The Fox Digital High Pressure Pump debuted at Interbike last fall and alongside the prototype iRD suspension set up app/shock combo. Quite simply, it’s a high pressure shock pump with a digital pressure gauge that makes it far easier to get super accurate air pressure in your fork and shock.
The readout shows air pressure in PSI and BAR in tiny increments (0.5psi below 100psi, 1.0psi increments over 100psi), letting you fine tune the pressure. The pump’s body is durable alloy with a 360º rotating hose. Stroke is nice and smooth. It’ll pump up to 300psi, which should satisfy the needs of any modern suspension component.
UDPATE: Comments about accuracy and tolerances from Fox’s engineer added at bottom!
Retail is $69.99, available now. More pics below…
Instructions? You don’t need no stinkin’ instructions. What you see is what you get. All that print on the inside of the box is just FCC and CE disclaimer jargon.
The hose rotates very freely, which makes it incredibly easy to hold the pump in a natural position. Yes, $70 is a bit much for a shock pump, but if you use one a lot like we do, having that extra bit of accuracy and easy to read numbers is a real treat.
From David Crum, Fox’s engineer for such things:
The gauges in the digital pumps are calibrated at the factory. In our testing, they show next to no drift in their readings over many hundreds of uses. It is important to note that these gauges, while highly repeatable – each gauge will read quite accurately the same known pressure and display the same value each time – are not able to achieve lab levels of accuracy. When compared to a calibrated master gauge, the gauges in the hand pumps will have some variation.
If perfect accuracy is required from a digital gauge, there will be three factors which prevent it from being selected for a hand pump:
- Cost – lab quality gauges (+/- 0.5% or better) start at a few hundred dollars US – and that’s just the gauge without a pump attached.
- Portability – most lab quality digital gauges require more power than a small battery can supply, often they are either 24 VDC or 110 VAC.
- Size – the pressure sensors and control electronics required by lab gauges prevent the gauge from being small enough to fit on a lightweight hand pump.
He concurred with the comments regarding accuracy and repeatability and recommends using the same pump all the time, which means once you find the setting that works for you, repeating that pressure with the same pump yields the same result whether it’s 100% accurate or not.
