Good Old Fashioned American Craftsmanship

A couple of years ago I sprung for a really nice bicycle floor pump, a professional tool made by Park Tool of St. Paul, Minnesota.

If you’ve ever been at all into bicycling and their maintenance, you’ve certainly seen Park tools at your local bike shop. Usually a bit pricier than the rest, the bright blue tools are almost without exception what the professional mechanics use. (One of the nice things about bicycling is that as a grownup you can afford The Best of some things. Unlike automobiles.) They’re running a “True Blue” ad campaign that points out, for example, that every single Park repair stand you’ve seen in every single bicycle shop in the United States for the last 29 years has been welded together by one man – Bradley Reid.

One morning the gauge on my pump stuck at 60 psi. Now I didn’t know if I could simply pump my tire up to 160 and get 100 psi, or if something very bad would happen. Since the tools have a limited lifetime warranty, I gave Park a call. For such a well-known presence in the cycling world, they’re actually quite a small company.

I explained my problem to the operator, who responded, “Oh, you want to talk to Mark.” Really? No phone menus? No overseas call centers? Nope. “Hi, this is Mark. Leave a message and I’ll call you back.”

Mark called back very shortly. Before I’d even finished explaining my problem he knew all about it. “The earlier pumps use brass gears with teeth as small as 1/4 mm. If it got knocked over too many times, sometimes it will skip a tooth or to and stay stuck there.” I hadn’t knocked it over, but I wasn’t going to point this out as he was going to send me an updated gauge. “Be sure to recycle that gauge; under the case it’s a solid brass body.” Really?? People still do that?

I just had to ask, having had so many dodos on the other end of the phone for some many years: Does the new gauge fit the old pump? 

There was a moment’s silent on the other end of the line. Then Mark said, in a slightly offended tone, “Of course it does. This is Park.” You’re right, and thanks for demonstrating it to me.

Mark mailed me a new gauge (and a little Park sticker) for no charge of course, which I easily swapped for the old one. I haven’t been able to bring myself to get rid of the old gauge though. Now I have a second paperweight, alongside my ‘70’s Campy Nuovo Record rear derailleur :).

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