Silca Bike Pumps – the news is good!

In the past I've bagged on the now-made-in-America incarnation of Silca bike pumps and accessories for coming back but only with $450 and $235 offerings.  However today the news is much better: Silca has re-introduced their basic Pista floor pump for a reasonable $125.  

Now you may balk at $125 for a bicycle tire pump when you can find a similar-looking item down at the big-box store for a fifth the money, but a quality tool is a quality tool and there's no such thing as a free lunch.  As of this year I've had my Pista floor pump for thirty years.  Having overhauled and replaced the leathers in it fifteen years ago, it works like new and is still better than anything else on the market.  Perhaps that's the best part – the pump is serviceable, you can get replacement parts, and it is a tool that is worth overhauling periodically.  Say, every decade or two.  How often to you see that these days?  Isn't this exactly the kind of they-don't-make'em-like-that-anymore quality everyone is longing for?  And if you want to go all political-economic on the matter, these pumps are made in America and widely recognized as the world standard in the field.  Knowing this, who would even want to buy a disposable plastic overseas-subsistence-labor-made pump in the first place?

Take a visit over at the Silca site and look around.  In addition to this working man's pump, they have some interesting accessories.  Nothing there is cheap in the dollar sense, but then nothing there is cheap in the quality sense either.

More later on this topic.