Air Ace Infinity AS Floor Pump

There’s a lot of Air Ace pump to love here. Not only does it stand almost 70cm high and weigh in at a solid 2kg, but it’ll pump up every kind of tyre known to bicycle kind, along with your air-sprung rear shock or fork.

It’s sturdily constructed, and somewhere a young industrial designer is gazing proudly at a diagram of this slickly rendered pump in his or her folio—if you appreciate good looking tools, then you’ll be drawn to its slick lines. Be aware, though, that the radically tapered profile is merely a fancy sheath that sits over an otherwise standard tubular pump barrel. It sits atop a broad, triangulated base that works well even on uneven ground, and the plastic coated braided-steel hose is long enough to deal with most awkward pumping situations. The mechanics couldn’t be simpler; a plastic bung and a rubber o-ring forms the plunger, so spares should be cheap and easy to source from a hardware store.

The party piece of the Air Ace pump is clearly the multi-faceted head. It has a robust thumb lock, provision for both presta and schrader valves without disassembly, and a short hose with a free-spinning schrader head and a bleed button makes up the shock inflation element. This combined with the 300psi maximum inflation pressure lets you inflate everything from rear shocks to road bike tyres and everything in between.

While its versatility is great, the pump’s do-it-all nature also detracts from its functionality. Because the gauge reads from 0-300psi, each 10psi increment is crammed closely together. As a result it’s very hard to get an accurate reading at low MTB tyre pressures, and for some, the difference between 27 and 32psi can be an important one. Of course this becomes less of an issue when you are dealing with higher pressures on road bikes.

The shock pump worked surprisingly well, although the extra-long hose makes the air pressure dip alarmingly when you first attach the chuck to a small volume shock. Gauge accuracy becomes largely irrelevant in this application anyway, as sag remains the one true indicator for suspension set-up. My only real concern would be that some heavy-handed home mechanic could overinflate a small-volume shock, as it only takes a couple of strokes to hit 100psi.

As with most all-in-one devices, there are compromises to live with. Obsessive tuners will be better off with a high-volume floor pump and dedicated shock pump. However, this could be the ideal pump to take to events or leave in the back of the car—from suspension tuning to high-pressure road bike tyres or sorting out the kids bikes, the Air Ace has got all bases covered. At $150 it’s not cheap, but it’s certainly not your average floor pump.