One of the most talked about and ogled over bike products to come out this year is -wait for it- a pump! That’s correct and after our first couple weeks with the new from the ground up Silca SuperPista Ultimate Floor Pump you can add us to the list of oglers.
To begin with it looks stunning. No, it needs a stronger adjective than that; beautifully gorgeous is better, but still doesn’t do it justice. In short, I’d buy one of these, even if I didn’t have a few bicycles, just to mount on a display case and stare at. The world would be a more beautiful and better place if every company took this much time and put this much effort into making a product. To get it over with right away we’ll address the one thing that many people will say is the major detractor of this piece of bike art; the price. At $450 this is most definitely the most expensive pump on the market. To be truthful, when I spoke to Silca President Josh Poertner a couple months ago about this pump and he told me that it would be near the $500 price range I was a little skeptical. Seeing it in person though and I can understand why it has to be that much. Absolutely no stone was left unturned when designing and manufacturing this tool. You can go to the Silca website and find all the technical information and if you ask them they’ll even send you a 10 page report that goes into every last detail. But for our report, we’ll only tell you how it works.
First off, it’s heavy, but in a good way. Feels solid in your hands when you pick it up and feels solid and precise when you grab onto the beautiful wood handle and slide the pump down. With other pumps, even the nicest I’ve known before the SuperPista, they have a somewhat wobbly feel as you use the pump. This one has such tight tolerances that it only moves up and down with no side to side action.
The base is thin and flat but very robust and heavy, made for easy pump use when in any brand of cycling cleat. This also lends to the solid and stable feel of the pump. The gauge is the most accurate we’ve seen and is +/-1% in accuracy. The most frustrating thing, with even the high end pumps we’ve been using, is gauges not reading the same every time. So, 85psi today is 90psi tomorrow and so on. In fact our very nice $100 pump that we’ve used up to now has a gauge that the needle rests at 20psi. It’s been creeping up over the past month or so. I don’t know now if 80psi is really 80 or 100. We’ve of course not had the Silca long enough to say that could never happen with the Silca, but based on the attention to detail in the build would find it very hard to believe that would happen.
The hose itself has also received an unheard of amount of attention. Again, without getting into the many details the stainless steel lined hose can handle up to 12,000psi. So all you track racers will be stoked to hear that. The stainless steel chuck is neatly docked to the base by a neodymium magnet which besides looking great makes it really easy to grab the hose without bending over. It’s funny, as I write this I keep staring at this picture and can’t help but think what things I use every day that I can re-engineer to look and feel this good. Kind of like what Tony Fadell is doing with the thermostat and smoke alarm. Smart.
So, do you NEED a $450 pump to get your bike rolling? Of course not, but if you are into design, if you are into superlative quality, if you are into buying products once and NEVER having to worry about buying that same product again, then the price is a bargain. This pump is fully rebuildable, and based on what we see here will last 100 times longer than the original Silca which is about 500 lifetimes. We have plenty of these in stock, in our physical store and online. We use it as our shop pump now, so come in and give it a try! Heard enough and want one of your own? Buy it HERE
Thanks for reading!
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