quintessential, simple, durable pump), were it not besplattered with PEDROS logos. The Super Prestige makes one worthwhile nod to good technology—a dual (Presta/Schrader) head. This is good technology here as having the dual head allows you to pump up both your Mom’s crappy varsity and your friends’ chairlift rig (as so many heavy-duty hoops still have Schrader-drilled rims).
So here’s the basic review: the pump is surprisingly stable. I say “surprisingly” because it has a small base and most pumps with small bases tend to teeter about a good deal when I get to pumping tires with angry-monkey abandon. Stable, in short, equals good.
The pump gauge is mounted near the pump's base, but is still legible when you’re glowering down at it from a fully-upright position. Personally, I’d prefer to have the gauge situated higher on the pump shaft (I’ve got Mr. Magoo-bad vision), but the numbers on the dial are large and clear. It's far easier to read, at any rate, than my 15-year old Silca.
the base is small, but the Super Prestige is surprisingly stable. I'd have liked the gauge placed higher on the pump shaft, but the numbers were still fairly legible.
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The pump head is one of those automatically-adjusting doo-dads. Instead of featuring separate holes for Schrader and Presta valves, it sports a single hole that adjusts to whatever valve you stick in there. It works fairly well, but the fit isn’t quite as snug and secure as most of the dual-hole pump heads I’ve used over the past few years.
The pump’s actual action is nice and smooth. It took me about 32 strokes to inflate a 2.3 mountain tire to 42 psi and 26 strokes to inflate a 700X25 road tire to 110 psi. That’s not super fast, but it’s certainly speedy enough. The overall construction on the Super Prestige is excellent. It’s an all-metal beauty—absolutely no crappy, snapping plastic in sight. The pump is both bullet-proof and lust worthy. The Super Prestige definitely withstood the random abuse that I heap upon all inhabitants of my workshop, and that’s saying a lot.
Do I recommend Pedro’s Super Prestige? You bet. Sure, there are cheaper, sexier models on the market, but if you have a hankering for a reliable pump that will stand the test of time, the Super Prestige shakes a defiant handle at Old Man Time and then some.
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