Originally Posted by
MikeyMK
Air squashes. Big time.
A two litre tube of air compressed to a tyre pressure will fit in a chicken's egg.
I liked old pumps. They were nice and big, and gave me big arms. They weren't very efficient because the hose on the end held half of the pump when compressed - only a fraction of my work was actually making it past the valve...
Cue forward a few decades and we have mini pumps, the size of a sausage, that pump tyres up faster. They do this because there is almost zero reservoir between the piston and the valve. So most of the air you push into a small compressed state has absolutely nowhere to hide but past the valve.
Going back to old technology, we have the floor pump. What's good about these is they have the highest capacity of manual pumps. Twice as long, twice as thick, they look great! But look at that hose... Same flaw. You may be pumping two litres of air, but most of it is just squashing back and fourth in the hose.
So if you must have a floor pump (and big-scale inefficiency does still equate to an effective pump when you have your bodyweight behind it) you should focus more on a short, braided, small-bore hose than the size of the cylinder.
It does take maybe a stroke on a floor pump to charge the hose to pressure, after that it is a solid column. Whatever pump you had must not have had a working check valve. My old Silca Pista and old Rennkompressor have no problem taking a tire up to pressure.
You either have volume or you have pressure. By that I mean, look at the barrel on the pump, the larger diameters tubes and pistons move more air but become difficult as the pressure rises which is great for tires of 60 psi working pressure (MTBs, fat tire bikes etc.) but the small diameter tubes and pistons will move less air and the effort to stroke the pump at higher pressure will be less thus they can reach upwards of 200 psi in some cases.
You can tell what sort of bicycles I ride, sure these high pressure pumps will fill a fat tire bike or MTB, just takes more strokes.